Cybersecurity

U.S. Reps. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., and Blake Farenthold, R-Texas, last week introduced legislation to prevent states from passing laws banning the sale of smartphones with encryption capabilities. The ENCRYPT Act of 2016 provides that a state may not mandate or request that a manufacturer, developer, se...

The U.S. departments of Justice and Homeland Security on Monday announced they were investigating reports that a hacker broke into government computer systems and stole sensitive information about employees at the agencies. The hacker posted stolen information for about 9,000 DHS employees online Su...

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

New Safe Harbor Pact Offers Temporary Port in Storm

Through an eleventh-hour maneuver, the United States and the European Union last week avoided action that could have choked the movement of data between the regions and caused financial harm to U.S. companies. It may be only a temporary respite, however. The problem stems from a European Court of Ju...

Keybase last week announced the alpha release of the Keybase app for the iPhone with a cryptographically secure file mount. Users can write data in an automatically created folder in this format: /keybase/public/username. Files written in the folder are signed automatically and appear as plain text ...

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University on Monday released a report that questions the so-called "going dark" phenomenon. The U.S. government and its surveillance and law enforcement agencies have been calling for an end to encryption because they say it lets terrorists c...

Microsoft on Monday unveiled Project Natick, a research initiative aimed at developing underwater data centers that could be built near coastal cities. The project is still in its infancy, but Microsoft built one test facility last year. Dubbed "Leona Philpot" -- after a character in the Halo video ...

Oracle earlier this week announced its decision to scrap its Java browser plug-in. The plug-in, which has been a frequent target of hackers, won't be included in the next version of the kit for Java developers, JDK 9, which is expected to ship in September. Oracle's action was motivated by browser m...

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

FDA Guidelines Target IoT Medical Device Security

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration last week took a step toward addressing the threat the Internet of Things poses to patients and their data by releasing some proposed guidelines for managing cybersecurity in medical devices. "A growing number of medical devices are designed to be networked to f...

Apple's Safari browser has been crashing on Macs and iOS devices when users launch a search through its address bar, according to reports that surfaced Wednesday. OS X and iOS users worldwide have been affected, according to The Verge, which confirmed the problem on several iOS devices and at least ...

The rise of autonomous war machines is outpacing policies and technological countermeasures, weapons and robotics experts warned last week at the World Economic Forum. Autonomous weaponry potentially is a $20 billion industry that has taken root in 40 countries, said BAE Systems Chairman Roger Carr....

Google Chrome users will get faster Web access soon through the Brotli open source compression algorithm, which has been rolled out to the M49 release of Chrome. That's in Canary -- which is designed for devs -- so it's not clear when Brotli will surface in the Chrome browser. Brotli, which was intr...

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

GM Bug Program Gets Mixed Notices

Two white-hat hackers, Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek, made headlines last year when they demonstrated how they could hijack the control systems of a moving motor vehicle over the Internet. The move got the attention of the auto industry, and last week General Motors put in place a program to enco...

Ukrainian officials earlier this week said they had launched a probe into the source of a cyberattack that targeted a Kiev Airport. The attack may be related to the BlackEnergy malware attacks that recently targeted Ukrainian infrastructure facilities, apparently from Russia. CERT-UA on Monday warne...

LastPass has boosted security for its users after a security researcher alerted the company of a phishing attack he devised to steal users' login and two-factor authentication credentials. Sean Cassidy, CTO of Praesidio, demonstrated the phishing attack, which he calls "LostPass," last week at Shmoo...

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