For the past few years, a number of groups of scammers have been cold-calling thousands if not millions of people in what's been referred to as the "Ammyy Scam" or the "Microsoft Tech Support Scam" among other names. The scammers pretend to be from Microsoft or another official group and claim to have detected errors on the users' computers. They have the victims pull up internal logs that show errors, and convince them to download and run the Ammyy Admin software to allow them to remotely...

On Wednesday, the former Reuters journalist Matthew Keys was sentenced to two years in prison for computer hacking. Keys, who once worked for Tribune Company-owned Sacramento television station Fox 40, left that job in 2010 and went on to copy and paste login credentials for the Tribune Company’s content management system (CMS) into a chatroom where members of the hacking collective Anonymous planned out their operations. (Keys still denies all allegations.)

Hackers could gain access to home and corporate networks via security flaws in wireless mice, suggests research. Weaknesses in the way mice swapped data with computers left them vulnerable, said security firm Bastille Networks. Attackers could spoof poorly protected signals letting them use PCs as if they were sitting in front of them, it said. Information about the loopholes have been passed to the makers of vulnerable mice...

The FBI and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration are jointly warning that modern cars are vulnerable to hacking. That may come as no surprise to those who have followed news reports about the possibility, but it does show the level of attention coming to the issue from the nation's top federal law-enforcement agency. The FBI's "public service announcement," issued Thursday, cites recent demonstrations in which...

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.

New "Improv" program will look at how commercial tech can be used against military.

A December outage in Ukraine that caused 225,000 customers to lose electricity was the work of hackers, a report prepared by US Department of Homeland Security officials has determined. The report published Thursday by the DHS Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team largely agrees with analysis provided last month by a member of the SANS industrial control systems team—that the December 23 outage was caused by external hackers.

Deng Xiaoping, in 1979 - his second year as supreme leader of China - perceived a fundamental truth that has yet to be fully grasped by most Western leaders: Software, if properly weaponized, could be far more destructive than any nuclear arsenal. Under Deng’s leadership, China began one of the most ambitious and sophisticated meta- software development programs ever undertaken.

Forget debates about Britain’s nuclear deterrent. New technology means a country can be brought to its knees with the click of a mouse. The naval base at La Spezia in northern Italy is in an advanced state of decay. The grand Mussolini-era barracks are shuttered; the weeds won their battle with the concrete some time ago. But amid the crumbling masonry, there is an incongruously neat little building, shaded behind a line of flags, with smartly outfitted security...

If Ukraine's grid was intentionally sabotaged, it could be classified as an act of war

GCHQ acquired the capability to target 13 different models and, with NSA help, exploited several networks in one year. A TOP-SECRET document dated February 2011 reveals that British spy agency GCHQ, with the knowledge and apparent cooperation of the NSA, acquired the capability to covertly exploit security vulnerabilities in 13 different models of firewalls made by Juniper Networks, a leading provider of networking and Internet security gear.

Remember last year, when hackers known as Lizard Squad took Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network offline on Christmas Day, leaving your brand-new Xbox One or PlayStation 4 largely inoperable? It might happen again. A new group calling itself Phantom Squad is threatening to do the exact same thing this year. In a now-deleted tweet, the group pledged to "shut down Xbox live and PSN this year on christmas [and] keep them down for one straight week."

Hackers have claimed that a number of Islamic State supporters' social media accounts are being run from internet addresses linked to the Department of Work and Pensions. A group of four young computer experts who call themselves VandaSec have unearthed evidence indicating that at least three ISIS-supporting accounts can be traced back to the DWP.

The cybersecurity expert Chris Rock is an unconventional killer. At this year's Defcon hacking conference—one of the largest conferences of its kind, attracting more than 6,000 hackers and security experts from around the globe—the Australian information-security researcher demonstrated how to manipulate online death-certification systems in order to declare a living person legally dead. Potential motivations for hackers, he explained...

Anonymous was running its anti-ISIS game the same way it had been for months: finding jihadists online, hitting their websites with attacks and getting their accounts taken down. Then, in June, the hacktivist group stumbled on something dark, volatile and unexpected. By tracking and geolocating a small group of jihadists it had been keeping tabs on, Anonymous determined ISIS was planning a mass killing in Tunisia — a July 4 copycat of an attack that...

Mattel’s latest Wi-Fi enabled Barbie doll can easily be hacked to turn it into a surveillance device for spying on children and listening into conversations without the owner’s knowledge. The Hello Barbie doll is billed as the world’s first “interactive doll” capable of listening to a child and responding via voice, in a similar way to Apple’s Siri, Google’s Now and Microsoft’s Cortana.

When a video first arrived announcing an Anonymous campaign against ISIS, many were skeptical. Coming in the wake of ISIS attacks on Paris, the #OpIsis campaign offered online activists an easy way to fight back against a frightening and genuinely evil group, all without closing their laptops. As the campaign picked up steam, many complained the Anonymous efforts would actually harm the fight against ISIS, muddying intelligence sources and flooding traditional channels with...

I am back from Amsterdam after presenting our research at Blackhat “Even the LastPass Will be Stolen, Deal with It!” together with Alberto Garcia. We had a blast at the conference and we got great feedback from the audience. Many asked for the video, slides, etc. so I though it is worth writing a post with all the details of our talk...

Gery Shalon -- a 31-year-old from the Republic of Georgia lies at the head of a global, digital crime syndicate.

Earlier this year, we covered the odd saga of Samsung's Internet-connected SmartTV, whose privacy policy raised concern that hackers might attempt to activate built-in microphones and cameras to spy on viewers. At the time, the Software Freedom Conservancy looked to take advantage of a triennial review conducted by the U.S. Copyright Office. Every three years, this government office hears petitions to exempt certain hacking...