More than 40% of global log-in attempts are malicious thanks to bot-driven credential stuffing attacks, according to the latest report from Akamai.

The stats chime with similar data from fraud prevention specialist ThreatMetrix, which claimed in its latest Cybercrime report for Q4 2017 that there were 34 million bot attacks during the peak festive shopping period, rising to 800 million for the quarter.

Google just announced a plan to “modernize” email with its Accelerated Mobile Pages platform, allowing “engaging, interactive, and actionable email experiences.”

“AMP started as an effort to help publishers, but as its capabilities have expanded over time, it’s now one of the best ways to build rich webpages,” it writes in the blog post announcing the AMP for Gmail test.

"We always talk about the ease of use, and not impacting user experience, etc, but it turns out that when it comes to their financial accounts...people actually would go the extra mile and will use extra security," Kessem said.

"They understand that there's something they can do to prevent it, and they need to secure their accounts," she said.

A group of child advocates is sounding an alarm about Messenger Kids, saying young people should be shielded from these types of services until they're older.

Facebook says it designed Messenger Kids to help parents and children chat in a safe way and give parents control of their kids' contacts and interactions.

The study also revealed user attitudes about biometric authentication technologies. 44 percent or respondents identified fingerprint biometrics as the most secure method of authentication. In contrast, only 27 percent rated passwords as being the most secure from of authentication.

"The study results show that millennials place higher value on convenience and memorizing dozens of new, complex, unique passwords is cumbersome, especially as these users are likely to have a growing number of accounts that require such passwords."

It is alleged that others who wanted to increase their follower count, including actors, entrepreneurs and political commentators, could then pay to be followed by the bots.

On social media, high follower accounts boost influence, which can impact public opinion, or bring advantages, such as job offers or sponsorship deals, to account holders.

"Devumi has helped over 200,000 businesses, celebrities, musicians, YouTubers and other pros gain more exposure and make a big impact to their audience," says its website.

You might not think that factory industrial controls would be directly accessible from the Internet. But a quick survey of devices open on the network port mentioned in the advisory (TCP port 102) using the Shodan search engine revealed over 1,000 Siemens devices directly accessible on the Internet (plus a certain number of honeypots set up to detect attacks).

Ironically, the credential-stealing vulnerability may not even be an issue in some cases, because a substantial number of the devices surveyed in the Shodan search had no authentication configured at all.

Generally, websites with fast loading pages will get a higher ranking in search results than those of the same quality content but with slower page speeds. Google will apply the speed-ranking factor to all mobile pages regardless of the technology used to build the page.

More recently, the company began rolling out mobile-first indexing under which it has begun using the mobile version of a website's content first when indexing pages for search. Prior to the shift, Google's search engine crawlers looked at the desktop content first for site indexing.

HTML5 is a boon for unscrupulous web advertising networks, which can use the markup language's features to build up detailed fingerprints of individual netizens without their knowledge or consent.

But what’s needed is a fundamental rethink, with features that ensure tracking-free browsing, just as private browsing doesn’t record session data on a local workstation. Some kind of warning, similar to the HTTPS icon, would also be useful.

The social network will use its analytics to publish on an automated basis what it assumes its users would rather see; for example, a post about a friend’s trip to Italy will get preferential treatment over, say, a coupon from The Gap or a Wall Street Journal news item about a change in U.S. immigration policy.

Thus, the social network is now more heavily pre-editing the information it presents to you. It has done this previously but ranked news items from businesses, brands and media outlets in a more evenly distributed fashion with items from friends and family members.