A little more than one month after the European Union enacted the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to extend new data privacy rights to its people, the governor of California signed a separate, sweeping data protection law that borrowed several ideas from GDPR, sparking a torch in a legislative data privacy trend that has now spanned at least 10 cou

byJohn E DunnAfter re-Chroming its Edge browser last summer, Microsoft this week announced a list of new security and privacy features it plans to add to forthcoming versions in an effort to take on its rivals.The first of these, tracking prevention, has been in the browser for months, but was recently redesigned to make it stand out a bit more.The second is

byLisa VaasEnough people must have griped about the loss of “www” and “https” in Chrome’s address bar to make Google rethink it: Chromium developers are testing a new Omnibox context menu that would give users the option to “Always Show Full URLs.”You can see what the final rendition of the “Show Full URLs̶

Google announced to have warned users of almost 40,000 alerts of state-sponsored phishing or malware attacks during 2019. Google shared data on alerts related to state-sponsored attacks, the tech giant revealed that it issued almost 40,000 alerts of state-sponsored phishing or malware attacks to its users during 2019. The number of alerts decreased by

byJohn E DunnConverting websites from HTTP to HTTPS over the last decade must count as one of the most successful quiet security upgrades ever to affect web browsing.Using an HTTPS site means that your browser and the site establish an encrypted connection which can’t be snooped on by ISPs, rogue Wi-Fi access points, or anyone else trying to monitor the cont

byDanny BradburyAndroid apps are snooping on other software on your device – and that could tell shady advertising companies more about you than you’d like.The news emerged this week in a paper from researchers in Italy, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. The privacy violations centre around installed application methods (IAMs), which are applicat

byJohn E DunnIt’s the COVID-19 shortage nobody expected – not toilet rolls, tinned goods or headache pills this time but Google software engineers.It’s a problem that many believe explains the abrupt decision by Google to delay the release of Chrome 81, the stable version of which was scheduled to start appearing on users’ computers on 17 March.This wa

byJohn E DunnThe menace of Business Email Compromise (BEC) is often overshadowed by ransomware but it’s something small and medium-sized businesses shouldn’t lose sight of.Bang on cue, the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) has alerted US businesses to ongoing attacks targeting organisations using Microsoft Office 365 and Google G Suite.Warnings

byDanny BradburyCryptocurrency security company Ledger has warned users about a rogue Chrome extension that dupes its victims into giving up the keys to their crypto wallets.Cryptocurrency owners need a wallet just like users of regular cash do. Instead of cash, however, crypto wallets hold digital keys – which grant users access to the blockchain addr

byJohn E DunnFirst came ‘fuzzing’, a long-established technique for spotting bugs such as security flaws in real applications using automated tools.More recently, security fuzzing tools have expanded in number, and today there are hundreds of specialised open-source tools and online services designed to probe specific types of software.But which security fuz

Google’s March 2020 security updates for Android address over 70 flaws, including a critical vulnerability that affects the media framework.  Google’s March 2020 security updates for Android include the fix for a critical vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2020-0032, that affects the media framework as part of the 2020-03-01 security patch level. The 2020-0

byDanny BradburyLast week was a big one for non-profit digital certificate project Let’s Encrypt – it issued its billionth certificate. It’s a symbolic milestone that shows how important this free certificate service has become to web users.Publicly announced in November 2014, Let’s Encrypt offers TLS certificates for free. These cert

byJohn E DunnUnsettling news for anyone who relies on smartphone voice assistants: researchers have demonstrated how these can be secretly activated to make phone calls, take photos, and even read back text messages without ever physically touching the device.Dubbed SurfingAttack by a US-Chinese university team, this is no parlor trick and is based on the ab

Google revealed that the enhancements to its scanning system implemented in Gmail are boosting its detection capabilities. Google announced that the new scanning capabilities implemented in Gmail have increased the detection rate of malicious documents. The IT giant proudly announced that combining its existing machine learning models with other protec

byLisa VaasNew Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas is suing Google over its alleged slurping of students’ data off of the free Chromebooks it passes out to needy schools and from its free G Suite for Education products, including Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, and other apps.According to the complaint, which was filed in the US District Cour