Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at Finnish security company F-Secure, spoke to The Reg at the launch of Sense, a consumer firewall device that aims to "secure your connected things". Hypponen says IoT is unavoidable. "If it uses electricity, it will become a computer. If it uses electricity, it will be online. In future …

The Internet of Things got just a lot worse, with F-Secure unravelling eighteen vulnerabilities in IP cameras from Chinese vendor Foscam. The company complains that after several months, “no fixes have been issued” – in other words, situation normal in IoT-land. The bugs are spread far and wide, because while only two …

European customer-premises equipment (CPE) kit-maker Inteno has said it isn't going to patch a hole that has been sitting in some of its routers for the last nine months, saying it's not the firm's problem. That's bad news if a European carrier, Inteno's key customers, dropped one of the problematic devices into your home. …

Over the last few years there has been an explosion in ransomware attacks, and the latest analysis shows the crooks are banking some serious Bitcoin. An analysis by F-Secure's chief research officer Mikko Hyppönen of a Bitcoin wallet used by Cryptolocker shows the operators are moving millions of dollars of virtual currency …

A Faraday cage, originally commissioned and assembled 10 years ago as a means to allow Finnish security firm F-Secure to test Bluetooth-based mobile malware, is still finding productive work even though the type of malware that spawned its creation is long dead. The copper-lined, 4-by-3 metre enclosure is still used for mobile …

F-Secure is looking to go that extra mile in consumer security with the launch of an anti-hacker appliance for the Internet of Things. The device, dubbed SENSE, works as a secure gateway, policing traffic to devices that might be insecure and generating alerts. For example, it will warn consumers if their router is running …

Security researchers have shone the spotlight on an ongoing campaign by Russian cyberspies to snoop on western governments and NGOs, as well as targets in Georgia, using the Dukes malware. The Dukes group of attackers employ a family of unique malware toolsets used to steal information by infiltrating computer networks, before …

Export control screening for individuals hoping to purchase everyday consumer technologies extends beyond just antivirus software downloads, according to several sources contacted by The Register. Those who share the name of someone on a blacklist have to go through secondary screening (a bureaucratic process generally …

The well-understood risk of insecure, public Wi-Fi networks has been graphically illustrated with demonstration hacks against three prominent UK politicians. The pen-testing style experiment demonstrates the ease with which email, finance and social networking details can be stolen while using free Wi-Fi in cafes, hotels and …

Facebook, which earlier this year started partnering with F-Secure and Trend Micro for malware detection, has added Slovak vendor ESET to its suite of security products. The previous tie-ups, detailed here, are worth noting to put the new partnership in context. F-Secure and Trend both pointed Facebook users at their free …

Ready to enjoy the Thanksgiving holiday? Can't wait to open your advent calendar? Not so fast – there's one more patch to install before the month is over. Adobe has posted an update for its Flash plugin, version 15.0.0.239, to address a critical remote-code-execution vulnerability. This will be the Photoshop giant's second …

There has been growing disquiet over Apple's desktop search app Spotlight, which sends queries for things back to the company's servers to process. Spotlight phones home in OS X Yosemite, version 10.10, and it is enabled by default: it can be switched off, but with Apple insisting that it now takes people's privacy seriously, …

Consumers carelessly use public Wi-Fi without regard for their personal privacy, even blithely agreeing to surrender their first born in exchange for the opportunity to check their emails without paying. That's according to an experiment which involved setting up a "poisoned" Wi-Fi hotspot. Unsuspecting users who connected to …

Infosec bods are warning of new malware spreading through game-streaming web hit Twitch: the software nasty subverts Steam accounts to drain player's wallets, and could take away all their precious weaponry. eskimo I've got 99 problems but a Twitch ain't one The malware spreads by bombarding users of Twitch's chat feature …

Security firm F-Secure has released a tool to decrypt data scrambled by the Synolocker malware – assuming you've obtained the decryption key from the crooks. Synolocker is ransomware that attacks NAS devices made by Synology. Those infected by the software find their data is encrypted, and receive an invitation to purchase a …

Security researchers have uncovered a link between a Trojan and a recently discovered cyber-espionage tool which suggests cyber-spies behind recent attacks on Western governments cut their teeth writing conventional Trojans. CosmicDuke combines elements from the Cosmu Trojan and a backdoor known as MiniDuke, previously …

Security researchers have uncovered a series of Trojan-based attacks which have infiltrated several targets by infecting industrial control system software from the makers of SCADA and ICS systems. The majority of the victims are located in Europe, though at the time of writing at least one US firm's compromised gear appears …

TrustyCon A surprising number of governments are now deploying their own custom malware – and the end result could be chaos for the rest of us, F-Secure's malware chief Mikko Hyppönen told the TrustyCon conference in San Francisco on Thursday. "Governments writing viruses: today we sort of take that for granted but 10 years ago that …