Another day, another reminder that companies don’t really have to abide by promises to NOT share your personal information. They have a big “but” in their contracts. Last week, it was WhatsApp and Facebook. We’ll get to that in a moment. This week, millions of Sports Authority customers began receiving notices [Keep reading]
The FBI has issued a warning that state board of election websites are being targeted by hackers, and in at least one case, voter data has been stolen. Yahoo News Michael Isikoff first reported the attack and posted the FBI warning online (against the FBI’s wishes). It’s very serious. Clearly the FBI [Keep reading]
Get used to another term in world of computer hacking: “economic warfare.” A French firm building multi-billion-dollar submarines for Australia and several other nations says it was the victim of economic warfare after some of its schematics for similar subs being built for India were released online, allegedly by hackers. The [Keep reading]
If you’re like me, you’re afraid to answer your cell phone. And that’s a bad thing for a reporter. It wasn’t always this way. For years, my cell phone number seemed to be out of the public domain, and even businesses that had it were pretty respectful of my need [Keep reading]
Sometimes, a glitch is more than a glitch. Sometimes, that glitch grinds much of the country to a halt. And it gets the company involved hauled in front of Congress to explain itself. Recent airline techno-disasters at Delta and Southwest — and United last year — have made one thing clear: Systems [Keep reading]
The switch to chip-enabled credit cards last year came with a serious deadline: New rules went into effect in October making merchants more liable for fraud. As is obvious to everyone who’s swiped when they should have inserted their card at a checkout line, the changeover hasn’t gone as smoothly [Keep reading]
Baseball has long celebrated cheating, but electronic cheating just sent a former team front-office worker to prison for nearly four years. Former St. Louis Cardinals scouting director Chris Correa, who earlier pled guilty to using old passwords to access a former team’s scouting database, was sentenced to 46 months in jail on Monday. Correa broke [Keep reading]
There’s been a scary increase in successful ransomware attacks against large organizations this year. Specifically, hospitals have found themselves at the mercy of hackers who demand ransom payments to unlock critical system files. Recently, there have been signs that these criminals have moved on to universities, too. The University of Calgary [Keep reading]
Quantrey Bryant wasn’t a suspected terrorist, but he was a convicted felon, and felons aren’t supposed to be able to buy guns. But from an Alabama jail cell, using smuggled cell phones, stolen credit card data, online websites, and straw buyers, Bryant was able to set up a guns-for-money crime [Keep reading]
How bad has the ransomware problem become? The state auditor of Ohio held a press conference yesterday because local government agencies keep falling for ransomware attacks. And a firm that tracks domain activity found a 3,500% increase in ransomware-related domain name registrations in the past quarter. Hacker love to cut and [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan