A new variant of Android malware is making its rounds in the wild, wreaking havoc among users and taking complete control over the infected smartphone. Once launched, the sophisticated Android.Obad.A, lurking inside an innocent-looking application, asks users to give it administrative privileges enabling the Trojan to manage the device from deep within the system. Android.Obad.A is equipped with an array of...

Google is looking to eradicate images of child sexual abuse from the Web and go after the abusers and pedophiles who post the offending pictures. The company is working on a huge database of pornographic photos tagged with unique fingerprints to help law enforcement, private companies and charitable organizations isolate the photos more rapidly and identify their uploaders and online distributers. This coul...

Surprising details emerged after last week’s meeting between US President Barack Obama and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, on the topic of cyber-warfare. Even though most of the meeting topics were kept under wraps, much of the discussions focused on North Korea and cyber-security. According to a news report by AFP, President Obama incidentally mentioned that every country is gathering intelligence abo...

An older flaw in the Adobe Flash plugin that should have been fixed two years ago is still exploitable by cyber-criminals, leading to users getting spied on in real time via the built-in camera and microphone. The flaw relies on the notorious click-jacking technique that allows a malicious user to disguise a transparent flash object (in this case the Privacy settings of the plugin) under a Play button, thus...

Patients using medical gear such as pacemakers, heart defibrillators and insulin dispensers  could become moving targets for cyber-criminals, according to a federal note issued by  the US Department of Homeland Security. Modern medical devices are miniatures of their predecessors and allow wireless programming and control to minimize maintenance, which would otherwise require cables sticking out of the pati...

France will no longer disconnect users from the Internet as punishment for illegally downloading copyrighted online content as part of the anti-piracy law. It would cost too much. Cutting off the Internet was the ultimate and third penalty step against those caught breaking the anti-piracy law. The French “three strikes” copyright law, or Hadopi, was set up to discourage the 65 million of France residents a...

Motorola presented two new electronic authentication prototypes, a tattoo and an FDA-approved pill, that make the human body transmit passwords to smart devices in an attempt to mark the beginning of a new wearable and edible technology. At the D11 conference, Regina Dudan, advanced research head for Motorola, said people need to transcend the login technology that has been used for more than 40 years and s...

A recent spam campaign abuses the world’s largest online retailer, Amazon.com, to promise a 55” TV set but instead direct users to a malware-laden page and infect them with a notorious exploit kit. Bitdefender Antispam Lab came across an increasing number of such e-mails crafted to look like Amazon order confirmations. The fake notifications, which appear to confirm the order of 55” TVs associated with bran...

The US government seized Costa Rica-based Liberty Reserve for allegedly financially supporting a huge network of cybercriminal activity and handling over $6 billion from online illegal operations.  Seven people are already in police custody for processing money laundering schemes. Among the detainees is Liberty Reserve founder Arthur Budovsky and co-founder Vladimir Kats who were arrested in Spain and in Br...

Iranian hackers are targeting US critical infrastructure elements, including energy, gas and oil corporations, with the clear intent of damaging the American IT framework, senior American officials report. "This is representative of stepped-up cyber activity by the Iranian regime. The more they do this, the more our concerns grow," an anonymous US official told The Wall Street Journal. "What they have done ...