A new tech startup that produces facial recognition camera systems tied to Facebook tagged photos, plans to offer the technology to more traditional physical stores so they could offer you appropriate deals as you enter their business. That’s great for stores who want to have more targeted information about you, based on a bit of

In May we read that game maker Blizzard, developer of a series of popular games including World of Warcraft, Diablo III and Starcraft, was hacked, but that turned out to just be individual compromised accounts from some of its users. Now we read, from Blizzard itself rather than a third party, that they have been

For years scammers and hackers  focused largely on Windows x86-based platforms, in many ways because that’s where the bulk of the users were. But times change, and new targets emerge. At Blackhat and Defcon last week we saw a flurry of talks on Mac OSX/iOS security,  trying to illuminate possible chinks in the armor. From

After my colleague Stephen Cobb stood in a huge line at Defcon waiting to get into the Friday keynote by NSA chief General Alexander, plus a swarm of interest shown at the two-part Meet the Fed panel presentation the next day, it’s becoming clear that multiple agencies of the federal government are focused on hackers,

If your organization’s website runs on Apache, and many do, you might wonder if the webserver’s .htaccess controls are securely configured. If you believe the demo we saw yesterday at Blackhat by Matias Katz and Maximiliano Soler, the answer is a resounding ‘NO!’ What Katz and Soler described in their session is not some rare

Blackhat keynote speaker Shawn Henry, the former executive assistant director of the FBI’s Criminal, Cyber, Response and Service Branch, started off the day after opening remarks from Jeff Moss, founder of Blackhat. Moss wondered if now was the time for the cyber-security sector to take a more aggressive/offensive approach. Jeff mentioned working for a former

Want to access the music tracks of YouTube.com videos on your iPod but don’t want to pay? You’re not alone. Recently, a crop of websites have popped up offering to convert the audio from videos to .mp3 files that you can then download at no charge. Sounds great, right? The catch: scammers are trying to

Gamigo learned a few months ago about a breach and alerted its users that they had been attacked. But now, we see an estimated 8+ million records just went public, no small amount for the attackers. What is interesting is that by one account, hash cracking was able to decrypt over 90% of the passwords,

Small businesses have their hands full these days in light of a down economy, tightening budgets and the steepening pace of business, but with nation-state hacks front and center in the threatscape, should you worry about those too, or are you (and your customers) safe? Nation-state hacks bring to mind images of large defense contractors,

Following the flurry of press coverage surrounding the proposed next generation of driverless cars, privacy groups are asking questions about what will happen to the data the cars (necessarily) collect, which – in the wrong hands – might prove tempting for abuse. Other car manufacturers plan on rolling out real-time data streams of information about