Apple Suspends Siri Program After Privacy Backlash

Apple is suspending a program that lets contractors listen in on Siri voice recordings after facing a rain of backlash regarding the privacy implications of the program. The suspension comes after a report in The Guardian last week outlining how contractors regularly listen to intimate voice...

How to securely send your personal information

This story originally ran on The Parallax and was updated on July 3, 2019. A few months ago, my parents asked a great security question: How could they securely send their passport numbers to a travel agent? They knew email wasn’t safe on its own. Standard email indeed isn’t safe for sending...

Germany Talking about Banning End-to-End Encryption

Der Spiegel is reporting that the German Ministry for Internal Affairs is planning to require all Internet message services to provide plaintext messages on demand, basically outlawing strong end-to-end encryption. Anyone not complying will be blocked, although the article doesn't say how. Cory...

WhatsApp Zero-Day Exploited in Targeted Spyware Attacks

UPDATE WhatsApp is urging users to update as soon as possible, after a zero-day vulnerability found in its messaging platform was exploited by attackers who were able to inject spyware onto victims’ phones in targeted campaigns. First reported by the Financial Times, the popular messaging app...

Hacker Breaks Into French Government's New Secure Messaging App

A white-hat hacker found a way to get into the French government's newly launched, secure encrypted messaging app that otherwise can only be accessed by officials and politicians with email accounts associated with the government identities. Dubbed "Tchap," the end-to-end encrypted, open source...

Telegram Gained 3 Million New Users During WhatsApp, Facebook Outage

WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram faced a widespread outage yesterday with users from around the world reporting issues with sending messages on WhatsApp and Messenger, posting feeds on Facebook and accessing other features on the three Facebook-owned platforms. While the outage was quite troubli...

Firefox Send — Free Encrypted File Transfer Service Now Available For All

Mozilla has made it easy for you to share large files securely and privately with whomever you want, eliminating the need to depend upon less secure free third-party services or file upload tools that burn a hole in your pocket. Mozilla has finally launched its free, end-to-end encrypted...

Securely and Anonymously Send and Receive Files: OnionShare

OnionShare is an open source tool for securely and anonymously sending and receiving files using Tor onion services. It works by starting a web server directly on your computer and making it accessible as an unguessable Tor web address that others can load in Tor Browser to download files from yo...

Merging Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram: a technical, reputational hurdle

Secure messaging is supposed to be just that—secure. That means no backdoors, strong encryption, private messages staying private, and, for some users, the ability to securely communicate without giving up tons of personal data. So, when news broke that scandal-ridden, online privacy pariah...

The Pitfalls of Facebook Merging Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp Chats

Facebook's effort to combine its major chat platforms could create minefields for users who rely on end-to-end encryption...

Australia Anti-Encryption Law Triggers Sweeping Backlash

A controversial Australian bill, which could give the government access to data protected by end-to-end encryption, was passed Thursday. The bill, called the Assistance and Access Act, empowers Australian police to essentially force companies that are operating in the country to help the governme...

Signal App’s New Privacy Feature Conceals Sender ID from Metadata

By Waqas Messaging apps are now becoming more and more secure to make it difficult or rather impossible for anyone to access your conversations. Switching to end-to-end encryption although offered a stronger layer of protection but still the unencrypted metadata like sender/receiver information,...

The Danger and Opportunity in 5G Connectivity and IoT

There is a lot of buzz building over fifth-generation mobile networks 5G and how they will revolutionize the fast-growing numbers of internet-connected devices — but what about security? What makes 5G so closely tied to billions of Internet of Things IoT devices is its speed 5G is expected to be ...

Telegram leaked IP addresses of its desktop app users

By Waqas The vulnerability affected Telegram’s desktop app for Windows, Mac, and Linux OS. Telegram, a popular privacy-focused instant messaging application, reportedly contained a bug that can leak the IP addresses of users. Known for providing end-to-end encryption, Telegram’s desktop app has...

All New Privacy and Security Features Coming in macOS 10.14 Mojave

At Worldwide Developer Conference 2018 on Monday, Apple announced the next version of its macOS operating system, and it's called Mojave. Besides introducing new features and improvements of macOS 10.14 Mojave—like Dark Mode, Group FaceTime, Dynamic Desktop, and Finder—at WWDC, Apple also reveale...

Another severe flaw in Signal desktop app lets hackers steal your chats in plaintext

For the second time in less than a week, users of the popular end-to-end encrypted Signal messaging app have to update their desktop applications once again to patch another severe code injection vulnerability. Discovered Monday by the same team of security researchers, the newly discovered...

CenoCipher - Easy-To-Use, End-To-End Crypto-Communication Tool

CenoCipher is a free, open-source, easy-to-use tool for exchanging secure encrypted communications over the internet. It uses strong cryptography to convert messages and files into encrypted cipher-data, which can then be sent to the recipient via regular email or any other channel available, suc...

Twitter is Testing End-to-End Encrypted Direct Messages

Twitter has been adopting new trends at a snail's pace. But it's better to be late than never. Since 2013 people were speculating that Twitter will bring end-to-end encryption to its direct messages, and finally almost 5 years after the encryption era began, the company is now testing an end-to-e...

Nextcloud: Improper protection of FileContentProvider

Some data in the FileContentProvider is protected against applications not related to NextCloud. The application checks if calling application package name contains "com.nextcloud.client" string. Every application with such substring in package name is allowed to fully access FileContentProvider...

Skype Finally Adds End-to-End Encryption for Private Conversations

Good news for Skype users who are concerned about their privacy. Microsoft is collaborating with popular encrypted communication company Signal to bring end-to-end encryption support to Skype messenger. End-to-end encryption assured its users that no one, not even the company or server that...