Cybercrime

The full scope of the Heartbleed bug came to light in a series of reports by researchers and white-hat hackers, with some claiming a billion smartphones may be at risk, as well as a statement allegedly from the US government over its use of the bug.

Scans of a huge botnet have revealed that it has harvested at least 16 million usernames and passwords for email sites and other online services, according to a report released by German security agency, the Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik (BSI).

The Heartbleed bug – a flaw in an encryption technology used to protect major websites including Yahoo – has left a huge amount of private data at risk - and internet giants are scrambling to find fixes for a problem which could leave customer data exposed to criminals.

A new technique for spotting cyber attacks has been designed by a young American student - and could prevent attacks against planes and power plants, by looking for abnormal communications within computers, rather than sifting for malicious software.

Armed with an impressive-looking shield logo, security app Virus Shield shot to the top of the sales charts on Android last week. There was one, tiny, problem: the app was a fake.

You may know it by one of many names: EMV, Integrated Chip Cards, or more simply Chip & Pin or Smart Cards… but whatever you call it: it is a hot topic for debate on the subject of credit card fraud. In this post we will explain the difference between these and traditional credit cards, and why it is being discussed so heatedly in the wake of the Target breach.

Apps designed to ‘report’ on handset users’ communications while remaining undetected have increasingly become a factor in cases of domestic violence and even murder.

Malware written specifically for DVR recorders used for the output of surveillance cameras has forced some machines to mine Bitcoin - although the low-powered machines are 'very bad' miners, Wired points out.