Following serious allegations brought up by the Guardian, the US Senate has a few privacy-related questions it would like to ask the people in charge over at Whisper, the self-proclaimed “safest place on the internet”.
Monthly Archives: October 2014
Facebook and Yahoo team up to block account hijackings via recycled accounts
Facebook and Yahoo have figured out how to undo the mess Yahoo made when it decided to recycle old email addresses. 
FTC takes down fake support scammers, upbeat about “getting consumers’ money back” [POLL]
Just paying the money back isn’t really a punishment for fake support call scammers. So, what do *you* think the courts should do to punish these guys? Have your say in our poll… 
POODLEs, Sandworms and getting safe online – 60 Sec Security [VIDEO]
The week’s security news, turned into an entertaining lesson, turned into a 1-minute video. Enjoy…
Hackers who threaten national security could face life sentences
Where damage to human welfare or national security is deemed serious enough, the proposed amendment to the UK’s Computer Misuse Act 1990 could mean life in jail for hackers, and some experts believe the changes could be used to target whistleblowers.
Has the “Sandworm” zero-day exploit burrowed back to the surface?
You may have noticed that Microsoft recently published a Security Advisory that sounds a lot like the “Sandworm” vulnerability all over again. Paul Ducklin explains…
Twitter invites us to say goodbye to passwords, use Digits instead
Twitter’s new credentials handling scheme is called Digits, and it’s hoping that mobile app developers use it to enable their users to sign in with their phone numbers as identifiers, along with one-time passwords SMSed to the phones. 
How to kill a troll
A new Pew study confirms what we already know: online harassment is a widespread disease afflicting the internet. Ignoring trolls and hoping they’ll go away is actually quite effective, survey respondents said. Then again, how about fighting back, instead? Change is possible, be it enabled by troll-blocking software, societal shift that sees trolling evolve into a stigma, or, if all else fails, calling their mothers. 
Do we really need strong passwords?
The idea that computer users should use long, complex passwords is one of computer security’s sacred cows. But is is really necessary? Mark Stockley investigates…
Google goes beyond two-step verification with new USB Security Key
Google’s adding support for a physical USB second factor that will first verify the login site as being a true Google website, not a fake site pretending to be Google, before it hands over a cryptographic signature. 