The 25 Worst Passwords of 2015

Password management company SplashData released its annual round-up of the worst passwords of 2015. The report is based on more than 2 million passwords that leaked online during the year. One trend the company found in 2015 is that while users are coming up with longer passwords, they are simple and not random. Here’s Splashdata’s complete list of the 25 worst passwords for 2015, with their ranking from 2014...

23,000 US government emails were dumped on the Dark Web and no one knows where they came from

Last week the US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) owned up to being breached by hackers. No concrete facts have surfaced since, and the extent of the hack’s damage remains unclear. We just know it’s worse than anyone is willing to say. Now databases containing private federal-employee data are being dumped on the Dark Web. One such database includes over 23,000 government email addresses, reports...

Programmer Site GitHub Says It’s Victim of Service-Denial Attack

(Bloomberg) — GitHub Inc., a U.S. website designed for computer programmers, has been under attack since Thursday in what may be an attempt by China to disrupt efforts to circumvent that country’s censorship policies. The San Francisco-based service, which helps programmers and tech companies share ideas for software development, has experienced its biggest-ever distributed denial of service attack, the...

How to Secure Mobile Messaging App Features

When you send a text or MMS from your phone the normal way, you can’t control what happens to the information once it leaves your device. Wireless carriers are required to save messages for a certain length of time to assist authorities in criminal investigations. The recipient can save the message indefinitely, or send it to someone else without your knowledge or permission. That means those risqué photos, videos...

Advantage Dental of Redmond hacked; 151,000 patients affected

REDMOND — A company with more than 30 dental clinics serving low-income people in Oregon says it’s been hacked, and the intruders got Social Security numbers and other personal information, but not treatment or financial data. Redmond-based Advantage Dental is notifying patients and paying for an identity-theft monitoring service, The Bulletin newspaper of Bend reported Tuesday. An intruder breached its...