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Credit: fdecomite More than 3 million people (three times previous estimates) are estimated to be actively using cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, finds the first global cryptocurrency benchmarking study by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance. While many members of the general public may have heard of “bitcoin”, the first decentralised cryptocurrency launched in 2009, a new report from the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF) paints a broader […]

One of the few regrets of Vint Cerf, who is often referred to as the ‘father of the Internet’, is the fact that encryption using public cryptography was not baked in the original ARPANET design. While the early Internet was meant to meet a number of requirements such as resilience and openness, encryption was not one of them. Some of this was because of the high cost […]

Telstra has announced that it will be launching a new suite of managed security services and two new cybersecurity centres in Melbourne and Sydney. According to Neil Campbell, Telstra’s director of Security Solutions, the offerings will be ready for customers by July 19, with the aim to make the cybersecurity challenge easier for organisations to deal with. “We’re taking this opportunity to rethink and reinvent really our […]

It should come as no surprise that there are numerous activities related to Trust, Identity, and Privacy on the agenda for IETF 98. Below I will highlight a few of the many activities and provide pointers to a number of additional ones. There is something for everyone interested in these areas in Chicago in the coming week! The fun starts before the meeting even begins with the […]

WASHINGTON — A Pakistani militant who planned a devastating truck bomb attack on a hotel in Islamabad in 2008 — which left two members of the American military and dozens of others dead — was killed in recent days by an American drone strike in Afghanistan, the Pentagon said on Saturday night. The militant, Qari Yasin, had ties to the Pakistani Taliban, who are closely aligned with […]

Most website visits these days entail a database query — to look up airline flights, for example, or to find the fastest driving route between two addresses. Credit: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Most website visits these days entail a database query—to look up airline flights, for example, or to find the fastest driving route between two addresses. But online database queries can reveal a surprising amount of […]

Stock photo The price of Bitcoin plummeted after the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) denied a request to bring Bitcoin to the financial market, highlighting how the value of the virtual currency can change within minutes. In February, the virtual currency’s value reached an all-time high of over $1,300 with investors taking a punt on rumors SEC would allow the first Bitcoin ETF. An exchange-traded fund […]

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By Gertrude Chavez-Dreyfuss and Trevor Hunnicutt | NEW YORK NEW YORK Investors are betting market regulators will approve what would be the first U.S. exchange-traded fund to track the price of bitcoin. From investment funds to wealthy individuals and even a Las Vegas strip club, the bitcoin ETF is generating a lot of buzz for a financial product. The surge in interest in the digital currency is […]

Confide, a messaging app used inside the White House and touted for its ability to allow staffers to privately leak to the press, isn’t as secure as the company claims. The multi-platform app, which first broke onto the security scene three years ago but only recently made headlines for its use across the Trump administration, claims that nobody can intercept and read messages that disappear after they […]

GoldenEye ransomware targets human resources departments because they’re used to opening emails and attachments from unknown sources. Image: Ali Donzanti What is a ransomware attack? Cybercriminals didn’t use to be so obvious. If hackers infiltrated your corporate network, they would do everything possible to avoid detection. It was in their best interests not to alert a victim that they’d fallen victim to cybercrime. But now, if you […]

BlackBerry KEYone (Image: TCL) TCL Communication on Saturday announced the 4.5-inch BlackBerry KEYone, the first smartphone from BlackBerry and TCL’s licensing partnership. Throwing back to old school BlackBerry, the KEYone features a physical keyboard. The BlackBerry KEYone will be available globally in April, starting at $549 unlocked. It will run Android 7.1 Nougat out of the box and will be loaded with both Google Play and BlackBerry […]

When the National Security Agency (NSA) introduced Secure Hash Algorithm 1 (SHA-1) in 2002 as an approved cryptographic security algorithm it was practically unbreakable. That was a long, long time ago. True, SHA-1 security has been broken, but then we’ve been planning on it being busted for years now. Getty Images/iStockphoto Since then, SHA-1 has been used in numerous secure applications. These include web Secure-Socket Layer (SSL) […]

