In 2015, the FDA issued warnings about a pair of infusion pumps – “smart” medical devices that had demonstrated security flaws. It was the first time in history that security researchers demonstrated that a hacker could take control of these life-saving devices remotely and use them to kill the patients they were protecting.

The spinning disk hard drive has been the reigning king of storage for almost as long as we’ve had desktop computers.

All things end, though, and the HDD’s reign is officially coming to a close. It’s getting increasingly difficult to justify springing for an old-style hard drive when you can buy an SSD or a hybrid drive instead.

CVE Details is a website that tracks bugs in various software systems, aggregating the data and issuing an “award” for the software that has the most reported bugs in any given year.

This year, Android topped the list by a wide margin, with a staggering 523 reported security issues.

Privacy has been on the endangered species list for a while now, but the growing number of smart devices in people’s homes is putting an increasing amount of pressure on what little privacy remains.

Last year, electronics giant Samsung came under fire when it was revealed that its smart TVs recorded everything you said when you were within twenty feet or so of your television.

Darren Cauthon, a software developer, got a Christmas present this year he didn’t ask for and didn’t want.

On Christmas day, his family downloaded and installed an app on their Android-based LG Smart TV and wound up getting a ransomware infection.

A very strange and disturbing case of the theft of protected health information has come from the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). The department recently reported on an incident that occurred in October 2015, in which a former psychiatric patient was able to access non-confidential information from a computer located in the hospital’s library.

Microsoft has been hard at work experimenting with various ways to optimize performance. One of the most recent experiments to come to light is the advent of “Windows Gaming Mode.”

Slated to be released to Windows Insiders users in January of this year, and the rest of the installed base sometime in the spring, the new mode causes Windows 10 users to behave a lot like an X-box.

File this one away under “it should go without saying, but…”

One of the most amazing and disheartening aspects of internet use is that after all this time, a shocking number of people are still getting taken in by the lure of installing a “crack” for popular software.

The government is taking a more active hand in establishing security protocols for at least one part of the Internet of Things. Specifically, new guidelines are being drafted by the FDA to set minimum security standards for ‘smart’ medical devices.

Hardly a week goes by that a new exploit or attack vector doesn’t come to light that your IT staff has to try to defend against.

The most recent threat comes from a vulnerability in the PHP Mailer Library, which is code used by most of the websites in existence today to help manage the sending of emails.