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Setting a passcode on your iPhone is the first line of defense to help prevent other people from accessing your personal details. However, it's pretty much easy for anyone with access to your iPhone to bypass the passcode protection (doesn't matter if you configured Touch ID or not) and access your personal photos and messages. A new critical security flaw discovered in iOS 8 and newer, including 10.2 beta 3, allows anyone to bypass iPhone's passcode and gain access to personal information using the benevolent nature of Apple's personal assistant Siri. The security glitch has been discovered by EverythingApplePro and iDeviceHelps and now that they have gone public with a video demonstration, you can expect Apple to fix this issue in the next iOS beta version. All an attacker need is to find out the phone number of the target's iPhone and access to the phone for a few minutes. But, what if you don't have target's phone number? No worries. You can

You won't believe your eyes while reading this, but this is true. Microsoft just joined the Linux Foundation as a high-paying Platinum member. Microsoft's love with open source community is embracing as time passes. At its first Connect event in 2013, the company launched Visual Studio 2013. A year later, Microsoft open sourced .NET, and last year, it open sourced the Visual Studio Code Editor, as well. Not just that, Microsoft partnered with Canonical to bring Ubuntu on Windows 10 , worked with FreeBSD to develop a Virtual Machine image for its Azure cloud , and chosen Ubuntu as the OS for its Cloud-based Big Data services. And the big news for this year is… At its 2016 Connect developer event in New York today, Microsoft announced that the company is joining the Linux Foundation as a Platinum member – the highest level of membership, which costs $500,000 annually. Besides this, Microsoft also announced that tech giant Google has also joined on with the indepen

Imagine a world where the software that powers your favorite apps, secures your online transactions, and keeps your digital life could be outsmarted and taken over by a cleverly disguised piece of code. This isn't a plot from the latest cyber-thriller; it's actually been a reality for years now. How this will change – in a positive or negative direction – as artificial intelligence (AI) takes on a larger role in software development is one of the big uncertainties related to this brave new world. In an era where AI promises to revolutionize how we live and work, the conversation about its security implications cannot be sidelined. As we increasingly rely on AI for tasks ranging from mundane to mission-critical, the question is no longer just, "Can AI  boost cybersecurity ?" (sure!), but also "Can AI  be hacked? " (yes!), "Can one use AI  to hack? " (of course!), and "Will AI  produce secure software ?" (well…). This thought leadership article is about the latter. Cydrill  (a

You need to be more careful next time while leaving your computer unattended at your office, as it cost hackers just $5 and only 30 seconds to hack into any computer. Well-known hardware hacker Samy Kamkar has once again devised a cheap exploit tool, this time that takes just 30 seconds to install a privacy-invading backdoor into your computer, even if it is locked with a strong password. Dubbed PoisonTap , the new exploit tool runs freely available software on a tiny $5/£4 Raspberry Pi Zero microcomputer, which is attached to a USB adapter. The attack works even if the targeted computer is password-protected if a browser is left open in the computer's background. All an attacker need is to plug the nasty device in the target computer and wait. Here's How PoisonTap works: Once plugged into a Windows or Mac computer via USB port, the tiny device starts impersonating a new ethernet connection. Even if the victim's device is connected to a WiFi network, Poi

A hacker with little more than a minute can bypass the authentication procedures on some Linux systems just by holding down the Enter key for around 70 seconds. The result? The act grants the hacker a shell with root privileges, which allows them to gain complete remote control over encrypted Linux machine. The security issue relies due to a vulnerability ( CVE-2016-4484 ) in the implementation of the Cryptsetup utility used for encrypting hard drives via Linux Unified Key Setup (LUKS), which is the standard implementation of disk encryption on a Linux-based operating system. The flaw actually is in the way the Cryptsetup utility handles password failures for the decryption process when a system boots up, which lets a user retry the password multiple times. What's even worse? Even if the user has tried up all 93 password attempts, the user is dropped to a shell (Busybox in Ubuntu) that has root privileges. In other words, if you enter a blank password 93 times – or s

Do you own an Android smartphone? You could be one of those 700 Million users whose phone is secretly sending text messages to China every 72 hours. You heard that right. Over 700 Million Android smartphones contain a secret 'backdoor' that surreptitiously sends all your text messages, call log, contact list, location history, and app data to China every 72 hours. Security researchers from Kryptowire discovered the alleged backdoor hidden in the firmware of many budget Android smartphones sold in the United States, which covertly gathers data on phone owners and sends it to a Chinese server without users knowing. First reported on by the New York Times on Tuesday, the backdoored firmware software is developed by China-based company Shanghai AdUps Technology, which claims that its software runs updates for more than 700 Million devices worldwide. Infected Android Smartphone WorldWide Moreover, it is worth noting that AdUps provides its software to much larger ha