Following on from our detailed guide to securing your webmail, here’s a quick breakdown of how to make the most important fixes, for users of Google’s Gmail.
Tag Archives: Security threats
White House networks hacked
Attackers broke into unclassified White House computer networks in the past 2-3 weeks. It’s far from surprising, one unnamed official said, given that it’s a “constant battle” between the government, trying to secure its sensitive systems, and bad actors seeking to intrude on them. 
Arrests made after ‘specialist malware’ used in £1.6 million ATM heist
“Specialist malware” allowed a gang of crooks to empty the cash machines of large amounts of money, averaging over £30,000 per machine. Now, the police have made three arrests in connection with the incidents.
3 ways to make your Outlook.com account safer
Following up on our detailed guide to securing your webmail, here’s a quick breakdown of how to make the most important fixes for users of Microsoft’s Outlook.com (formerly known as Hotmail and, for a while, Windows Live Hotmail).
Cops swap arrested women’s photos in nude-photo ‘game’
California Highway Patrol (CHP) cops have allegedly been forwarding pics from phones belonging to women in custody to their own phones and to each other.
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. 
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.
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. 
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. 