A security researcher created a $1,500 cell phone base station kit (including a laptop and two RF antennas) that tricks cell phones into routing their outbound calls through his device, allowing someone to intercept even encrypted calls (non Gold Lock) in the clear. Most of the price is for the laptop he used to operate [...]

India’s Department of Telecommunications has been asked by the government to serve a notice to Skype and Research In Motion to ensure that their email and other data services comply with formats that can be read by security and intelligence agencies, or face a ban in India if they do not comply within 15 days. [...]

The New Yorker is featuring a long and detailed profile of Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks. From this Wired’s Threat Level pulls out one salient detail: that Wikileaks’ initial scoop came from documents intercepted from Tor exit routers. The eavesdropping was pulled off by a Wikileaks activist — neither the New Yorker nor Wired knows [...]

Yesterday, it was announced that physicists at the University of Toronto in Canada have successfully attacked a commercial quantum cryptography system for the first time in history. Quantum cryptography was considered by some to be unbreakable, however, like many other security systems, the technology was built making various assumptions, and in the real-world not all [...]

Researchers are poking holes in the chain of trust for SSL certificates which protect sensitive data. According to these hypothesized attacks, governments could compel certificate authorities to give them phony certificates that are signed by the CA, which are then used to perform man in the middle attacks. They point out that Verisign already makes [...]

On March 8, a security company  employee plugged a newly ordered HTC Magic phone from Vodafone into a Windows computer, where it triggered an alert from the antivirus software. Further inspection of the phone found the device’s 8GB microSD memory card was infected with a client for the now-defunct Mariposa botnet, the Conficker worm, and [...]

We would like to announce our latest Gold Lock 3G version for Nokia phones – now with the ability to send encrypted SMS messages even when the phone is not connected to the internet. Download the latest versions simply by browsing from your Nokia phone to the following URL: “www.gold-lock.com/symbian”. Sending and receiving an encrypted [...]

Iran’s police chief has warned opposition supporters against using SMS text messages and e-mails to organize antigovernment rallies. Ismail Ahmadi Moghaddam said spreading word of such demonstrations was a crime that carried a “heavy penalty.” Cell-phone and e-mail messages emerged as a key form of communication for Iran’s opposition in the unrest that erupted in [...]

A group of cryptographers has developed a new attack that has broken Kasumi, the encryption algorithm used to secure traffic on 3G GSM wireless networks. The technique enables them to recover a full key by using a tactic known as a related-key attack, but experts say it is not the end of the world for [...]

USB Flash drives with hardware based AES 256-bit encryption manufactured by Kingston, SanDisk and Verbatim have reportedly been cracked. These drives are advertised to meet security standards suitable for use with sensitive US Government data (unclassified, of course) as emphasized by the FIPS 140-2 Level 2 certificate issued by the US National Institute of Standards [...]