NSA Director Gen. Alexander Retires: What Will Be His Legacy?: It wasn’t all that long ago that the U.S National Security Agency NSA was often referred to as “No Such Agency.” The super-secret intelligence division of the U.S. has long lived in the shadows, but that changed dramatically during the era of Gen. Keith Alexander. Alexander’s […]

WebView Exploit Affects Most Android Phones: An exploit for a vulnerability that affects an estimated 70% of all Android devices has been added to the Metasploit open-source penetration testing framework. The “single-click” Metasploit exploit targets a vulnerability in a WebView component that’s used by the native Android browser, although the component can also be used […]

Obama Says Cyberterrorism Is Country’s Biggest Threat, U.S. Government Assembles “Cyber Warriors”: Cybersecurity has become a U.S. government priority in the past year, after a string of denial of service DOS attacks on government computers and hacking attempts of the CIA’s main computer, as well as on French, Israeli and British defense agencies. But while many […]

The rise and fall of Bitcoin mining: Earlier this month, fans of Bitcoin—the world’s most popular digital currency—were caught in a whirl of panic as one group threatened to corner the market for new bitcoins. GHash.io, a Ukraine-based collective of Bitcoin miners, recorded a massive spike in its computing power. Almost overnight, an organisation that […]

Did Ukrainians Almost Take Over Bitcoin?: Bitcoin was designed to be a currency free from the corrupting influence of government or any other centralized authority. Now, though, with the value of a single electronic unit hovering around $1,000, the battle to control emission of Bitcoins is on. The developers of Bitcoin created an ingenious system […]

Airport X-Ray Scanners Can be Hacked to Mask Weapons: Scanners used at airport security checkpoints can be infiltrated and manipulated to fool Transportation Security Administration (TSA) screeners into seeing false images, according to security experts. The potential vulnerability in the machines (Rapiscan 522B) could result in terrorists smuggling weapons through checkpoints and boarding planes with […]

7 Reasons Federal Cybersecurity Hires Will Grow: Government officials have recognized the importance of investing in human capital, not just technology, to confront cybersecurity crises.Call me an optimist, but I predict the US government will make significant progress in 2014 in marshaling a human capital strategy — not just a technical response — to today’s […]

NIST makes a hash of SHA: Three years ago in January, 2011, NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology) issued NIST Special Publication 800-131A, setting forth rules and recommendations for the use of certain cryptographic standards. They’ve just been caught violating one of those rules themselves. It is normal in cryptography that the newest and […]

Google adds their Chrome apps and extensions to bug bounty: Google has expanded the scope of their bug bounty program to include Google-created apps and extensions for Chrome. At the same time the company increased “substantially” the rewards they pay out as part of their Patch Rewards program. This program pays out rewards for fixes to vulnerabilities […]

Million Dollar Twitter Contest Hijacked by Scammers: Scammers are taking advantage of recent Super Bowl social buzz in a scheme which target entrants of an Esurance contest. The company premiered a commercial following Super Bowl, where they offered US$1.5 million dollars to one lucky Twitter user who used the hashtag #EsuranceSave30.  Following this, Symantec Security […]