Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks with extortion demands for payments in Bitcoin cryptocurrency to stop them are becoming more and more popular in 2015, but what happens if you give in and pay the ransom? Switzerland-based email service provider ProntonMail (Proton Technologies AG) has found out the hard way that paying the ransom doesn’t ...

Chinese eCommerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. has acquired Youku Tudou, Inc., China’s version of YouTube, for around $3.9 billion. Alibaba already owned shares in the company prior to acquisition, with The Wall Street Journal reporting that the deal priced the company at $4.4 billion. Under the deal Alibaba will pay $27.60 an American depository ...

The price of Bitcoin has been on a rollercoaster ride this week with the cryptocurrency hitting a 12 month high of $490 until settling back down to its current price (at the time of writing) of $360. We’ve discussed the possible reasons behind the Bitcoin price rise in a previous post, but one of the ...

Despite the ongoing embrace of Bitcoin by investors and even some banks in the past year, not everyone in the fiat money financial industry has gotten on board yet, and this week was no exception. Leading the pack was J.P. Morgan Chase Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimons who predicted at the Fortune Global Forum, like ...

Microsoft has acquired Mobile Data Labs, Inc., the company behind the smart mileage tracking app MilesIQ for an undisclosed sum. Founded in 2012, MilesIQ offers a service that claims to take the hassle out of mileage tracking with a mobile app that catches drives automatically and syncs them to the cloud, “dramatically simplifying the process ...

Social networking giant Facebook, Inc. has continued its ongoing push to keep users on the site with a new service that delivers inline music support. Called “Music Stories,” the new feature allows users to embed a 30 second preview of a shared song or album they wish to share from either Apple Music or Spotify ...

Application security firm Checkmarx, Inc. have released a new mobile security report that throws a common misconception about mobile security on its head. The State of Mobile Application Security 2014-2015 report, published in conjunction with Appsec Labs, tested hundreds of mobile applications of all types including banking, utilities, retail, gaming and even security oriented applications for ...

Photo sharing and live video streaming app maker 17 Media, LLC has raised $10 million Series A in a round that included Infinity Venture Partners and Prometheus Capital. Co-founded by Taiwanese rapper-turned-entrepreneur Jeff Huang and app designer Popo Chen, the 17 App offers an interesting combination of photo sharing (a la Instagram) and video streaming, ...

Thieves in Atlanta, Georgia may have made history this week by being the first to steal a Bitcoin ATM in the United States. The two hooded bandits, one armed with a handgun, entered the Village Smoke Shop on Juniper Street late in the evening Tuesday and immediately approached the Lamassu Bitcoin ATM with one of ...

vBulletin Solutions, Inc. has issued an urgent reset of the passwords for its over 300,000 accounts following a breach by hackers that exposed the IDs of hundreds of thousands of users. The hacker who claimed responsibility for the hack used a zero-day vulnerability to access the site, with mixed reports claiming that at least for ...