Security

How to prevent phone and tablet theft

If you're under the age of 25, there's almost an even chance you have lost your cell phone or had it stolen at least once. According to a Pew Research Center survey conducted last April, 45 percent of cell phone users between the ages of 18 and 24 have had a phone lost or stolen.

The survey also found that 3 out of 10 cell phone users between the ages of 35 and 54 have misplaced their device or had it stolen, as Kashmir Hill reports on Forbes.com.

There's nothing new about cell phones being popular … Read more

Go Daddy: Sorry about the outage. And no, it wasn't a hack

Domain registrar and Web hosting company Go Daddy said that yesterday's outage, which brought down an untold number of Web sites, was not the result of a hacker attack.

"The service outage was not caused by external influences," the company's interim CEO, Scott Wagner, said in a statement. "It was not a 'hack' and it was not a denial of service attack (DDoS)."

After the outage, which affected many Go Daddy customers starting at around 10 a.m PT, someone using the Twitter handle @AnonymousOwn2r claimed to have caused the outage with a distributed … Read more

Go Daddy says client Web sites back up

Web sites serviced by Web hosting and domain registrar Go Daddy were back online early this evening after being down for much of the work day, a company spokeswoman told CNET.

"All services are restored and at no time was sensitive customer information, such as credit card data, passwords, names, addresses, ever compromised," Go Daddy spokeswoman Elizabeth Driscoll said in a phone interview just before 5 p.m. PT. She said the company does not know at this time exactly what caused the outage and she couldn't say exactly how many sites were affected.

"It did … Read more

Trend Micro shuffles features for your safety

Trend Micro wants to redefine the expectations of people buying security suites by changing what level of protection they get. The Trend Micro Titanium 2013 updates move feature sets around, lowering the price on features previously available only for more money, as well as debuting new ones.

Available exclusively from Download.com today, Titanium Antivirus Plus (30-day trial download, $39.95), Titanium Internet Security (30-day trial download, $79.95), Titanium Maximum Security (30-day trial download, $89.95), Titanium Premium Security (30-day trial download, $99.95), and Titanium Mac (30-day trial download, $69.95) push a number of formerly premium options … Read more

Go Daddy-serviced Web sites go down; hacker takes credit

Web sites serviced by DNS and hosting provider Go Daddy were down for most of today, but were back up later this afternoon. A hacker using the "Anonymous Own3r" Twitter account claimed credit for the outage.

"Things are restored," Go Daddy spokeswoman Elizabeth Driscoll told CNET just before 5 p.m. PT today. She said she did not have many details and was hoping to be able to give an update with more information in the next 24 hours.

In an interview this afternoon, Driscoll reiterated that she could not say what the cause of the … Read more

A peek behind the mask: Anonymous' 'Topiary' speaks

The mask has come off on at least one member of Anonymous.

The Guardian.com has published a lengthy profile of the group and Jake Davis, a Scottish teenager who used the handle "Topiary" and acted as one of Anonymous' spokesmen before he was arrested in July 2011.

The profile offers readers little that we didn't already know about the group, although the author does give us some nice glimpses of a few prominent members of Anonymous and the well-known splinter group LulzSec.

Davis is almost exactly the sort of person many critics of the group expected … Read more

Experts: Google's 'Aurora' hackers still at it years later

The hackers behind the cyberespionage attacks on Google and more than 30 other companies three years ago are still going strong and seem to have a steady stream of weapons in their arsenal in the form of rare unpatched vulnerabilities known as zero-days, Symantec researchers said today.

The group has used exploits for four zero-day vulnerabilities in attacks over the past few months against targets across a variety of industries, including energy, aeronautics, and financial, and particularly manufacturers of components sold to defense contractors, the security provider said in a blog post.

"This group is focused on wholesale theft … Read more

Phishing attacks via text spiked this week -- researcher

A surge in SMS phishing attacks this week took security experts by surprise and tricked victims into providing credit card and other sensitive information to scammers, a researcher said today.

The phishing onslaught, which targeted customers of the major cellular carriers in the U.S., started on Tuesday, said Mary Landesman, senior security researcher at security provider Cloudmark.

The number of SMS-based phishing attempts observed by security firm Cloudmark based on reports from consumers rose more than 900 percent during the first week of September from what would be expected over that period in a normal month, she said in … Read more

Why the Apple, FBI and AntiSec UDID debacle won't go away

Hacktivist collective AntiSec kicked off the week by publishing one million anonymized Apple UDIDs (Unique Device Identifiers) including device types and associated usernames, saying it was part of a 12 million large database that they'd snagged off an FBI agent's computer.

Online, techies scrambled to see if their devices were in the database dump, and look for clues as to where the alleged larger collection might have come from.

The FBI waited until the end of the day to issue an uncharacteristic, slightly sophomoric Tweet calling AntiSec's allegation TOTALLY FALSE and an oddly worded … Read more