apple

February 22, 2016

The Lowdown on the Apple-FBI Showdown

This post was originally published on this siteMany readers have asked for a primer summarizing the privacy and security issues at stake in the the dispute between Apple and the U.S. Justice Department, which last week convinced a judge in California to order Apple to unlock an iPhone used by one of assailants in the recent San Bernardino massacres. I don’t have much original reporting to contribute on this important debate, but I’m visiting it here because it’s a complex topic that deserves the broadest possible public scrutiny. Image: Elin Korneliussen (@elincello) A federal magistrate in California approved an order (PDF) granting the […]
April 12, 2016

New Threat Can Auto-Brick Apple Devices

This post was originally published on this site If you use an Apple iPhone, iPad or other iDevice, now would be an excellent time to ensure that the machine is running the latest version of Apple’s mobile operating system — version 9.3.1. Failing to do so could expose your devices to automated threats capable of rendering them unresponsive and perhaps forever useless. Zach Straley demonstrating the fatal Jan. 1, 1970 bug. Don’t try this at home! On Feb. 11, 2016, researcher Zach Straley posted a Youtube video exposing his startling and bizarrely simple discovery: Manually setting the date of your iPhone or iPad all […]
May 2, 2016

How the Pwnedlist Got Pwned

This post was originally published on this siteLast week, I learned about a vulnerability that exposed all 866 million account credentials harvested by pwnedlist.com, a service designed to help companies track public password breaches that may create security problems for their users. The vulnerability has since been fixed, but this simple security flaw may have inadvertently exacerbated countless breaches by preserving the data lost in them and then providing free access to one of the Internet’s largest collections of compromised credentials. Pwnedlist is run by Scottsdale, Ariz. based InfoArmor, and is marketed as a repository of usernames and passwords that have been publicly leaked online for any period […]
February 24, 2017

iPhone Robbers Try to iPhish Victims

This post was originally published on this siteIn another strange tale from the kinetic-attack-meets-cyberattack department, earlier this week I heard from a loyal reader in Brazil whose wife was recently mugged by three robbers who nabbed her iPhone. Not long after the husband texted the stolen phone — offering to buy back the locked device — he soon began receiving text messages stating the phone had been found. All he had to do to begin the process of retrieving the device was click the texted link and log in to the phishing page mimicking Apple’s site. Edu Rabin is a resident of […]