Crime prevention

Tushar Mehta/Digital Trends Buying phones at an auction is a great way to save some of your hard-earned money — whether you’re looking for the best Android phones or a new iPhone. It can be online bidding on platforms like eBay or an in-person affair like a customs office sale. But one place you should never pick up a phone from is a police auction. The folks at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland purchased 228 phones seized and subsequently auctioned by the police and found that most of…

No one wants to fall victim to ransomware, but a new report from blockchain security firm Chainalysis claims that ransomware payments could be set for a record-breaking year, with criminals raking in close to half a billion dollars just seven months into 2023. According to the analysis, ransomware payments this year have totaled $449.1 million so far. That’s $175.8 million more than this time last year, suggesting that hackers have doubled down on this method of extracting money from unfortunate victims. Sora…

Protestors clash with police in Nanterre, France last week after the killing of Nahel Merzouk.Image: Ameer Alhalbi (Getty Images)Amidst ongoing protests in France, the country has just passed a new bill that will allow police to remotely access suspects’ cameras, microphones, and GPS on cell phones and other devices.What Drew John Boyega Back Into Sci-Fi? | io9 InterviewAs reported by Le Monde, the bill has been criticized by the French people as a “snoopers” charter that allows police unfettered access to the location…

A vulnerability in the MOVEit file transfer software has led to the infiltration of the personal records of millions of Americans across several states, according to Tech Radar. The exploit has targeted the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) in Louisiana and Oregon. MOVEit software is used globally by several organizations, including many government agencies, and the vulnerability’s code has been connected to several data breaches, the publication added. Andrew Brookes/Getty Images Approximately 6 million Louisiana…

There’s a lot to protect yourself from online these days, with keeping tabs on the best antivirus software pretty much a necessity. Today you can save quite a bit along the way, at least, as Malwarebytes is offering a bundled discount on one of its subscription tiers. You can get Malwarebytes Premium for just $80 for a one year subscription, and included with it are six free pieces of software that will go a long way toward keeping your identity, data, and digital accounts protected. All told their normal price…

Eyeing the increasing threat of damaging cyberattacks by hackers backed by hostile foreign states, the U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) on Tuesday announced the creation of the National Security Cyber Section — aka NatSec Cyber — within its National Security Division (NSD). Hackers operating out of countries like China, Russia, and North Korea seek to cause disruption across a wide range of sectors, steal government and trade secrets, spy on targets, and raise revenue via extortion. Such nefarious activities have long…

Ransomware group BlackCat has claimed responsibility for a cyberattack on Reddit in February and is now demanding a $4.5 million payment to prevent it from publishing 80GB of data that it claims to have stolen from the site. But that’s not all, as the group, which is also known as ALPHV, is insisting that Reddit also reverse the API price changes that have caused so much controversy just recently. In a message posted by the group this week, the perpetrator said: “We are very confident that Reddit will not pay any…

Microsoft has shared some information about an outage that impacted its services earlier this month. The disruption affected the computer giant’s Azure cloud computing platform, along with Microsoft tools such as the Outlook email and OneDrive file-sharing apps. At the time, Microsoft said little about the incident, but in a post published over the weekend, it confirmed the cause to be distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, a malicious act that attempts to disrupt a server or network by overwhelming it with…

Credit: Bing Image Generator Last week, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) issued a public service announcement about the rise in deepfake explicit content and how it is being used for crimes like extortion, blackmail, and harassment. In the simplest of terms, a deepfake is synthetic multimedia material trying to mimic an original. It can be an AI-generation photo, video, or audio clip. The name “deepfake” comes from the inherent technology used in creating such media — deep learning — which involves training…

Microsoft has discovered a critical exploit in macOS that could grant hackers easy access to your Mac’s most important data. Dubbed ‘Migraine,’ it shows why it’s vital to update your Mac as soon as possible. Migraine is so damaging because it can bypass Apple’s System Integrity Protection, or SIP for short. SIP is enabled by default on modern Macs and works by sandboxing sensitive parts of the computer from outside meddling. Only processes that are signed by Apple (or those with special privileges, like Apple…