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Hillary Clinton's lawyer may have allowed hackers to obtain all of the former secretary of state's emails by reviewing the contents of her private server on a laptop tied to Chinese cyberspies, a House Republican charged on Friday. Heather Samuelson was one of the Clinton aides who sifted through the private email server used during Clinton's tenure at the State Department, and helped decide which would be designated as personal messages and which were work-related. That's when the potential Chinese hacks may have taken place, because she used two laptops made by Lenovo, a company with ties to the Chinese...

On the heels of Lenovo’s massive $3.5 million fine for preinstalling adware on laptops without users‘ consent, Hewlett-Packard is jumping in with both feet when it comes to installing spyware on its PCs without the consumer’s permission. According to numerous reports gathered by Computer World, the brand is deploying a telemetry client (a system data that is uploaded by the Connected User Experience and Telemetry component), on customer computers without asking permission. The software, which was first identified on November 15 of this year, is called “HP Touchpoint Analytics Service” and appears to replace the self-managed HP Touchpoint Manager solution....

Once they blur all the distinctions, they can do anything, and justify it in their minds. And that is why the Left is always so violent when they are out of power, and why they control or try to control everything, when they are in power. The problem with all Leftist arguments and debates on any position is that they completely blur any distinction between lawful and lawless, in an effort to confuse, distort, and force their position that since everyone is lawless in some way, no one is, and individualism still means everyone is the responsibility of everyone else,...

Without regard for discussion I've heard about Matt Drudge being a 'chaos' guy... ...twice in the past week I've had Drudge idling in another tab and had my entire browser locked up by adware mimicking a support window. I'm fully-aware it's a scam, having shared this during a recent scam/fraud presentation. I've been visiting Drudge less & less the prior year; time to dump my cache and leave it be. - rant over -

A study from GeoEdge, an ad scanning vendor, reveals that Flash has been wrongly accused as the root cause of today's malvertising campaigns, but in reality, switching to HTML5 ads won't safeguard users from attacks because the vulnerabilities are in the ad platforms and advertising standards themselves. The evidence exists to proclaim Flash as one of today's most vulnerable and insecure software applications. Targeted in cyber-espionage and malvertising campaigns, Flash has gotten a bad reputation, and for a good reason. HTML5 ads are replacing Flash ads in the industry Security researchers have discovered vulnerabilities in Flash almost every month, and...

Ad blocking is something of a contentious issue, but it's one that has been brought to prominence in 2015. The adblockalypse arrived this year as the debate about whether disabling ad blockers was preferable to paying for content. Adblock Plus -- one of the best known ad blockers out there -- recently updated its acceptable ads policy which gives people the option of permitting certain ads to appear in their browser. But a new deal struck with ASUS means that anyone buying a phone or tablet from the Taiwanese company in 2016 will find that ad blocking is baked in...

... So what are the most common types of malware? They fall into two main categories: those that are basically no more than a nuisance, and those that are aimed at getting money from the victim. Perhaps the most common example of nuisance malware is adware. According to Oh, this is typically delivered along with free software or by compromised or malicious web sites. Adware rarely does any real damage, but some examples are hard to remove. The term was once applied to 'advertising supported software.' In return for getting a useful application at no charge, you accept that it...

Microsoft has been pushing Windows 10 for over a year now, and it seems to be "successful."

... Adblock Plus already has a Firefox for Android add-on, though it requires installing two apps and setting them up. The company also has an Android app that blocks in-app ads, but it only works on Wi-Fi connections and has to be sideloaded and hooked up to a proxy. In other words, Adblock Plus isn’t easy to use on mobile. Adblock Browser is supposed to change that. “This is the first time we’ve really gone with a solution that is completely ours,” communications manager Ben Williams told VentureBeat. Adblock Browser wasn’t exactly written from the ground up. The team used...

