FBI

The site that tells you if you were hacked has partnered with the FBI

May 31st, 2021

With major hacks and data breaches happening almost daily, protecting your online accounts and passwords is as important as ever. You should use strong, unique passwords for each online account you operate and use on a password management app to keep track of them all. You should occasionally change passwords, especially those you share with …

Tech

Fascinating details emerge about the Russian hackers who attacked a major US fuel pipeline

May 10th, 2021

Andy Meek

US national security officials are still scrambling to get to the bottom of this weekend’s Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack that was believed to have been executed by a gang of Russian cybercriminals, and Colonial Pipeline itself is struggling to contain the fallout from the attack on this major US fuel pipeline — and to get …

Tech

The true story of how the FBI cracked the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone

April 14th, 2021

Chris Smith

Apple and the FBI were engaged in a massive fight over encryption in the early part of 2016, following the December 2015 mass shooting in San Bernardino. A husband and wife shot and killed more than a dozen people, and then they died in the ensuing fight with the police. They left behind an iPhone …

Tech

The FBI is hacking hundreds of computers in the US, but for a good reason

April 14th, 2021

Andy Meek

A little more than a month after Microsoft disclosed a bombshell piece of cybersecurity industry news — an attack on Microsoft Exchange servers, whereby state-sponsored hackers from China were chaining together attacks on four vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s email cloud service in order to steal data — the US government just shared a pretty incredible piece …

Tech

Did the FBI force Apple to abandon full iCloud encryption? It’s more complicated than it seems

January 22nd, 2020

Yoni Heisler

While Apple remains steadfast in its refusal to help the FBI unlock a pair of iPhones belonging to Florida shooter Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani, the company did admit that it handed over to the FBI gigabytes of Alshamrani’s data, a haul that included his iCloud backups. This is possible because although iCloud backups are encrypted, Apple …

Tech

The FBI needed two months to hack Lev Parnas’ iPhone 11

January 22nd, 2020

Chris Smith

The Pensacola shooting resurfaced an old squabble over encryption between the FBI and Apple, with US Attorney General William Barr and President Donald Trump taking official stances against Apple, urging the company to unlock the iPhones belonging to suspects in criminal investigations. Ironically, the FBI is actually quite good at unlocking encrypted phones without Apple’s …

Tech

Reuters: Apple abandoned full iCloud encryption after FBI complaint

January 21st, 2020

Chris Smith

While Apple can’t unlock an end-to-end encrypted iPhone for the police, the company can access iCloud data and share it with law enforcement. That’s because Apple also holds the keys to iCloud backups. But Apple planned a few years ago to let users fully encrypt iCloud backups, but the feature was never released. A new …

Tech

Trump demands Apple ‘step up to the plate’ and help the FBI unlock a terrorist’s iPhone

January 15th, 2020

Yoni Heisler

The ongoing saga involving Apple, the FBI, and a pair of locked iPhones belonging to Florida mass shooter Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani shows no sign of slowing down anytime soon. If anything, the dispute appears to be intensifying with Donald Trump taking to Twitter late on Tuesday to weigh in on the issue. “We are helping …

Lifestyle

FBI busts two illegal streaming sites so massive they dwarf Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu

December 16th, 2019

Andy Meek

In spite of the fact that consumers now have an abundance of choice when it comes to streaming video services to pay for, there are still thousands of people, it seems, who would prefer to pay for an alternative to Netflix, Disney+ and the like. An illegal alternative. Over the weekend, the US Justice Department, …