Duncan Riley
Latest from Duncan Riley
AT&T ‘accidentally’ blocks Cloudflare’s privacy-focused domain name service
AT&T Inc. is blaming an accident for a firmware update that blocked Cloudflare Inc.’s privacy-focused DNS service. The block, first reported by users on the DSL Reports user forum, saw AT&T users who had applied a “security” patch issued for AT&T’s Arris BGW210-700 gateway unable to access https://1.1.1.1, the address used by Cloudflare’s DNS service. ...
US Cyber Command elevated to higher status as NSA triples data collection
The United States has upped the seriousness it considers the threat of cybersecurity, elevating the U.S. Cyber Command to a “combatant command” on Friday. The change came at the same time it was revealed that the National Security Agency, which now shares the same head as Cyber Command, tripled the amount of data it gathered from U.S. ...
‘Winnti Umbrella’ groups linked to years of Chinese state-sponsored hacking
Hacks dating back nearly a decade that were previously thought to have originated from separate attack groups are linked to a Chinese government intelligence agency, according to a recently published report. The report, from the Threat Research & Analysis Team at ProtectWise Inc., links attacks by groups using names such as LEAD, BARIUM, Wicked Panda, GREF and PassCV to a Chinese ...
Twitter advises its 336M users to change passwords following encryption failure
Twitter Inc. is advising all of its 336 million users to change their passwords after the microblogging service uncovered a “hashing” bug that potentially exposed all user passwords,. There’s no evidence so far of either hacking or malicious actors stealing the data. Hashing describes a method that obscures passwords using various types of secure encryption, in ...
IPOs keep on coming: Shares of cybersecurity firm Carbon Black jump 26%
The growing wave of tech initial public offerings will be joined at the ringing of the bell Friday morning on the Nasdaq exchange by cybersecurity firm Carbon Black Inc. On Friday, the company’s shares shot up 30 percent from their offering price at the bell, closing up 26 percent, to $23.94 a share. Late Thursday, ...
Notorious Russian hacking group targets LoJack anti-computer theft program
Notorious Russian hacking group Fancy Bear is believed to be behind an attack that hijacks a function within Absolute Software Corp.’s LoJack security tool to redirect data to malicious command-and-control servers. Discovered by researchers Netscout’s Arbor Networks, the attack targets installations of LoJack, an anti-computer theft program used by corporations and individuals to guard their assets, ...
Goldman Sachs to launch bitcoin trading desk
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is set to become the first major merchant bank to embrace cryptocurrencies, announcing Wednesday that it’s planning to launch a bitcoin trading desk. First reported by The New York Times, the desk will involve the bank using its own money to trade with clients in a variety of contracts linked to ...
Google working on a social gaming startup called Arcade
Google Inc. is working on a social gaming startup looking to debut its first game as early as summer, according to a report from Bloomberg. Called simply “Arcade,” the startup is being headed by 21-year-old boy-genius Michael Sayman, best known for joining Facebook at the age of 17 and designing the Lifestage app. Sayman later joined Google, initially ...
Telegram cancels plan for public ICO after raising $1.7B in presales
Encrypted-messaging startup Telegram Messenger LLC has canceled its public initial coin offering after having raised $1.7 billion from some 200 private investors, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. The Telegram ICO, first reported in January, saw the company raise an initial $850 million in presales by Feb. 18 and then another $850 million by March 29. The ...
Google launches .app domain names with security baked in by default
Google Inc. has entered the domain name market in a big way, launching the .app extension three years after acquiring the rights to do so. It’s pitched as the first top-level domain name to come with security built in, since every .app extension has Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure or https by default. Google said that ...