TECH TWEET

Mobile Security—How Secure Are Your Mobile Devices, Actually? Whether it’s searching embarrassing symptoms or letting curiosity win and checking out the latest photo leak, we all get up to some questionable things online from time to time—things we wouldn’t want our boss or maybe even friends to know. We aren’t ones to judge, but if you think that in this day-in-age you’re just as safe (or safer) doing all that on your smartphone as your PC, you might want to reconsider. For example, a recent study examining 10,000 mobile devices in the UK and the US, showed that 40 of the 50 top porn sites were susceptible to software that may harm your phone badly. Another security report issued by Nokia in March 2017, revealed a new all-time high in mobile device infection rates—a stunning 400 percent increase over last year! Spyware that exposes your text messages, contact lists, GPS coordinates and other data that you’d rather kept to yourself, hits both Android and iOS-run devices. Yet ...

Your computer may be making Bitcoin​ for hackers Spike in value of digital currencies gives cyber criminals a new way to earn money that is less disruptive than ransomware Hackers are commandeering the horsepower of unwitting victims’ computers to secretly generate cryptocurrencies, hoping to cash in as the price of bitcoin has soared to $6,000. New forms of malicious software have mushroomed, appearing on hacked desktop computers, and hackers are sneaking code that generates digital currency on misconfigured cloud-computing servers and even on websites, which have been reprogrammed so visiting browsers become unsuspecting digital-currency generators. Digital currencies such as bitcoin need a broad network of computers to process transactions. To lure participants, they pay off the computers that join the network with newly minted digital currency. These computers are called miners. A typical personal computer can crank out about one bitcoin every 4½ years, according ...