Credit: shatterered.io Today, researchers at the Dutch research institute CWI and Google jointly announce that they have broken the SHA-1 internet security standard in practice. This industry standard is used for digital signatures and file integrity verification, which secure credit card transactions, electronic documents, GIT open-source software repositories and software distribution. CWI cryptanalyst Marc Stevens says: “Many applications still use SHA-1, although it was officially deprecated by […]

Stock photo SoftBank, Sprint, and TBCASoft have revealed plans to create new solutions which introduce blockchain technology into the telecommunications industry. On Friday, the companies announced their intentions to “aim” for a technology partnership which will jointly develop blockchain technology for telecommunication carriers. In a press release, the firms explained that the heart of the research and development of a new blockchain solution relies on TBCASoft, which […]

Google has announced that it has cracked the Secured Hash Algorithm 1 (SHA-1) cryptographic function, marking a milestone that spells both danger and opportunity for the computing world. The unprecedented feat was achieved through the real-world collision attack on the cryptographic algorithm, which led to the production of two PDF files that contain similar SHA-1 signature. What Is SHA-1? As a mathematical algorithm, the SHA-1 is capable […]

The alerts are designed to warn people about impending severe weather events such as flooding. Image: IBM Research scientists are building a new form of networking technology designed to provide billions of people with potentially lifesaving weather alerts, even if they don’t have internet connectivity. Developed by IBM Research and The Weather Company, Mesh Network Alerts is a peer-to-peer mesh networking technology that allows Android devices to […]

Texas Republican Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said Tuesday that “creating backdoors into secure platforms would be a huge mistake.” “Instead, we need to find a way to keep our countries safe while also keeping our data safe and secure,” McCaul said at the RSA Conference in San Francisco. The remarks, geared for the presumably pro-encryption audience of cybersecurity professionals, indicate that the […]

Researchers from North Carolina State University, Boston University and George Mason University have developed a Bitcoin-compatible system that could make it significantly more difficult for observers to identify or track the parties involved in any given Bitcoin transaction. Bitcoin was initially conceived as a way for people to exchange money anonymously. But then it was discovered that anyone could track all Bitcoin transactions and often identify the […]

If you’re looking for a quick, easy, and affordable way to protect your Google account, Facebook, GitHub, Dropbox, Salesforce admin account (and much more), or looking for a way to harden your Mac or Windows login credentials, then you need to take a look at YubiKey. Must read: Best Raspberry Pi alternatives, starting at only $5 OK, first off, what is YubiKey? YubiKey is a small authentication […]

By Anna Irrera | NEW YORK NEW YORK Cisco Systems Inc (CSCO.O), Bosch Ltd (BOSH.NS) and several other companies, have set up a consortium to work on how blockchain can be used to secure and improve “internet of things” applications, as sectors beyond finance seek to benefit from bitcoin’s underlying technology. The group, which also includes Bank of New York Mellon Corp (BK.N), Foxconn Technology Group, security […]

Credit: Michael Vadon Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) Now that President Trump is in the White House, there are some breathless stories going around about the technology his administration is adopting. When Barack Obama came into the White House, he was the most connected president ever, an active user of an actual BlackBerry, before that concept became so terribly quaint. At the time, I covered the […]

WhatsApp provides end-to-end encryption, preventing eavesdroppers from reading messages. (Image: file photo) Americans “remain divided” on whether the government should be able to access their private encrypted messages, according to new research. Pew Research found in its latest report on cybersecurity that 46 percent of Americans would allow the government to access encrypted communications to investigate a crime, whereas 44 percent are in favor of encrypted apps […]

China is progressing well and stands on the same starting point as other economic powers in the quantum computing arena, but local organisations still fall behind their western counterparts in research experience. China in recent years had begun investing in quantum technology, initiating several national projects in quantum communications and computation. And it seemed likely to continue its investment in future, said Andrew Yao, a Turing Award […]

(Image: Project Zero) Cisco has closed a remote code execution vulnerability in its WebEx extension for Chrome, after Project Zero’s Tavis Ormandy alerted the networking giant to the issue on Saturday. According to Ormandy, the extension worked on any URL that matched against a magic pattern, and since it could be used in a non-visible iframe, the user need not be aware the extension was engaged. “The […]

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