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The White House has backed away from its push for mandatory cybersecurity standards in favor of an approach that would combine voluntary measures with incentives for companies to comply with them. That approach reflects recognition of the political reality of a divided Congress that makes mandated standards difficult to push through, and a belief that an executive order President Obama signed in February could improve companies’ cybersecurity.

Security researchers have identified 32 separate apps on Google Play that harboured a bug called BadNews. On infected phones, BadNews stole cash by racking up charges from sending premium rate text messages.

Could this be the deadliest smartphone app ever? A German security consultant, who's also a commercial pilot, has demonstrated tools he says could be used to hijack an airplane remotely, using just an Android phone. Speaking at the Hack in the Box security summit in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, Hugo Teso said Wednesday that he spent three years developing SIMON, a framework of malicious code that could be used to attack and exploit airline security software, and an Android app to run it that he calls PlaneSploit.

Tens of millions of online note-takers found themselves worrying about their security Monday, as questions remained about a weekend hack of Evernote.

Hackers targeted dozens of computer systems at government agencies across Europe in a series of attacks that exploited a recently discovered security flaw in Adobe Systems Inc's software, security researchers reported on Wednesday.

Mac computers have stopped running programs written using the Java programming language in their browsers, as Apple blocked it because of security problems.

Around 11 a.m. on New Year’s Eve day, a Facebook friend in India sent an urgent message: My website had been hacked. Sure enough, when I went to my site and right-clicked my mouse to view the “source code” (the gibberish that shows what’s going on behind the scenes), I discovered that in addition to being a journalist and social media teacher, I was now also a purveyor of erectile dysfunction products.

Skype says it has resolved a flaw with its password reset tool that could be used to hijack users' accounts on the chat tool.

China rejected on Tuesday as "groundless" U.S. accusations that two top Chinese telecoms equipment makers posed a security risk. The U.S. House of Representatives' Intelligence Committee urged American companies on Monday to stop doing business with Huawei Technologies Co Ltd and ZTE Corp. , warning that China could use equipment made by the companies to spy on certain communications and threaten vital systems through computerized links.

When Mark Zuckerberg wrote about creating a hacker-friendly company in the letter attached to Facebook’s IPO filing last year, he meant it–in more ways that one. Facebook has paid out more than $300,000 to hackers that reveal bugs in the site and help to fix them, according to Ryan McGeehan, the head of Facebook’s security response team. In a post to questions-and-answers site Quora earlier this month, McGeehan wrote that the company’s bug bounty program, which typically pays hackers around $1,000 for each vulnerability they disclose to Facebook’s security team, has paid out rewards to 131 researchers in 27 countries since it launched in July of last year, and has even hired one of those hackers as a summer intern.