Privacy

Somewhere in a small city in south central Russia, a group of men in their twenties have got away with what some are describing as one of the biggest cyber-heists in history.

Since a recent claim researchers could “uncloak” Tor users for less than $3,000, there has been a flurry of activity in the “anonymous” online service - but in the form of new adverts, new markets, and new security.

After a technical error on a Mozilla database, thousands of email addresses and encrypted passwords were exposed for nearly a month - leaving 78,000 Mozilla app developers vulnerable to hackers.

Users of the online privacy service Tor - designed to allow users to access hidden sites anonymously - may have been unmasked after an attack lasting five months, crafted to de-anonymise traffic on the service.

If intelligence and law enforcement agencies have a genuine need to spy upon some communications then it should not be via a backdoor that could put millions of innocent, law-abiding users at risk.

The developers of the Tor online privacy service are fixing a weakness which could have exposed the identities of hundreds of thousands of users of sites around the world.

A new project aims to protect homes and small businesses from the security failings of Wi-Fi routers, a problem which has repeatedly hit the headlines over the past year.

A new kind of web tracking tool bypasses the protections privacy-conscious web users rely on and is already being used to track users across thousands of sites - without users being aware of it.

New facial recognition technology which can instantly identify people from any digital image in seconds is being trialled in the UK for the first time.