Security

The company also reiterated that the messages 'only' triggered a crash loop, and that you could recover the PS4 by first deleting the rogue messages in the PS Messages app and then choosing to rebuild the database from the system's Safe Mode menu.Provided there is a solution in place, you'll still need to be on guard if you received a message and haven't fired up your console since. And regardless of whether or not you're affected, it's as good a time as any to review your message privacy settings. If you don't want to risk future problems or just don't see a need to receive messages from strangers, you might as well limit messages to "friends only." … [Read more...] about Sony says it fixed message bug that crashed PS4s

You can eliminate the chance of a hostile message by going into your settings (either in the console or the PS Messages app), visiting account management, and then changing your privacy settings so that messages are either limited to friends or switched off.We've asked Sony for comment. The company can likely address this with a software update, and it's relatively easy to protect yourself in the meantime. However, there's little doubt that the consequences are serious. Most phone-oriented bugs are troublesome, but won't necessarily prevent you from using your other apps on your device. Here, a prankster is rendering your PS4 effectively inoperable until you walk through some painstaking troubleshooting steps. … [Read more...] about PS4 owners say malicious messages are crashing their consoles

It has not been a good week for Google or Facebook. The week started with Google announcing it was finally putting the sorry social media network Google + out of its misery—not because it had lost the social wars to Facebook, but because it had exposed the data of 500,000 of its users, and Google hadn't disclosed it. And the week ended with Facebook explaining how 30 million of its users got hacked. If you have a Facebook account, you can follow our instructions here to safely find out if you were and how bad it was. Both the Google and Facebook breaches are a great example of the conundrum facing companies who get hacked: What’s the right way to disclose a privacy breach? Lily Hay Newman explains how lawmakers are trying to answer that question. Bad cybersecurity news wasn’t confined to Silicon Valley. The Government Accountability Office issued a blistering report on the cybersecurity of the Department of Defense’s military weapons systems. The report issued a … [Read more...] about Security News This Week: Kanye’s Password Literally Couldn’t Be Worse

The good news: A recent scourge of fake Adobe installers really does update you to the latest version of Flash. The bad news: It places cryptomining malware on your machine in the meantime. The Hack Researchers at Palo Alto Networks this week warned of the latest evolution in both cryptojacking and fake Flash updates, two popular forms of cyber malfeasance united in one unpleasant parcel. Over the past several months, the researchers have found 113 of these fake updaters, which deposit a cryptocurrency miner called XMRig on the affected device. Once in place, XMRig works quietly in the background, leeching your computer's resources to generate Monero, a popular privacy-focused cryptocurrency. What makes this attack especially curious, though, is that it bothers to place the actual Flash update on the device as well. Which is considerate, but also just plain practical, from a cryptojacking perspective. "It's likely to make the user think that nothing had gone wrong," says Ryan Olson, … [Read more...] about Hack Brief: Fake Adobe Flash Installers Come With a Little Malware Bonus