WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

Make no mistake, the knowledge of hacking is different from a hacker. A hacker is a person, not the skill. And the use of any knowledge is a personal choice and that choice isn’t universal. The same way some politicians are corrupt, some hackers are corrupt. The same way some politicians are good, some hackers are good also. You may be a Satoshi Nakamoto or an Albert Gonzalez, it is your choice. There is nothing wrong with the hacker knowledge. It is all about you. What You’ll Learn

In 2019, we saw phishing attacks reach new levels of creativity and sophistication.

A video explainer on the technology that’s changing the meaning of the human face.

The Dark Web is real, and your information might be for sale there. Here’s what your data is worth. The simple answer is this: about $45. This is how much, on average, a full set of information for a credit card is selling for, including a name, SSN, birth date, and CVV.

How to get off of people search sites like Pipl, Spokeo, and WhitePages.

How creepy is that smart speaker, that fitness tracker, those wireless headphones? We created this guide to help you shop for safe, secure connected products. Smart home gadgets, fitness trackers, toys and more, rated for their privacy & security.

We teamed up with researchers from New York University and the University of California, San Diego to find out just how effective basic account hygiene is at preventing hijacking. The year-long study, on wide-scale attacks and targeted attacks, was presented on Wednesday at a gathering of experts, policy makers, and users called The Web Conference.
Our research shows that simply adding a recovery phone number to your Google Account can block up to 100% of automated bots, 99% of bulk phishing attacks, and 66% of targeted attacks that occurred during our investigation.

Your web browsing history is the most lucrative piece of information that can be traded.

On average, in the US, using those three records, you could be correctly located in an “anonymized” database 81% of the time. Given 15 demographic attributes of someone living in Massachusetts, there’s a 99.98% chance you could find that person in any anonymized database.

Our tech columnist listened to four years of his Alexa archive, and discovered Amazon tracks us in more ways than we might want.

Our tech columnist offers some practical advice for fighting back against iOS apps hungry for your personal data.

The open source list of trackers that powers our browser extensions, Firefox’s private browsing mode, and other popular privacy tools can be found here along with a change log and notes.

We ran a privacy experiment to see how many hidden trackers are running from the apps on our iPhone. The tally is astounding. Apple says, “What happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone.” Our privacy experiment showed 5,400 hidden app trackers guzzled our data — in a single week.

I lost north of $100,000 last Wednesday. It evaporated over a 24-hour time span in a “SIM port attack” that drained my Coinbase account. It has been four days since the incident…

Passwords. We all have lots of them these days. And yet we're told repeatedly to not reuse passwords and to make them strong. For most of us, that's an opposing set of directives. Unless you have some amazing memory, there's no way that we mere mortal

Have your accounts been leaked or stolen in a data breach? Find out at Firefox Monitor. Search our database and sign up for alerts.

False news spreads online faster, farther, and deeper than truth does — but it can be contained. Here’s how.

We live in a data-driven world. Almost every transaction and interaction you have with most organisations involves you sharing personal data, such as your name, address and birth date. You share data online too, every time you visit a website, search for or buy something, use social media or send an email.

Many people, particularly older folks, proudly declare they avoid using the Web to manage various accounts tied to their personal and financial data — including everything from utilities and mobile phones to retirement benefits and online banking services. The reasoning behind this strategy is as simple as it is alluring: What’s not put online can’t be hacked. But increasingly, adherents to this mantra are finding out the hard way that if you don’t plant your flag online, fraudsters and identity thieves may do it for you.

• Railway police have begun using facial-recognition eyewear to catch criminals.
• In tests the glasses identified faces within 100 milliseconds.
• Seven people have been arrested for a range of previous crimes, and another 26 were banned from travel.
• China has been ramping up its use of facial-recognition technology as it moves toward a nationwide database that can recognize any citizen within three seconds.

KrebsOnSecurity has long warned readers to plant your own flag at the my Social Security online portal of the U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA) — even if you are not yet drawing benefits from the agency — because identity thieves have been registering accounts in peoples’ names and siphoning retirement and/or disability funds.

In What’s In a Boarding Pass Barcode? A Lot, KrebsOnSecurity told the story of a reader whose friend posted a picture of a boarding pass on Facebook. The reader was able to use the airline’s Web site combined with data printed on the boarding pass to discover additional information about his friend. That data included details of future travel, the ability to alter or cancel upcoming flights, and a key component need to access the traveler’s frequent flyer account. 

More recently, security researcher Michal Špaček gave a talk at a conference in the Czech Republic in which he explained how a few details gleaned from a picture of a friend’s boarding pass posted online give him the ability to view passport information on his friend via the airline’s Web site, and to change the password for another friend’s United Airlines frequent flyer account.

Anonymity, like security, has many layers. Observers have developed methods of piercing anonymity which involve differing levels of technology.

These are the steps you can take and the tools you'll need to remain anonymous and hidden online. Tor, VPN, burner emails, encryption, bitcoin, etc.

With the Supreme Court slated to rule next term on whether cellphone location data requires a search warrant, a new poll shows that a majority of U.S. adults support law enforcement accessing certain personal data for someone under investigation, but only if it's authorized by a warrant. Polling was conducted June 8 through June 12 among 2,200 U.S. adults. Morning Consult is the official polling partner of POLITICO, Vox, Fortune, and Bloomberg News.