Security & Privacy

When Mark Zuckerberg and friends debuted Facebook Home yesterday, they downplayed the ever-growing importance your data has for the company. While the Facebook-obsessed may love Home, chances are your privacy won't feel welcome at all.

Facebook has earned a reputation for developing new products and features that are respectful of user privacy, and then slowly, sometimes with great subtlety and sometimes with mastodon-like lumbering, walking those policies back to a decidedly less-respectful state.

There's little indication that Facebook Home will be any different. At the Facebook Home question-and-answer session that followed Thursday's announcement, Zuckerberg said, "Analytics … Read more

Anonymous continues to target North Korea with its latest round of exploits.

Citing the threat posed by the North Korean government, the "hacktivist" group defaced the country's official Twitter and Flickr accounts yesterday.

The North Korean Twitter feed now displays a series of tweets with links that poke fun at the country's leader Kim Jong-un. One linked image portrays Kim Jong-un in a less than flattering light and criticizes him for "threatening world peace with ICBMs and nuclear weapons" and "wasting money while his people starve." The country's Flickr account shows … Read more

In September 2011, security companies first noticed a new malware scam for OS X, which posed as a fake Adobe Flash installer, and hence became known as Flashback. Unlike prior scams, this malware took on some new approaches to tricking users by infecting common browsers, disabling Apple's XProtect system, and eventually morphing into a Java-based exploit that resulted in approximately 600,000 Macs being infected worldwide.

The Flashback malware has been seen as one of the more widespread and successful attacks on the OS X platform, but while it was eventually snuffed out a year later, it left everyone … Read more

A Huawei executive has acknowledged that the telecommunicatons equipment maker will not see growth this year in the United States.

In a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, Huawei executive Bob Cai, who is in charge of the firm's wireless marketing division, said there will be no growth margin in the U.S. market in 2013.

Although Huawei does expect to see growth from Asian and European markets as mobile device and network demands continue to rise, security concerns have led to government officials in Europe and the U.S. advising caution when using or purchasing Huawei's … Read more

Samsung has tapped Absolute Software to embed the corporate security solutions provider's patented persistence technology onto its mobile devices -- most notably onto the upcoming Galaxy S4 smartphone.

Headed for Samsung Knox when it debuts this year, Absolute boasted that Samsung's mobile devices will then be the first worldwide to offer "constant, tamper-proof security connection for tracking, wiping, recovery and IT servicing" by including its endpoint security and management software.

For reference, Knox is Samsung's mobile security platform for professional and personal accounts on enhanced versions of Android.

The Vancouver, B.C.-headquartered company said … Read more

Google's "new" privacy policy, launched a little over a year ago, is still causing headaches in Europe. But a new pan-European investigation into the policy may cause greater troubles for the search giant.

The French data protection authority, the Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des Libertes (CNIL), said today that the search giant has failed to respond to its requests to make changes to its controversial privacy policy and has handed the case to European member states to deal with the matter locally.

The U.K., France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands were first involved … Read more

"Game of Thrones," the wildly popular fantasy drama on HBO, has set an all-time record via BitTorrent, according to data collected by Torrent Freak.

The site, which tracks the world of BitTorrent and piracy, was tracking uploads and downloads of the first episode of the latest season of "Game of Thrones." It found that just a few hours after the first torrent was shared on the site, 163,088 people were sharing just one torrent. The so-called "swarm" of people sharing the torrent outpaced the previous titleholder, "Heroes," which had 144,663 … Read more

The Russian government has turned to censorship on the Web.

According to the New York Times, the government is utilizing a new law, which the Russian parliament approved in July and which took effect in November, that allows the government to selectively censor Web pages within its borders because of content that it believes is illegal or harmful to children. The law's supporters have said that it protects against child pornography and other harmful content, but detractors say that it's giving the government too much power to block whatever it deems unfit for its citizens.

Although smaller sites … Read more

Apple's nearly year-and-a-half old iMessage service has been found to be vulnerable to an attack that uses a flood of messages, or messages so long that the application is rendered unstable.

According to a report from The Next Web, a small group of developers have found themselves the target of an attack that does one of those things -- sending what could be thousands of messages.

The source is suspected to be someone with involvement in pirated iOS software, who could have gotten some basic information needed to send another user a message through Apple's messaging service, The … Read more