Con men always need a dance partner. I’ve spent 25 years writing about scams, and I’ve interviewed 1,000s of victims. I’ve talked to 90-somethings who are sure a woman (or man) in Nigeria loves them and just needs money for a flight home. To people who are sure that [Keep reading]
For years, security researchers and consumers have been fixated on concerns around hacking cars. Maybe they should worry about ship hacking instead. Several recent collisions involving U.S. Naval vessels have sparked speculation that someone or something is interfering with the ships’ ability to steer clear of other vessels in busy [Keep reading]
In all the noise of this week’s events, it would be easy to miss some dramatic news out of Kiev today. So I’ll amplify it here. A Ukrainian hacker who wrote code that might have helped hack the U.S. election — and other political events around the world — has [Keep reading]
If you don’t think identity theft can cost you, just ask Lucky Whitehead. The FORMER Dallas Cowboys player lost his job recently because someone else knew his Social Security number. Whitehead was fingered for a shoplifting crime recently in Prince George’s County, Virginia, not far from Washington D.C. Police said [Keep reading]
A California mom is suing Disney and some of its software partners for allegedly collecting personal information about her kids through mobile phone game apps. I was on the TODAY show this week talking about it; you can click the image above to see the segment. There’s a novel legal [Keep reading]
Everything you know about passwords is wrong. But then, you probably knew that. I’ve been harping on the various exercises in futility that is password setting for some time. Most recently, I talked about password patterns — how we all use them, and how they make life easy for would-be [Keep reading]
If you use retail store gift cards, you should know: They’re not safe. Criminals are remotely draining their value, and unlike credit cards, consumers have no fraud liability protections. If your retail gift card is hacked, you are screwed — you have no rights to get the money back. [Keep reading]
Computer users have something new to worry about in the cat-and-mouse game with hackers. You probably use “password patterns” to create easy-to-remember-but-hard-to-guess passwords. Well, the criminals are on to you. Their ability to detect such patterns may have figured prominently in the high-profile attack on a security professional earlier this [Keep reading]
It was easy to impersonate White House officials like Jared Kuschner and Reince Preibus or even Eric Trump. It fooled plenty of people who should have known better, like Anthony Scaramucci, former Utah governor and presidential candidate Jon Hunstman, Homeland Security Adviser Tom Bossert — and Trump, too. This [Keep reading]
The next time you speak to a debt collector, you might find yourself negotiating with a computer. And you might actually prefer that. Consumers buy toothpaste and bread without talking to a person. They get boarding passes for flights with a few swipes of a credit card or mobile phone. [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan