14 iPhone apps covertly talking to suspect Golduck malware server

Security researchers say they’ve found more than a dozen iPhone apps covertly communicating with a server associated with Golduck, a historically Android-focused malware that infects popular classic game apps. The malware has been known about for over a year, after it was first discovered by Appthority infecting classic and retro games on Google Play, by …

Microsoft releases Internet Explorer update to counter remote code execution flaw

Microsoft today issued an out-of-band security update to patch a critical zero-day vulnerability in Internet Explorer (IE) Web browser that attackers are already exploiting in the wild to hack into Windows computers. Discovered by security researcher Clement Lecigne of Google’s Threat Analysis Group, the vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2018-8653, is a remote code execution (RCE) flaw …

Oath, the owner of AOL and Yahoo to pay $5 million to settle charges for violating children’s privacy law.

Oath, the owner of AOL and Yahoo, has agreed to pay about $5 million to settle charges from the New York attorney general that the media company’s online advertising business was violating a federal children’s privacy law. AOL, through its ad exchange, helped place targeted display ads on hundreds of websites that it knew were …

Will physical security keys kill off need for passwords?

In 2012, Wired‘s Matt Honan wrote about the disastrous consequences of tying your entire digital life to a string of letters, digits, and symbols. Honan is just one of countless people whose online accounts were hijacked after hackers discovered their passwords; the list of victims also contains high-profile tech executives, including Mark Zuckerberg. The need …

HTTP-over-QUIC experimental protocol will be renamed to HTTP/3

QUIC stands for “Quick UDP Internet Connections” and is, itself, Google’s attempt at rewriting the TCP protocol as an improved technology that combines HTTP/2, TCP, UDP, and TLS (for encryption), among many other things. The HTTP-over-QUIC experimental protocol will be renamed to HTTP/3 and is expected to become the third official version of the HTTP …

Cloudflare launches privacy Android and iOS apps to hide DNS traffic from prying ISPs

Cloudflare launched today official mobile apps for its 1.1.1.1 privacy-first DNS resolver service. Mobile apps for Android and iOS are now available on their respective app stores. The company first launched the 1.1.1.1 service to great fanfare on April 1, earlier this year. The service is a basic DNS server, but one for which Cloudflare …

China Telecom accused of hijacking the vital internet backbone of western countries

A Chinese state-owned telecommunications company has been “hijacking the vital internet backbone of western countries,” according to an academic paper published this week by researchers from the US Naval War College and Tel Aviv University. The culprit is China Telecom, the country’s third-largest telco and internet service provider (ISP), which has had a presence inside …

Magna Carta for the web: Tim Berners-Lee in new campaign to rescue the web from abuse

The internet today isn’t what Tim Berners-Lee pictured when he invented the World Wide Web nearly three decades ago. In a talk at the opening of the Web Summit in Lisbon on Monday, the inventor of the web called on governments, companies and individuals to back a new “Contract for the Web” that aims to …

Internet freedom is declining globally and China is being blamed for exporting censorship

A new report out this week shows that China is by far the most effective censor of the internet, and far from retreating, is exporting its model around the world. Beijing has consistently defied all the confident predictions (including by people far more knowledgeable about the internet than Clinton) that this would be impossible. China’s …

Regulator implored to probe Android apps advertising to preschoolers

Several children’s apps on Google’s app store have been found to inappropriately lure youngsters to watch ads or make purchases, according to a pair of consumer groups that cited a new study in calling for an investigation by federal authorities. “Popular apps for preschoolers are rife with marketing,” Josh Golin, executive director of Campaign for …