Russia joins the list of countries fighting with online anonymity. Russian government (that is, Putin) has implemented a law bill according to which, starting on February 2020, every device connected to the Internet will have to be registered beforehand. This bill is supposed to help fight illegal trade of, for example, stolen smartphones, but it is not hard to figure out that it will give the Russian government means to trace anyone online using their MAC address or IMEI number. What is more, registration will not even be free, but will cost 100 ruble per device.The bill will supposedly ...

Long story short, people from Wired, a monthly American magazine on technology, have recently found out that a large, combined hacker attack under the code name ”Collection#1” have gathered over 87 gigabytes of e-loot. Among it are 773 million e-mail addresses, which perhaps is not bad in itself, and 21 million passwords to some of these addresses, which is bad indeed. All this data has been gathered over a number of lesser attacks and has all been stored on the Mega hosting platform. It is not improbable that your address and password are among them; it might be wise to change ...

Firefox 69, the newest version of this classic web browser, will not support Flash Player. The old plug-in is generally considered to be an old and unhandy relic of the old times and is being pushed out more and more in favour of HTML 5 or other, newer ones. Firefox 69, which is supposed to come out on September 2019, will block that plug-in by default. Consumer version of the browser will completely stop working with FP at 2020. Tweet Vote on HN ...

This type of thing should really move us more, but I am afraid that we have recently been oversaturated with groundbreaking news of various leaks, e-robberies and other Internet mischief. Now we are simply jaded and largely indifferent to most of them. Anyway, back to the point: two days ago the press has been informed that personal data of 30 thousand of Pentagon employees have been stolen. The leak has been caused by, reportedly, negligence of one of Pentagon’s subcontractors in setting up proper protection for the network it was using. We do not know which subcontractor is that. ...

Good guys from Palo Alto Networks have just discovered that 113 of Flash app sources online have been infected with a nasty bot. The program’s name is XMRig and it is a silent bitcoin mining device – it will use your computer’s resources to mine e-currency and send it to a set receiver (tip – not you). Miner does not spy on the infected user, but its activation does add a significant strain to the computer’s hardware.Flash is an application that is slowly dying out, but some of us are still using it. If you do, make sure to download yours from a trusted ...

Long story short, Google has allowed personnal data of 500 thousand of its users to be stolen, failed to inform us about it and now backs off by turning off the Google + service. Long story a bit longer: Google + social service will be closed down for most of its users in ten months. Why? Well, because the fact that almost nobody uses G+ anymore, the more important reason is Google’s negligence in making sure that our Google + accounts are safe & in informing us when they no longer are. An unknown person or group of people have managed to break into Google + and steal data of 500 ...

According to Bloomberg, Chinese spies have managed to install special microchips on the servers of thirty largest American companies, including Amazon and Apple. The chips were reportedly not only stealing data these companies gathered but also infected their servers with various kinds of viruses. How did the spies gain entry to the servers? Bloomberg seemingly has two theories; one that says that no one knows how did it happen and that the companies in question learned of the microchips just now and another which states that the companies were coerced into installing the chips themselves ...

QRecorder was an app of some renome, available on Google Play for some time already. Its purpose was to record phone calls. While it did that, not long ago it was found out that QRecorder also had another, more malicious function. As it turned out, QRecorder was a trojan. Its function was to check text messages of infected devices for bank account access data, steal it, log into the account and steal money. It is believed that QRecorder was created with Bohemian banks in mind; it is unknown whether or not the virus will work on other countries’ bank accounts as well. As for the app ...

You have bought yourself a new device, like networked storage or a router. You go through the process of installation, use the default password ”admin” or ”1234” or whatever, install it and then change the password. It is just common sense, right? Well, many Americans are seemingly failing with the last part of the process, because lawmakers in California want to ban such default passwords. Their reasoning is that the Internet is plagued with malware that is good at finding out devices with weak security measures and can infect your computer even during the few ...

As reported by the Nightwatch Cybersecurity, there is a newly found hole in the security of every Android OS older than 9 Pie. This gap allows a potential hacker to learn your phone’s IP and MAC address, Wi-Fi and BSSID, giving them the possibility to, among other things, track your position and enter your Wi-Fi network. Google knows the issue and is working on fixing it, but so far only Android 9 Pie devices are safe. For everyone with older OS, be extra careful: no opening mails from Nigerian princes, no clicking on ads ...