Human rights nonprofit Amnesty International on Tuesday disclosed what it says was a plot likely carried out by a hostile government to infiltrate its network by infecting a member of its staff with sophisticated spyware.
Israeli hacking firm NSO Group is mostly known for peddling top-shelf malware capable of remotely cracking into iPhones. But according to Israeli authorities, the company’s invasive mobile spy tools could have wound up in the hands of someone equally, if not far more, devious than its typical government clients.
It’s becoming clear that at some point in the not-so-distant past, a group of assholes at Facebook dreamt up a plan to prey on users who desire better mobile security but can’t be bothered to read the fine print.
As if there aren’t enough tech security threats to worry about, you also need to be on your guard against so-called ‘stalkerware’—invasive programs installed by suspicious spouses, jealous exes or controlling parents without your knowledge. Here are the warning signs (on your computer) to look out for, and what you…
It’s a scary fact of digital life that there are a lot of ways your PC can be exposed. Maybe you’ve been hacked by a state agent, or cracked by weird Nazi trolls. Fortunately you’re not powerless, and there are lots of ways to fight back. You don’t need to be a hacker, cracker, or computer savant to protect your…
If you bought Barnes & Noble’s impossibly cheap Nook and love being surreptitiously beamed to China, Christmas came early.
Is radical transparency the best solution to expose injustice in this technocratic world, a world that is changing faster than law can keep up with? That question became even more relevant to me, a privacy activist, when I found myself in the WikiLeaks archive, because I worked at Hacking Team nine years ago.
Hacking Team, the company now equally known for selling intrusive spyware to governments and getting royally hacked, has words for people who disagree with its habit of peddling powerful cyberweapons to regimes with terrible human rights records: What’s a “repressive” regime, anyway?
Spyware maker Hacking Team just asked its customers to stop using its software in the wake of a large data breach. Good! Because Hacking Team is a corrupt trashcan company that provides weapons to criminals.
Another day, another cynicism-inducing reminder that the NSA hasn’t just been unlawfully dragnet spying on our digital lives—it has also rigged up new and complicated techniques to do so, like hijacking app stores to put spyware on smartphones.
Spyware company mSpy—which lets people pay for software to secretly track their loved ones, employees, and really whoever they want—has been hacked, and a huge data dump posted on a Tor-accessible website.
The Drug Enforcement Agency has been quietly spending millions on off-the-shelf spyware for the past few years.
It’s not only digital criminals who like to secretly infect people’s computers with invasive malware. In fact, the FBI likes malware so much, it created its own special brand. We don’t know much about it, but now that the US Department of Justice is pushing for policy changes that’ll allow the FBI to install spyware…
Last week, news broke that many Lenovo computers were shipped with a dangerous piece of Superfish adware, which made the computers vulnerable to malicious hacks. Now, with a class action lawsuit looming and anti-virus vendors pledging to root out the adware, Lenovo's CTO has said his company is done with Superfish.
Here are some sordid scenarios. Your ex-girlfriend can see every time you swipe right while using Tinder. Your former husband is secretly listening to and recording your late-night Skype sessions with your new boyfriend. Some random slippery-dick is jacking off to the naked photos in your private photo library. For…
These days, new malware scams are a dime a dozen. Phony email links, misleading URLs, fake call centers; if you haven't already stumbled across one yourself, chances are you know someone who has. But what's stopping all this malicious code from running rampant and turning every last corner of the internet into a kill…
Are you a jealous lover, helicopter parent, or otherwise neurotic human being with crippling trust issues? Then we've got the answer to all your problems right here. No, it's not therapy (although, you know, good idea); it's a top-of-the-line smartphone that comes pre-loaded with all the spyware an overbearing human…
An American citizen living in Maryland sued the Ethiopian government today for infecting his computer with secret spyware, wiretapping his private Skype calls, and monitoring his entire family's every use of the computer for a period of months. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is representing the plaintiff in…
Der Spiegel's fairly harrowing report about the NSA's hacking unit, Tailored Access Operations (TAO), got a little more harrowing this morning when an unnamed blogger at LeakSource published images from the agency's hilariously-named and terrifying spy gear catalog.
The scariest Google Glass hack just got fixed before anyone evil could actually use it, but the details are a little unsettling. Using nothing more than Glass's camera and a malicious QR code, hackers would have been able to steal total control of the device if you so much as looked at the wrong thing.
