Security

A seemingly coordinated series of burglaries has taken place in Iceland leading to the loss of around US$2 million worth of computing equipment used to mine Bitcoin. The thefts actually occurred back in December and January, but they have only just been reported as Iceland’s police did not want to reveal details until their investigation had been completed. An estimated 600 devices were taken.

The PS4 was released back in 2013 and has finally been jailbroken, allowing users of the system to run custom applications, game backups, and even install Linux. It's exclusive to users on the 4.55 firmware, though.

Could central regulation for cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, be coming sooner rather than later? Canadian economist and current Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, brought up a number of issues about cryptocurrency during a speech at the Scottish Economics Conference held at Edinburgh University. These concerns included the current volatility of cryptocurrency values, the relation crypto-assets have with illicit activities, and the need for some form of regulation.

It appears the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has issued dozens of subpoenas to cryptocurrency companies in regard to the number of token sales and Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) that have been made recently. The SEC is looking for these cryptocurrency issuers to provide more information about their business practices and to dig out fraudulent activity.

VeganCoin and Sovereign have become two of the latest additions to the ever growing cryptocurrency world. VeganCoin was founded by the people behind VeganNation, who claim the currency will be “cruelty free”. The Sovereign is a virtual currency that will be launched by the Republic of the Marshall Islands, a country in the Pacific Ocean. The Sovereign will be accepted as legal tender in the island nation.

Sikur is a smartphone maker that likes to put an emphasis on security. In 2015, the company released the GranitePhone, which offered users multiple layers of data privacy protection. In the meantime, Sikur has been working on a new device, which was announced at the 2018 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The SikurPhone includes an app called SikurWallet, which according to the makers is designed to be the “digital marketplace’s safest wallet.”

In a Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA) session held today, Bill Gates made a comment about cryptocurrencies that suggests he is not currently a huge advocate of the decentralized and unregulated digital payment systems. In contrast, Steve Wozniak has offered a more favorable view of virtual currency, even though he has actually been subject to Bitcoin-trading fraud himself.

French electronics company Archos has unveiled plans to release a hardware wallet that will provide cryptocurrency owners with a physical layer of security for their virtual currency transactions. The Archos Safe-T mini hardware device can be connected to a computer or smartphone via microUSB cable. The wallet will be released in June, 2018 and will cost €49.99 (~US$61).

The quad-camera Honor 9 Lite receives the software update that enables Face Unlock after a few other Honor devices, such as the Honor 7X and the Honor View 10. According to the website that broke the news, the update arrives in stages and should be fully deployed by March 5. Priced below US$200, the Honor 9 Lite is one of the few handsets in the same price range to support this feature.

The President of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, has claimed that the country’s cryptocurrency has enjoyed booming business on the first day of its pre-sale. Apparently, investors have snatched up US$735 million worth of Petro digital currency. Meanwhile, Bitcoiin2Gen (B2G), which has the masterful Steven Seagal as its celebrity ambassador, is currently lagging behind with a still impressive US$27.97 million in its pre-ICO fundraising round.

Instead of using malicious apps or website exploits, hackers just hijacked Tesla's cloud servers and made sure their illicit cryptomining endeavors would not seem suspicious.

Google has officially rolled out Google Play, its feature rich competitor to Apple Pay. The new app will work everywhere that Android Pay was already accepted while the company will continue to add new features and work with partners to extend its reach.

The cryptocurrency craze continues as a sovereign state and a controversial celebrity become involved in the virtual currency (VC) industry. Venezuela's government has made its "petro" currency available in a presale launch, while Steven Seagal has been promoting a digital currency called Bitcoiin 2Gen.

Apple has released a patch that will fix the so-called 'Telugu bug' on iOS, MacOS, tvOS and WatchOS. When users receive a message or notification that contains a certain Indian character, the app crashes and becomes unusable. In some cases, the bug even results in the device entering a bootloop.

The United States Air Force has made bounty payouts totaling US$103,883 to hackers invited to test the force's systems and software. The event ran from December 9, 2017 to January 1, 2018.

Two of the class-action suits involve Intel's own shareholders and board members, essential pitting Intel against Intel in court.

White House spokesman, Rob Joyce, doesn't believe the US government is ready to attempt regulating Bitcoin until the good and bad aspects of the cryptocurrency are fully understood. The US official was discussing the topic at the Munich Security Conference in Germany.

The latest variants dubbed MeltdownPrime and SpectrePrime were discovered by Nvidia and Princeton University researchers. In a nutshell, these variants force two CPU cores to react to each other in order to trick multi-core systems into giving up cached data.

The US Department of Defense has stated that the United States Air Force (USAF) must ensure its computers are operating Windows 10 by March 31, 2018. The Microsoft OS is considered to be a crucial component in the overall readiness of the armed service branch.

The imminent release of the LitePay service lead to a sudden appreciation for Litecoin over the past few days. Litecoin is thus expected to become more useful and appreciate even further as LitePay is compatible with Visa-enabled online/offline sale outlets.

The heads of a number of American intelligence agencies have backed a "no buy" list that includes devices produced by Chinese manufacturers Huawei and ZTE. The agents praised American telecommunications companies for not bowing down to pressure from the Chinese to sell their products.

Although Facebook already filed an appeal, it is worth mentioning that the Berlin regional court ruled against its data-collection practices, saying that the default settings break the law, while some terms and conditions do not meet the legal standards needed to get the users' effective consent.