MacKeeper, a utility and security program for Apple computers, celebrated its fifth birthday in April. But its gift to U.S. consumers who bought the application may be a slice of a $2 million class-action settlement. Released in 2010, MacKeeper has been dogged by accusations that it exaggerates security threats in order to convince customers to buy. Its aggressive marketing has splashed MacKeeper pop-up ads all over the web. The program was originally created by a company called ZeoBIT in Kiev, Ukraine. The country—full of young, smart programmers—has long been a hub for lower-cost software development and outsourcing.

The Chinese PC manufacturer Lenovo has been accused of running a "massive security risk" after researchers found flaws in its software. Three vulnerabilities could be exploited to install malware on users' systems or to hand attackers a measure of control over them, it was reported. Lenovo acknowledged the findings and urged users to download a patch to resolve the issues. The news follows revelations about pre-installed adware on Lenovo systems.

Software security group Kaspesky labs in collaboration with the Dutch police has released a tool which helps to decrypt files locked by Ransomware. Kaspersky Labs has released a decryption tool for files encrypted with CoinVault ransomware. The tool was developed by the Kaspersky lab after the The National High Tech Crime Unit (NHTCU) of the Dutch police handed over the information obtained from a database of CoinVault command-and-control server containing the decryption keys.

The Internet is lighting up with warnings about Superfish, an adware program that came preinstalled on many Lenovo laptops in the past six months. Like a lot of the bloatware that comes on new computers, Superfish exists to help push advertising, not to serve any real consumer need. That would be annoying enough, but Superfish seriously undermines the user's safety, according to many security experts. Superfish is a piece of third-party software that Lenovo installed to, as it says in its apology to consumers, “enhance the shopping experience.” That means it's meant to help advertisers target potential customers. But security...

Do you ever feel like you're being watched? In the past, you could chalk it up to paranoia, close the curtains and get on with your life. Thanks to technology, it's not just your imagination. You really are being watched in your home, at work and everywhere in between. From online advertisers and hackers to the NSA and other government agencies, everyone is trying to keep tabs on you. And things keep getting worse. If you think you know every gadget and organization that's a danger, think again. Here are three things spying on you that you probably didn't know...

Is anyone else seeing certain words become hyperlinked to ads when they post??

So now when I log on to FreeRepublic, I get this really annoying "bent corner" in the upper right hand corner of the window. It kind of pulsates, and if I hover the mouse over it, it suddenly expands to takes over half the screen. Most annoying is that even when it is in the upper corner, it covers whatever is on the screen under it. Then I get this cancer advertisement. And also I get a "Search with Bing" search window. And if I am on FR, and click on a post to open it in a new tab,...

In case you have not heard or have not had this happen to you, a company named LoudMo is promoting a $2.00 pay per install program for its affiliates. This has led to an increase in stealth placement of an advertisment program that give you pop-ups that offer free downloads of FLV Player, Chameleon Tom,BabelFish, or Gateway Content Protection. The adware program is a drive by install that has largly been seen on Facebook and Bit Torrent, but will probably become more widespread. This program can infect all platforms and your anti-virus will not find or get rid of it...

Real Networks, makers of the RealPlayer music and media management application, have launched a new version of their software. RealPlayer SP for Windows is available immediately as a beta download, with a Mac version expected by the year end.

My computer is infested with this crap and I can't get rid of it. None of the free services can solve the problem, and I might even pay for such a service, except that all of them seem to be just folks willingly to take advantage of you and charge you more money, and possibly infect you more. Has anyone here seen this? How should I and anyone else deal with this?

Ads could be targeted at users based on local system data. Microsoft has filed a patent application for a new method of targeting advertising, using information on the contents of a local computer rather than interactions with the web. While most current advertising relies on watching an individual's web browsing habits, selecting the type of ads to show them based on the type of sites they visit, the system proposed by Microsoft would analyse a user's computer to gather data from documents, emails, downloaded media content and even system settings, which would then be used to create a more accurate...