Iain Thomson

RoundupWelcome back, Brits, from your Easter break – assuming you weren't working or on-call over the four-day weekend. Since you've been away from your desks, RSS feeds, and browsers, it's been a busy time in cyber-security, what with not one but two Facebook privacy cockups, one cunningly timed to coincide with the release of the …

Water coolerHey El Reg, help me out with this. I saw someone on Twitter complaining that she had to have her face scanned by US airline JetBlue before flying overseas from America. Why would they be doing this? According to food writer MacKenzie Fegan, she was asked to undergo a facial scan at a computer terminal at the departure gate …

Samsung has confirmed that its dual-screen Galaxy Fold handset, which was due to go on sale for $1,980 apiece this week in the US, has been delayed due to the touchscreen easily breaking. Early builds of the fold-able Fold were given out to selected journalists to review and praise earlier this month, though, within days of …

Marcus Hutchins, the British security researcher who shot to fame after successfully halting the Wannacry ransomware epidemic, has pleaded guilty to crafting online bank-account-raiding malware. For nearly two years now, Hutchins, 24, has been living in the US, while out on bail awaiting trial, after being collared in 2017 at …

Android users across Europe are due a software update from Google today that will ask them to make a choice for the future of their smartphones and gadgets – which browser and search engine do you want to use? Once the update has been installed, the next visit to the Google Play Store will throw up two panels, asking users to …

While journalists and netizens are distracted digesting the redacted 400-plus-page Mueller report, released within the past few hours, today will be a good day for spin doctors to bury bad news. And Facebook just couldn't pass up on the opportunity. One hour before the long-awaited dossier by Robert Mueller – special counsel …

The first attempt by a private company to land a probe on the Moon's surface ended in failure on Thursday when the vehicle crashed minutes before it was supposed to land. The Beresheet lander, run by Israeli firm SpaceIL, was due to touch down on the lunar regolith after months spent getting into position. The lander carried a …

Generally a system crash is a private affair, but the BT Tower, one of London's tallest landmarks, spent much of the weekend displaying a Windows error message in a very public fashion. The building, originally known as the Post Office Tower, is famed for both its revolving top floor and, more recently, for the banks of LEDs …

Remember that sordid and strange tale of the National Enquirer publishing Jeff Bezos's sexts sent to his new girlfriend, and then trying to blackmail the billionaire biz baron? Good. Now, the Amazon supremo's chief private investigator Gavin de Becker reckons the Saudi Arabian government hacked into devices to swipe copies of …

The Ethiopian Airlines 737 Max 8 that crashed this month, killing all 157 passengers and crew, was actively using Boeing's Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) that is thought to have brought down a similar 737 five months earlier. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal over the weekend, Ethiopian CEO …

A million or so Asus personal computers may have downloaded spyware from the computer maker's update servers and installed it, Kaspersky Lab claims. Someone was able to modify a copy of the Asus Live Update Utility, hosted on the Taiwanese manufacturer's backend systems, and sign it using the company's security certificate, …

RSAPoliticians are, by and large, clueless about technology, and it's going to be up to engineers and other techies to rectify that, even if it means turning down big pay packets for a while. This was the message computer security guru Bruce Schneier gave at last week's RSA Conference in San Francisco, during a keynote address, …

RSAIf you're looking to the US government to save your electronic privacy, don't hold your breath: Europe looks to be the real hero in this fight. That's according to, well, quite a few of you, we reckon, but also crypto-guru Bruce Schneier, who was speaking at 2019's RSA Conference in San Francisco on Wednesday. He warned the …

RSAThe NSA has released its home-grown open-source reverse-engineering suite Ghidra that folks can use to poke around inside applications to hunt down security holes and other bugs. Spoiler alert: it's Apache 2.0-licensed, available for download here, and requires a Java runtime – and the agency swears it hasn't backdoored the …

RSADespite multi-factor authentication being on hand to protect online accounts and other logins from hijackings by miscreants for more than a decade now, people still aren't using it. Today, a pair of academics revealed potential reasons why there is limited uptake. Spoiler alert: it's because, apparently, there isn't enough …

RSAWhile Russian hackers, Kremlin-backed or otherwise, grab the headlines, China remains the biggest cyber-security threat to America, FBI director Christopher Wray warned today. Speaking at the RSA Conference in San Francisco this morning, Wray said the scale of Beijing's government-orchestrated online espionage is greater than …

RSAAdi Shamir, the S in the renowned RSA encryption system, didn't take his usual place on the Cryptographers' Panel at this year's RSA Conference in San Francisco – because he couldn't get a visa from the US government. And he's not alone. Shamir – the 2002 Turing Award co-winner and a member of the US, French, and Israeli …

RSAAs San Francisco gets ready for its annual RSA gabfest Conference, taking place next week, organisers appear to have got the message over inclusivity following last year's fiasco. When the 2018 event was initially announced, many in the infosec industry were shocked that, despite the wealth of talent across all genders in the …

The group trying to crowdfund a plan to colonization of Mars that was declared suicidal has shuttered its shop front. The Mars One project envisaged landing on Mars by 2023: it hoped to shuttle cargo over to the dust world first, followed by members of the public who had submitted successful applications for the one-way trip. …

RoundupHere's a summary of more infosec news beyond what we've already reported this week – enjoy. Beware of pretend Italian plumbers bearing gifts: Mario, the beloved video game plumber with a porn-star mustache, should be treated with caution, according to security shop Bromium. Well, at least images of him. Engineer Matthew Rowen …

National Enquirer publisher American Media Inc (AMI) today denied it blackmailed Amazon head honcho Jeff Bezos by threatening to leak his nude selfies if he didn't play ball. Bezos caused a major stir on Thursday after he published online emails that appeared to show AMI executives threatening to print highly embarrassing …

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos today published an extraordinary open letter claiming National Enquirer publisher American Media Inc (AMI) is trying to blackmail him by threatening to leak purloined pics of the billionaire's "semi-erect manhood." In effect, the zillionaire tech baron has shot back, publicly revealing descriptions of his …

Wells Fargo customers have been unable to access their online bank accounts for more than seven hours today – after smoke knackered one of its data centers. Starting around 6am Pacific Time (2pm UTC), the American bank's online portal and its mobile application have been totally unusable. There are also reports of cards being …

Despite revealing licensing and chip sales fell by 20 per cent in its latest quarter, shares in Qualcomm managed to hold steady in after-hours trading on Wednesday. They were up a tad over two per cent to $51.40 apiece following a bold outlook for the year. "We are pleased to announce a good first quarter, particularly in the …

It has long been known that our Milky Way is on a collision course with the Andromeda galaxy, with the epic prang to take place in four to eight billion years' time. New data suggests we'll hit another galaxy well before that, though, and the super-smash could send our Solar System headfirst on a path out of the Milky Way. Our …