Apple is looking to revamp its software development workflow to balance introduction of new features and ironing out existing bugs. The upcoming iOS 12 internally codenamed 'Peace' will be the first result of this strategy.

Microsoft has announced support for Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection, a Windows 10 only feature, to Windows 7 SP1 and Windows 8.1. This is to help organizations protect themselves during the transition to Windows 10 from the aforementioned OSs.

The Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities exposed inherent flaws in hardware and software design, which we've been using for many years. Chip vendors and developers alike are scrambling to quickly release fixes to prevent any damage to customer data. Intel, AMD along with motherboard partners and Microsoft have released security patches over the past month to cover the necessary mitigation. This tutorial will help you in determining whether your PC has received the required mitigation so as to thwart any potential abuse of these vulnerabilities.

Friday's Winter Olympics opening ceremony in Pyeongchang came under cyber attack from malware known as "Olympic Destroyer." The virus affected Internet and television services used by media representatives but did not cause any major long-term disruption.

After CoinCheck and NiceHash, the BitGrail hack is the third major incident in less then 4 months. Of course, the Italian exchange kept most of the funds in a hot wallet, and many other exchanges are probably still doing this, practically inviting hackers to rob them blind.

With ransomware on the prowl every other day, it has become all the more important to ensure that critical files are protected from being encrypted or altered. The Windows 10 Fall Creators Update includes a new functionality called Controlled Folder Access that can help prevent modification of critical files and folders by unauthorized software. This tutorial will show you how to enable this functionality to protect both personal and corporate data.

Fujitsu's PalmSecure authentication sensor technology, built in to their business laptops, is getting full integration with Windows Hello for a contactless login option that doesn't involve facial cameras.

Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) has detained a group of scientists who attempted to use a supercomputer at a top secret nuclear facility to mine Bitcoin. Security was alerted when the would-be miners tried to connect the computer to the Internet.

Not long after they revealed a custom boot screen on a Nintendo Switch, a group of hackers calling themselves fail0verflow apparently managed to run a Linux-based operating system on this game console.

Leaked code for the iBoot section of iOS 9 was uploaded to GitHub this week, leading to concerns that the software may have fallen into the wrong hands. Apple has already made maneuvers to try to limit the damage caused, but the company should be worried about such leaks happening in the first place.

Developers for the massively popular multiplayer online battle royale game PUBG will be introducing a new patch for their product that includes new anti-cheat measures to combat players utilizing hacks and codes. The patch will go live on February 8.

Although there is still a lot of work to be done in the camera software department, the Essential team was very quick in delivering this month's security patch from Google for the company's only handset.

Google has announced that it is folding the Nest smart home products team into its rapidly expanding hardware division. The move will see the end of Nest-branded products in favor of Google's own "Made by Google" branding.

Although it quickly infected a few thousand devices worldwide, the spread of the cryptocurrency mining malware ADB.Miner seems to be quite limited at this time. However, there is still time for this piece of code to become a serious global threat.

Phones sold through Amazon's Prime Exclusive Phone program will no longer display lock screen ads, according to the retailer. The phones, which which were sold at prices substantially lower than MSRP, will instead feature Amazon-centric apps only while retaining (most of) their discounts.

The company Turing Robotics Industries has filed for bankruptcy in Finland. The company was supposed to start the production of Turing Phones in a factory formerly used by Nokia but wasn’t successful in doing so.

Microsoft has listed out a few servicing changes to Windows and Office keeping in view the deployment requirements of the enterprise. The company also detailed availability and support cadences of Office 2019 and Windows 10 LTSC.

Hackers are trying to spread the stolen NEM coins to as much as 20 accounts, but Coincheck and the NEM Foundation have already tagged all the affected coins, making the affected cryptocurrency easily trackable on exchanges.

Thanks to improved focus and machine learning, Google has been able to remove 700,000 bad apps from the Play Store, 99 percent of which were caught before being installed by any users.

The fingerprint software vulnerability affects quite a few ThinkPad, ThinkCentre and ThinkStation models that run Windows 7, 8 or 8.1.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Intel had informed select customers about the Meltdown/Spectre vulnerabilities. What's news, however, is that somehow the Chinese Government could have gotten to know about the vulnerabilities much before the US Government did.

Hackers managed to steal 523 million NEM coins and possibly US$123 worth of Ripple coins from Coincheck's online hot wallet. The Japanese exchange assured its affected customers that the money will be reimbursed upon the completion of the police investigations.

Microsoft has made an optional patch available for users experiencing instability with their PCs following the recent round of software updates from both it and Intel. The Microsoft patch rolls back its OS-level protection in favor of Intel's BIOS solution.

An APK teardown of the Settings APK in Note 8 Oreo builds reveals a new biometric authentication called 'Intelligent Scan' that could probably feature in the upcoming Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus. The APK teardown further reveals that the new dual-camera setup in the S9 Plus could enable depth-sensing stickers that can be added to photographs.

The Q4 2017 financial report mentions about decreased desktop CPU sales and the "in-silcon" fixes that could totally eradicate the Meltdown/Spectre vulnerabilities in the upcoming 10 nm CPUs, and possibly in fresh batches for the current 14 nm CPUs.

With the new Denuvo acquisition, Irdeto is looking to strengthen its own security tech. The Denuvo DRM for games could also end up stronger than ever, giving crackers around the world a hard time once again.

Intel has identified the root cause of the recent reboot issues plaguing the company's 'Broadwell' and 'Haswell' chips that received a microcode update for the Meltdown and Spectre exploits. The company has issued an updated guidance for customers and partners in this regard.