An interesting talk happened recently during the Usenix Enigma security conference in San Francisco. It was held by Rob Joyce, basically the number one hacker of the US. He is the head of NSA's Tailored Access Operations, or TAO. That's pretty much the government's hacking team, tasked with breaking and entering into the systems of its enemies. Or allies, if need be.

This man, who assumed the position of hacker-in-chief just a few months before Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the whole ordeal, spoke about a lot of things which Wired summed up in one smart sentence -- he explained how to keep people like him out of your systems.

UK's businesses have had a bigger chance of being attacked by a malware than those in the US or the Republic of Ireland in December 2015, a new report by security researchers suggest.

According to a report by Check Point, in December 2015, UK was the 99th most attacked country globally, surpassing the US (122nd) and the Republic of Ireland (116th).

Companies increasingly face demands to keep documents in order to satisfy legal and compliance requirements. This can present problems in deciding what to keep but also in keeping up with the latest regulations.

The latest EU/US Data Transfer negotiations for example are causing businesses to re-think their current business processes and data governance strategy in order to address these changes.

A group of MPs has criticized plans put forward in the Draft Investigatoy Powers Bill after consulting with several top technology firms, including the likes of Apple, Facebook and Google.

The Science and Technology committee has slammed the bill as being vague and confusing, issuing a 43-page report outlining its views on key issues such as encryption and data collection.

Endpoint security and digital investigations specialist Guidance Software is launching a new solution to help organizations identify and classify confidential data.

EnForce Risk Manager allows organizations to reduce their surface area of risk, limiting the potential damage from breaches and improving their ability to comply with global data protection rules.

Earlier today we learned that a new API is bringing adblocking to Samsung's own mobile web browser. Adblock Fast was the first to take advantage of the new option and now, hot on its heels, comes the big guns -- Adblock Plus.

Today Samsung is rolling out an Android 6.0 Marshmallow update and once this has been installed, Adblock Plus can also be installed. The extension brings content blocking capabilities to Samsung's own web browser, but you'll have to jump through the relevant hoops to gain the privacy and bandwidth preserving capabilities.

Kaspersky Lab has released its report into DDoS attacks for the fourth quarter of 2015, and it claims that the global reach of attacks shrunk, but the sophistication of those attacks grew.

According to the report, in the fourth quarter of 2015, resources in a total of 69 countries were attacked. In the previous quarter, that number stood at 79. Similar to the previous quarter, in the last three months of 2015 the majority of attacks (94.9 percent) took place in just ten countries, with the US, China and South Korea being the most affected of the bunch.

Living in a technological age where there is a near-fanatical obsession with privacy, a move towards encryption seems to make perfect sense. While there have been calls from some governments to ban encryption and demands for decryption keys to be handed over, there is a drive by companies and online services to try to increase security and privacy with encryption.

But a new report (Don't Panic: Making progress on the encryption debate) from Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society suggests that encryption may be all but pointless when it comes to curtailing surveillance. While governments and surveillance agencies may balk at the idea of people using encryption to 'go dark' online, and many people embrace the idea as a means of increasing their privacy, the report suggests that the task of surveillance is not going to be made impossible, and could be helped by the Internet of Things (IoT).

The BlackEnergy malware first appeared in 2007 as a relatively unsophisticated program that that generated random bots to support Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.

Endpoint security specialist SentinelOne has detected a new variant of the program which was used last month to attack a Ukranian power facility. It also believes that this latest variant may be state-sponsored.

It's possible that you reached this article purely by chance, or you may have Googled 'how to change the default search engine in Microsoft Edge'. However you got here, the fact that you're reading this indicates that you're either interested in Windows 10's Edge, or actively use it -- and this means there's something you need to know.

If you fall into the latter camp and use Edge's InPrivate mode to cover your online tracks, you might want to think about changing your web browser. Edge has already got some stick for its lack of extension support -- "it's coming, it's coming!" Yeah, whatever... so's Christmas -- but now it turns out that InPrivate mode is a privacy nightmare. It is possible to peak behind the curtain and see which sites have been visited when using a browsing mode that should mask this.

Security researchers have discovered a vulnerability in LG G3 smartphones which could be exploited to run arbitrary JavaScript to steal data. The issue has been named Snap, and was discovered by Israeli security firms BugSec and Cynet.

What is particularly concerning about Snap is that it affects the Smart Notice which is installed on all LG G3s by default. By embedding malicious script in a contact, it is possible to use WebView to run server side code via JavaScript. If exploited, the vulnerability could be used to gather information from SD cards, steal data from the likes of WhatsApp, and steal private photos.

Lots of things are said about Flash, and most of them aren't good. The Adobe app has proven to be a security nightmare and constant updates do little to alleviate the problems. Now a new version is on its way and hoping to fix things.

New versions of Flash 21 and Air 21 are in the works, currently these products are codenamed "Sutter". Don't expect any major changes, the company points out it's just incremental advances.

Google's security bounty programs can be quite lucrative for those who discover problems, and the company has just published a report looking back at the security landscape in 2015. Entitled Google Security Rewards - 2015 Year in Review, the report reveals the financial rewards that have been paid out in the last 12 months.

In all, Google has paid out more than $2 million to more than 300 people, but Sanmay Ved is probably one of the more interesting reward recipients. He's the guy who -- very briefly -- managed to buy Google.com before having it taken off his hands. Google offered him a $6,006.13 reward, but there's a little more to the story.

The largest scale of internet attacks enlist thousands or tens of thousands of previously hacked computers to simultaneously attack and overwhelm the websites and e-commerce services of selected victims.

Whilst there is often media coverage of the victim organizations affected, and sometimes discussion about the motivation of the attackers, there is rarely any awareness by those computer owners that are participating in attacks and facilitating online crime.

Employers are offering salaries up by 14 percent on average for IT security specialists in the light of the growing threat posed by cyber crime.

A Global Salary Survey by UK specialist recruitment company Robert Walters also sees salaries for developers increasing as major employers look to overhaul their online presence.