Choosing a VPN can be tricky, but security experts agree it's a good way to safeguard digital privacy. Here are some pro tips from Consumer Reports to make the decision easier.

Privacy has always been a key feature and popular selling point for the messaging app WhatsApp. Company co-founder Jan Koum grew up in the Soviet Union under heavy government surveillance, and he promised to keep user data protected after Facebook acquired WhatsApp in 2014. Now, with Koum on the way out, it may be time to ditch WhatsApp before that promise leaves with him.

More needs to be done to stop small social media websites being exploited by extremists, experts have said. The likes of Facebook and Twitter have responded to calls to remove extremist content over the last 18 months. And some smaller social media sites have joined a scheme where information is shared to enable blocking content.

A sophisticated hacking campaign launched from computers in China burrowed deeply into satellite operators, defense contractors and telecommunications companies in the United States and southeast Asia, security researchers at Symantec Corp said on Tuesday. Symantec said the effort appeared to be driven by national espionage goals, such as the interception of military and civilian communications.

Ticketmaster has admitted that 40,000 of its customers’ credit card details and personal information has been leaked in a data breach. According to the ticket sales website, it was hit by malicious software on Saturday via one of its third-party suppliers. Anyone who has attempted to buy tickets off the website between February and June this year could be affected by the breach.

Sensitive Facebook information for up to 120 million users was put at risk for years by a leaky quiz application company called Nametests.com, a security researcher disclosed today, proving what many experts previously suspected: Cambridge Analytica was the tip of the iceberg.

Malicious code or deliberate design faults can be inserted into everyday business products before they even leave the original manufacturer. Here's how you can protect yourself.

Latest Mueller indictment offers excruciating details to confirm known election pwnage.

Since the last time we were together inside his prison lodgings at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, a few things have changed. Julian Assange has grown a beard, looks more pallid and pauses when I ask…

60,000 customers affected due to Walmart Canada hack

If a hacker attacks your TrackingPoint smart gun over its Wi-Fi connection, you may find the weapon is aiming at a different target than you think.

Knowledge alone is next to useless in countries whose rulers enforce self-censorship

A group of Russian hackers linked to Moscow’s government have for seven years been targeting intelligence information from governments and organizations in the United States, Europe, and Asia, acco

The deputy director of the US National Security Agency warns of the increasing danger of destructive cyber attacks by states.

Ask a chief executive of any security company what the crown jewel of their business is, and they'll tell you it's the source code. In a day and age of government spying, hackers, and backdoors, there's a great deal of mistrust and paranoia in the tech industry. Governments particularly are on edge that other states are using tech firms to get access to their most critical systems and data, including the US government...

For the first time in several years, humans now account for more Internet traffic than bots, but bot activity is increasing at smaller websites.

Smart TVs are opening a new window of attack for cybercriminals, as the security defenses of the devices often lag far behind those of smartphones and desktop computers. Running mobile operating systems such as Android, smart TVs present a soft target due to how to manufacturers are emphasizing convenience for users over security, a trade-off that could have severe consequences.

If your password is on this list, you better change it ASAP. The 25 worst passwords of 2015 have been released by Los Gatos, Calif.-based SplashData. The company, which makes password management software, compiles the annual list from the most common passwords leaked online each year — more than two million in 2015.

France is a weakened country that relies too heavily on its subservient intelligence relationship with the United States and the United Kingdom, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange told French radio on Friday. Speaking to France Inter radio from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London where he has been holed up for nearly four years, Assange was asked if he was disappointed that France had refused to grant him political asylum last year.

In the early years of the Obama administration, the United States developed an elaborate plan for a cyberattack on Iran in case the diplomatic effort to limit its nuclear program failed and led to a military conflict, according to a coming documentary film and interviews with military and intelligence officials involved in the effort. The plan, code-named Nitro Zeus, was devised to disable Iran’s air defenses, communications systems and crucial...

The Justice Department, impatient over its inability to unlock the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino killers, demanded Friday that a judge immediately order Apple to give it the technical tools to get inside the phone. It said that Apple’s refusal to help unlock the phone for the F.B.I. “appears to be based on its concern for its business model and public brand marketing strategy,” rather than a legal rationale.

