TeslaCrypt ransomware now impossible to crack, researchers say

The latest version of the TeslaCrypt ransomware has tidied up a weakness in previous versions that in some cases allowed victims to recover their files without paying a ransom.

Cisco's Talos research group found that TeslaCrypt 3.0.1 has improved its implementation of a cryptographic algorithm making it impossible now to decrypt files.

"We can not say it loud and often enough, ransomware has become the black plague of the internet," wrote Andrea Allievi and Holger Unterbrink, both security researchers with Cisco, in a blog post on Wednesday. "The adversaries are modifying and improving it in every version."

Anonymous Declares Total War on Donald Trump, Again (2016)

Anonymous, the group known for cyber-attacks on government and corporate websites, has a new target: GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump.



Trump has been targeted because according to the masked activist, "your inconsistent and hateful campaign has not only shocked the United States America, you have shocked the entire planet with your appalling actions and ideas."

The collective has already posted unverified personal information about Trump and staff, including his social security number.



This not the first time the hacktivist group has gone after Trump, according to The Guardian. It reports that at the end of 2015 it shut down his website for Trump Tower in New York City after his call to ban Muslims from entering the U.S.

MobiSocial: A New privacy-based social network

With rising public interest in what developers refer to as the “privacy economy,” researchers from the MobiSocial Lab at the Stanford School of Engineering have announced at SXSW a new type of social network, called Omlet that allows users to control their own personal data.

Omlet “shields users from the monetization of their personal lives by giving them total and unquestioned control of their personal data,” according to Monica Lam, a professor of computer science at Stanford and founder of the MobiSocial lab and a startup by the same name, MobiSocial. Omlet’s creators are heralding the release as the first venture of what they call the “privacy economy.”