Iain Thomson

An Equifax executive – who knew the biz had been hacked before it was made public and banked over $75,000 in stock trades using this inside knowledge – has avoided jail. Sudhakar Reddy Bonthu, formerly a software product development manager for Equifax’s Global Consumer Services team, admitted to learning that hackers have …

Video A Chinese businessman has announced plans to light Chengdu at night by launching an artificial "moon" to direct the out-of-sight Sun's rays down onto the city's streets. The idea is the brainchild of Wu Chunfeng, chairman of Chengdu Aerospace Science and Technology Microelectronics System Research Institute. He said …

A programmer who wrote and sold software that backdoored PCs so they could be remotely controlled has been jailed for 30 months – and forced to give up his stash of 114 Bitcoins. Colton Grubbs, 21, of Stanford, Kentucky, was sentenced this week after admitting to creating LuminosityLink, a software package he claimed was a …

As any San Francisco Bay Area resident knows traffic is bad and getting worse, but the city's officials think they have found the culprit: ride-hailing companies. In a report [PDF] issued on Tuesday the San Francisco County Transportation Authority acknowledged that a lot of new people have moved into the area, drawn by tech …

October is shaping up to be a lousy month for NASA. First, the Hubble space telescope went into hibernation. Then a Russian Soyuz rocket failed to get its astronauts and kit up to the orbiting International Space Station. And now the American agency's Chandra X-ray Observatory, tens of thousands of miles from Earth, is kaput – …

Comment Thursday's failed Soyuz launch, carrying kit and astronauts to the International Space Station means NASA is fast running out of options for shipping stuff into orbit. Especially since its homespun solutions aren't living up to their earlier promise. The US space agency hasn't been wild about using the Russians as a delivery …

IBM has officially griped to a top US government watchdog about JEDI – the Pentagon's proposed 10-year $10bn single-vendor IT system for America’s Green Machine. Whichever lucky lone supplier wins the coveted Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract will be responsible for providing all cloud activities for the …

The big data market became a little less competitive on Wednesday when two of the biggest players, Cloudera and Hortonworks, agreed to merge. “Our businesses are highly complementary and strategic,” said Tom Reilly, chief executive officer at Cloudera. “By bringing together Hortonworks’ investments in end-to-end data …

It’s that time of year again: CRM loyalists flood San Francisco for the annual Dreamforce conference hosted by Salesforce – but day one hasn’t exactly gone to plan. For a start, on Tuesday, protestors wheeled a huge wooden cage down the street outside the busy conference center to rally against Salesforce signing a multi- …

A Romanian woman has admitted running a ransomware operation from infected Washington DC's CCTV systems just days before President Trump was sworn into office in the US capital. Eveline Cismaru, 28, pled guilty this week to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and one count of conspiracy to commit computer fraud, …

Cops have named the programmer who went on a gun rampage at WTS Paradigm – a US maker of enterprise resource planning software – this week. He shot four colleagues, leaving one in a critical condition. At around 10.20am on Wednesday, Anthony Tong, 45, who had worked at the company in Middleton, Wisconsin, for little over a …

The three brains behind the Mirai malware, which infects and pressgangs Internet-of-Things devices into a botnet army, have avoided jail. In December, Paras Jha, 22, Josiah White, 21, and Dalton Norman, 22, pleaded guilty in the US to breaking the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act after developing and masterminding the Mirai …

Video SpaceX today named its first paying passenger it will fly around the Moon and back to Earth – and it's Japanese biz baron Yusaku Maezawa. Yeah, him. You know. Him. “SpaceX has signed the world’s first private passenger to fly around the Moon aboard our BFR launch vehicle — an important step toward enabling access for everyday …

Hurricane Florence has now landed on US soil, bringing 100 MPH winds, torrential rain, and claiming at least four lives. Many residents have fled, though some can’t – because they are keeping the area’s data centers up and running during the carnage. The Carolinas, on America's east coast, are studded with data centers full of …

NASA ground controllers received some disturbing readings from the International Space Station on Wednesday - air pressure inside the craft was falling. That’s not a good sign when you're 220 miles up in space. The ISS crew were asleep at the time, but ground control opted not to mention it to them, since the pressure drop …

The annual Miss America beauty pageant scholarship program has a tech entry this year, Microsoft developer Allison Farris. Ms Farris, who holds both bachelor's and master's degrees in Management Information Systems from the University of Alabama, has spent the last three years as a Redmond developer in the US capital working …

Comment The hacking world's summer camp has ended. The last of the Black Hat USA, BSides Las Vegas, and DEF CON attendees and organizers have now left Sin City after a week of lectures, networking, and partying. What unfolded over those seven or so days will have knock-on effects for years to come – not just from researchers and …

Black Hat If you want to avoid the cops, or watch deliveries and call-outs by trucks and another vehicles in real-time, well, there's potentially not a lot stopping you. Security researchers have found more than 100,000 internet-facing cellular gateways, some of which broadcast their exact whereabouts to the world. These particular …

DEF CON Hackers of all ages have been investigating America’s voting machine tech, and the results weren't great. For instance, one 11-year-old apparently managed to hack and alter a simulated, albeit deliberately hobbled, Secretary of State election results webpage in 10 minutes. The Vote Hacking Village, one of the most packed-out …

DEF CON American police and the judiciary are increasingly relying on software to catch, prosecute and sentence criminal suspects, but the code is untested, unavailable to suspects' defense teams, and in some cases provably biased. In a presentation at the DEF CON hacking conference in Las Vegas, delegates were given the example of …

DEF CON Rob Joyce, the former head of the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations hacking team, has spilled the beans on which nations are getting up to mischief online. Joyce gave one of the first talks at the DEF CON hacking conference in Las Vegas and interest was intense - the lines to get in stretched around the hall. Joyce …

Updated At midnight on Thursday, Matt Linton, a senior Google bod who was one of the key players in sorting out the Spectre CPU security hole mess, went to his hotel room in Caesars Palace, Las Vegas – and found his key no longer worked. When he went to reception to find out what the problem was, he was met by two security guards who …

Black Hat Four years ago, IOActive security researcher Ruben Santamarta came to Black Hat USA to warn about insecurities in aircraft satellite-communication (SATCOM) systems. Now he’s back with more doom and gloom. During a presentation at this year's hacking conference in Las Vegas this week, he claimed he has found a host of flaws in …

Black Hat The whizz kids who uncovered the Spectre and Meltdown data-leaking flaws in modern processors have scooped two Pwnie Awards – often referred to as the information security industry’s Oscars. Moritz Lipp, Michael Schwarz, Daniel Gruss, Thomas Prescher, Werner Haas, Stefan Mangard, Paul Kocher, Daniel Genkin, Yuval Yarom, Mike …

Black Hat Data centers are vital in this cloudy world – yet little-understood management chips potentially give hackers easy access to their servers in ways sysadmins may not have imagined. The components in question are known as baseband management controllers (BMCs). They are discrete microcontrollers popped into boxes by the likes of …