At core, when we talk about cyberwar, we’re just talking about warfare conducted through computers and other electronic devices, typically over the Internet. As the very ’90s prefix cyber- (when was the last time you heard someone talk about cyberspace with a straight face?) suggests, it’s been part of our cultural and political conversations since the early ’80s. In recent years, however, such conversations have picked up...

MY LIFE DEPENDS on the functioning of a medical device: a pacemaker that generates each and every beat of my heart. I know how it feels to have my body controlled by a machine that is not working correctly, and this is why I encourage fellow security researchers to delve into these medical devices and find ways to make them more secure. Four years ago, I woke up lying on the floor, but I had no idea how I’d gotten there or for how long I’d been out.

Apple isn't alone in blocking government-backed security breaches. Google today announced that it will let users know if they are been targeted by a state sponsored hacker using a new warning. The company said it will also be increasing the visibility of other types of Gmail security warnings to try and help people better protect themselves.

Modern-day leaks may have caused embarrassment and resignations, but in ancient times revealing secrets often ended in death.

Finding evidence that someone compromised your cyber defenses is a grind. Sifting through all of the data to find abnormalities takes a lot of time and effort, and analysts can only work so many hours a day. But an AI never gets tired, and can work with humans to deliver far better results. A system called AI2, developed at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, reviews data from tens of millions of log lines each day and pinpoints anything suspicious.

Hackers have again demonstrated that no matter how many security precautions someone takes, all a hacker needs to track their location and snoop on their phone calls and texts is their phone number. The hack, first demonstrated by German security researcher Karsten Nohl in 2014 at a hacker convention in Hamburg, has been shown to still be active by Nohl over a year later for CBS’s 60 Minutes.

A database reportedly containing roughly 93.4 million Mexican voter registration records was discovered on an Amazon cloud server without any password protection and includes everything from home addresses to ID numbers, a security researcher has disclosed. MacKeeper researcher Chris Vickery, who is well known in security circles for unearthing database flaws by using the Shodan search engine, found the massive trove of records...

Ad-blockers are controversial, but are just as much a fact of life as ads are. But now some sites are preventing users with active ad-blockers from accessing their content -- a controversial practice not least because of the security implications, but also as it falls foul of privacy laws for an entire continent. Elephant in the room: ads keep websites free for everyone to access, but they also keep writers and content creators in business because ads are the driving force behind our wages.

The government’s cyber spying outfit has an ‘unbelievable’ child porn problem. But the NSA can’t—or won’t—say how often it finds such criminal images on its workers’ computers.

Another day, another security breach. They've almost become routine to many of us. This latest one actually happened in 2012, when LinkedIn, and later EHarmony, revealed that hackers had stolen the login info for about 6.5 million users. The new development is the revelation it actually affected over 100 million users. (Yes, that's significantly more.) And now a hacker is selling user data on the Dark Web marketplace...

Uber has your home address. It has the addresses of the places you want to get to. It knows when you’re going to church, to your boyfriend’s house, to the union hall, to the doctor’s office. And if you’re a driver for Uber, it’s tracking you for hours and hours each day. We talk a lot about NSA surveillance, National Security Letters, warrant canaries, facial recognition technology, a police van disguised as a Google Maps vehicle, the war against encryption, and government-mandated backdoors.

A new, yet-to-be-released smartphone promises to put its users' security and privacy first with the help of a radical if not somewhat uncertain approach. Una earlier this month launched its crowdsourcing campaign ahead of the debut of its newest custom-built smartphone: the Unaphone Zenith. Dubbed a "truly private and secure smartphone" that "values your privacy and data as much as you do," the 5.5-inch smartphone runs a modified Android 6.0 operating system called UnaOS.

With just a few million dollars and a phone number, you can snoop on any call or text that phone makes – no matter where you are or where the device is located. That’s the bold claim of Israel’s Ability Inc, which offers its set of bleeding-edge spy tools to governments the world over. And it’s plotting to flog its kit to American cops in the coming months.

It's easy to get excited about internet voting. Social media, Skype, online banking—these types of tools and services have expanded our voices, connected us the world over, and added convenience and efficiency to our lives. Who wouldn’t want to see elections benefit from these kinds of advances? But internet voting isn’t online banking or video calling or tweeting. Voting is a special activity, and trying to do it online poses special problems, most of which security researchers don’t yet know how to solve.