He was a former hacker from Alabama who styled himself a “disruptive technologist” and believed that he was using his data-mining expertise as a force for good. But then, in April, Virgil Griffith traveled to North Korea with a visa he had obtained from a diplomatic mission in New York City, going through China to […]
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The holiday shopping season is upon us, and along with the bright lights and frosted window displays we can count on suffering through a more shadowy tradition: rampant cybercrime. Between Black Friday and Christmas in 2013, cyberthieves gained access to credit and debit card information from up to 40 million Target customers. This month, Macy’s […]
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A dead or dying phone or laptop is enough to send anybody on a mad dash to find a way to charge the device, but you might want to think twice before using that random cable found at an airport charging station or docking into that hotel USB port — hackers could be waiting. As […]
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Facebook is under fierce scrutiny for its decisions about political advertisements and consumer privacy, and its foray into developing a new cryptocurrency. So it makes sense that the company would try to drum up a little positive publicity and remind people that there are tech firms out there that pose much greater threats to privacy, […]
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In 2014, hundreds of private, intimate photos of celebrities — most of them women — were posted on the online message board 4chan. From there, they spread to other online sites like Reddit, where the thread including links to the photos gained 75,000 subscribers in less than a day. The photos were stolen by hackers […]
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LONDON — Prince Harry has launched legal proceedings against the owners of two British tabloids over accusations that they hacked his phones, opening a new front in his unprecedented campaign against the news industry’s treatment of him and his wife, Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex. It was the second time in recent days that the […]
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One sunny Wednesday in February, a gangly man in a sports jacket and a partly unbuttoned paisley shirt walked into the Los Angeles field office of the F.B.I. At the reception desk, he gave his name — Val Broeksmit — and began to pace anxiously in the lobby. Mr. Broeksmit couldn’t believe he was voluntarily […]
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Everything you do online is tracked, logged and studied by someone, either through advertising or more malicious means. Being watched is an unpleasant feeling; it’s gotten to the point where even my “I have nothing to hide” friends are growing uncomfortable with the whole thing. As the privacy and security editor for Wirecutter, a New […]
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A Russian man pleaded guilty on Monday to taking part in a global, multiyear hacking operation that involved cyberattacks on a dozen American companies and an elaborate scheme to use stolen information to manipulate stocks and run illegal online-gambling businesses. The man, Andrei Tyurin, 35, of Moscow, is the first person to be convicted in […]
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Parisa Tabriz used to be a hacker. Now she is a princess. Ms. Tabriz, 36, is a director of engineering at Google, where she oversees its Chrome web browser and a team of security investigators called Project Zero. Several years ago, when Google required her to get business cards, she picked the title “security princess” […]
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SAN FRANCISCO — When hackers took over the Twitter account of Twitter’s chief executive, Jack Dorsey, last week, they used an increasingly common and hard-to-stop technique that can give them complete access to a wide array of the most sensitive digital accounts, including social media, email and financial accounts. Called SIM swapping, it allows hackers […]
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Hackers took over the Twitter account of Twitter’s chief executive, Jack Dorsey, on Friday and used the account to broadcast a string of racist messages and bomb threats. In the posts, the attackers claimed that Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters would be bombed, and used Mr. Dorsey’s account to retweet posts from several individuals appearing to […]
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You probably know that it’s not a good idea to use “password” as a password, or your pet’s name, or your birthday. But the worst thing you can do with your passwords — and something that more than 50 percent of people are doing, according to a recent Virginia Tech study — is to reuse […]
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Computer systems in 23 small Texas towns have been hacked, seized and held for ransom in a widespread, coordinated cyberattack, the authorities said this week. The Texas Department of Information Resources said Monday that it was racing to bring systems back online after the “ransomware attack,” in which hackers remotely block access to important data […]
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For most of our lives, we have been conditioned to share a piece of personal information without a moment’s hesitation: our phone number. We punch in our digits at the grocery store to get a member discount or at the pharmacy to pick up medication. When we sign up to use apps and websites, they […]
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The software engineer accused of stealing the personal information of more than 100 million people from Capital One also obtained data from over 30 companies and other organizations, according to federal prosecutors. In a court filing Tuesday, prosecutors said they found multiple terabytes of stolen data from other companies, educational institutions and other organizations on […]
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In July, Europol celebrated the third anniversary of its No More Ransom initiative, announcing that the public-private partnership had helped more than 200,000 ransomware victims recover their files using its library of freely available online tools instead of giving in to hackers’ demands to pay a cryptocurrency ransom. All told, the recovered files saved victims […]
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Overwhelmed by requests from consumers seeking compensation related to the giant 2017 data breach at the credit bureau Equifax, the Federal Trade Commission is recommending that people accept free credit monitoring rather than cash. In a blog post published on Wednesday, the agency announced that because of the high volume of requests, the F.T.C. would […]
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Large financial companies have to thwart hundreds of thousands of cyberattacks every single day. Data thieves have to get lucky only once. Big banks like Capital One, the victim of a recent attack that captured the personal information of over 100 million people, are a target for digital troublemakers, like individual hackers trying to impress […]
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Before she was arrested and accused of illegally obtaining the personal data of over 100 million people from Capital One, Paige Thompson, 33, had a public Twitter persona typical of a software engineer in Seattle. She commented often on programming chatter, fretted about her dating life and mourned the euthanasia of her cat, Millie. Millie’s […]
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In one of the largest thefts of data from a bank, a software engineer in Seattle hacked into a server holding customer information for Capital One and stole millions of credit card applications, federal prosecutors said on Monday. The suspect, Paige Thompson, left a trail online for investigators to follow, according to court documents in […]
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A software engineer in Seattle hacked into a server holding customer data for Capital One and stole millions of credit card applications, federal prosecutors said on Monday. The engineer, Paige Thompson, gained access to 120,000 Social Security numbers and 77,000 bank account numbers, according to court papers, and tried to share the information with other […]
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Some hackers demand ransom; others sweep up personal data for sale to identity thieves. But whatever hackers’ motives, school systems around the country have been the targets of their cyberattacks. One attack forced the Houston County School District in Dothan, Ala., to delay the first day of school for 6,400 students. Others crippled computer systems […]
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