LED signs could soon hide secret messages

From free decoder rings hidden in our cereal and Enigma machines used during world war two to the end-to-end encryption of iMessage, the sending and receiving of secret messages has always been a part of our daily lives. Thanks to technology, apps an...

This cute Def Con badge beckons you to hack it

At previous Def Cons I wrote about the unofficial badges and the culture surrounding those pieces of technology. This year I was determined to move past my infatuation with blinking lights and colorful PCBs (printed circuit boards). Then I saw the Ma...

Dozens of kids hack election site replicas in just minutes

The Def Con hacker conference has been demonstrating how vulnerable voting machines are to hacks through its Voting Village, wherein adults are given the chance to compromise various models of voting devices. But this year, Def Con also let kids get...

Android exploit targeted apps’ shoddy use of external storage

Many mobile security flaws revolve around obvious avenues like websites or deep, operating system-level exploits. The security team at Check Point, however, has discovered another path: apps that make poor use of external storage like SD cards. Whi...

Machine learning can ‘fingerprint’ programmers

Programmers tend to have their own distinct styles, but it's not really feasible to pore over many lines of code looking for telltale cues about a program's author. Now, that might not be necessary. Researchers have developed a machine learning syste...