A coalition of shipping industry associations has published The Guidelines on
Cyber Security Onboard Ships, laying out best practices for the giant ships that ply the seas, and revealing that these behemoths are routinely infected with worms, ransomware, and malware spread by infected USB devices.

BadUSB is bad news: malware that targets the firmware in your USB port's embedded system, bypassing the OS, antivirus software and other countermeasures.

Last October, Bloomberg published what seemed to be the tech story of the year: a claim that Supermicro, the leading supplier of servers to clients from the Pentagon and Congress to Amazon, Apple and NASA, had been targeted by Chinese spies who'd inserted devastating, virtually undetectable hardware backdoors into their motherboards by subverting a small subcontractor in China.

Gwern Branwen asks the deceptively simple question "How many computers are in your computer?"

Computers that are isolated from the internet and local networks are said to be "airgapped," and it's considered a best practice for securing extremely sensitive systems.

If the Trump administration makes good on its promise to pack all potentially explosive laptops together in a blast-multiplying steel case in the plane's hold, it will be good news for would-be bombers — and bad news for your data security.

After a redditor claimed to have gotten a computer virus from factory-installed malware on an e-cig charger, the Guardian reported out the story and concluded that it's possible.

Security experts have been haunted by the prospect of unpatchable, potent, fundamental bug in USB devices; the tension only heightened when sourcecode for an exploit went live last week.

Last summer's Black Hat presentation on "Badusb" by Karsten Nohl alerted the world to the possibility that malware could be spread undetectably by exploiting the reprogrammable firmware in USB devices — now, a second set of researchers have released the code to let anyone try it out for themselves.