Adulterers beware: 40m users of cheating website Ashley Madison hacked July 20, 2015 Hackers are threatening to reveal the details of millions of users of the extramarital dating website Ashley Madison, which is soon to embark on a multimillion-pound float in London. A cache of date stolen from the site, which is owned by Canadian company Avid Life Media, includes databases and financial information. Avid said it was [...]
Turing Phone: The makers of this smartphone say it’s impossible to hack and doesn’t break July 14, 2015 It sounds like a challenge for hackers if ever there was one, but a mobile phone startup is promising its upcoming smartphone is not just impossible to break, but also impossible to hack into. Aptly named the Turing Phone, it promises to be a secure phone, built for a post-Snowden and data surveillance world. Using [...]
Cyber security firm NCC’s revenue rise is not reflected in stalling profits July 9, 2015 Cyber security firm NCC has revealed rising revenue in the year ending 31 March. Revenue was up 21 per cent from 2014, to 133.7m. Finance boss Atul Patel, told City A.M. that this showed “another record year of strong international growth.” The revenue growth did not though prompt a rise in profits at the Manchester-based [...]
Google I/O 2015: From Projects Vault and Brillo to smart jeans and cardboard virtual reality, the impossibly advanced technologies unveiled in San Francisco June 3, 2015 BRILLO Essentially an operating system for the Internet of Things (IoT), Google’s Project Brillo is an adapted version of Android designed to manage a number of connected devices from a central management console. It’s Google’s attempt at standardising the way we control devices, from household appliances like Nest (which, incidentally, Google owns) to wearables [...]
Could the humble password about to become a thing of the past? Here’s how brainwaves are being used in the battle for cyber security June 3, 2015 A new system allowing accounts to be unlocked using brainwaves could spell the end for passwords as we know them. Named “brainprints”, the system is the creation of a research team at Binghamton University in New York, and involves an application that can identify a person based on nothing more than their mental reactions to [...]
The cost of cyber attacks on businesses has doubled in the last year June 2, 2015 The threat of cyber attacks on UK businesses is rising steeply, a government report has warned. Over the last year, the total cost of malicious attacks on business software and cyber breaches by employees came to £1.46m – over twice as much as the £600,000 they cost a year earlier. Nine out of 10 companies [...]
The rise of Cyberchondria: Search engines are wrongly making us believe we have terrible diseases May 7, 2015 You're feeling a bit funny – what could the cause be? A life-threatening disease? If MrDoctor123 on unknown medical blog considers it to be a vague possibility, then surely there's a genuine risk of imminent death. This over-reliance on the internet to self-diagnose our medical problems is spreading across the world faster than a highly [...]
Loyalty membership Costa lot as coffee card scheme data hacked April 23, 2015 Costa Coffee suspended millions of Coffee Club Card online accounts yesterday after hundreds of its loyalty scheme members suffered a security breach. The Whitbread-owned coffee shop said that it had identified a small number of members who had “some unusual activity” on their accounts after carrying out security checks. A spokesperson told City A.M. the [...]
Hackers force British Airways to freeze-frequent flyer accounts March 29, 2015 Tens of thousands of British Airways frequent-flyer accounts have been hacked, meaning executive club flyers will be unable to use their points. The carrier said no personal information had been viewed or stolen on the small proportion of its customers who were affected, whose accounts have now been frozen while the issue has been resolved. [...]
These are the four biggest threats to financial stability, according to the Bank of England March 26, 2015 The financial policy committee (FPC) which looks after financial stability over at the Bank of England, has outlined the areas it intends to keep a closer eye on in its quarterly assessment released today. 1. Geopolitical turmoil Eurozone turmoil could pose a threat to future financial stability. There have been some encouraging signs recently but [...]