Security

You probably use Wi-Fi on the regular to connect your smartphone, computer, or other electronic device to the glory of the world wide web. But soon, that same technology could also keep you safe in real-life public areas.

According to a peer-reviewed study led by researchers from Rutgers University-New Brunswick, ordinary Wi-Fi can effectively and cheaply detect weapons, bombs, or explosive chemicals contained within bags.

Hackers planted malware on an automated teller machine (ATM) server belonging to an Indian bank as part of a criminal scheme which saw the theft of nearly 944 million rupees (US $13.5 million) in a co-ordinated attack across 28 countries last weekend.

India’s Cosmos Bank, based in the western city of Pune, suffered an attack which saw hackers use malware to steal customer information from the company’s ATM server and then use that data to clone thousands of Visa and RuPay debit cards.

 A firewall used by the CIA to communicate with its spies in China compromised their identities and contributed to their executions by the Chinese government, several current and former intelligence officials told Foreign Policy magazine in a report published Wednesday.

In a two-year period starting in 2010, Chinese officials began accurately identifying spies working for the US.

No '80s-era Adidas tracksuits. No video of a hacked Jeep Cherokee slowing to a crawl from 70 mph on a highway after losing its acceleration power. No steering-wheel hijacked Jeep stuck in a muddy ditch. This time, famed car hackers Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek came purely as defenders - rather than hackers - of automobile security.

We've all heard of the dangers that the internet of things presents, but could they be used to target critical infrastructure and trigger mass blackouts? Security researchers from Princeton University think so, Wired reports.

The Princeton researchers believe a botnet encompassing thousands of connected and hacked power-hungry home appliances like air conditioners and water heaters could take down the power grid simply by overwhelming it.

The vaunted Necurs botnet — a network of millions of hacked computers that do the bidding of criminals — suddenly shifted its focus this morning: Normally it sends consumers spam email pushing pharmaceuticals and penny stocks, but now it's conducting a more targeted phishing campaign to hack into bank networks, according to new research by Cofense.

At the USENIX Security Symposium here today, University of Florida researcher Nolen Scaife presented the results of a research project he undertook with Christian Peeters and Patrick Traynor to effectively detect some types of "skimmers"—maliciously placed devices designed to surreptitiously capture the magnetic stripe data and PIN codes of debit and credit cards as they are inserted into automated teller machines and point-of-sale systems. The researchers developed SkimReaper, a device that can sense when multiple read heads are present—a telltale sign of the presence of a skimmer.

L33tdawg: Christopher will also be at #HITBGSEC Singapore at the end of August.

When a room filled with hundreds of security professionals erupts into applause, it's notable. When that happens less than five minutes into a presentation, it's remarkable. But that's what transpired when security researcher Christopher Domas last week showed a room at Black Hat USA how to break the so-called ring-privilege model of modern CPU security.

An overhaul of a critical internet security protocol has been completed, with TLS 1.3 becoming an official standard late last week.

Describing it as "a major revision designed for the modern Internet," the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) noted that the update contains "major improvements in the areas of security, performance, and privacy."

It is generally thought that a computer fresh from the factory is pretty much as secure as it gets, before software is installed and it is connected to the internet. However that might not be the case with Apple’s Mac computer as security researchers have discovered a bug that could allow Macs to be hacked even before the user logs in for the first time.