Cybersecurity

U.S. federal CIO Tony Scott on Monday sent a memo to the heads of executive departments and agencies requiring that all publicly accessible federal websites and Web services use HTTPS -- "the strongest privacy and integrity protection currently available for public Web connections." Some federal web...

BitTorrent's Bleep, a secure peer-to-peer messaging service, last month reached the end of its third trimester in alpha testing, and an official version became available for iOS, Android, OS X and PC. The official release is the first to reach iOS. Bleep's Whisper feature enables ephemeral messaging...

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

Google's Android Permissions Get Granular

Google appears to be heeding warnings of security experts who say Android users need better control over what apps do with information from their phones. At I/O, its worldwide shindig for developers held last week, the company announced that the next version of its mobile operating system, Android M...

There's a new twist in the way feds are seeking to penalize bad actors for making and distributing software used in crimes, suggest recent arrests. "There's a more concerted campaign to go after go after those folks who are distributing in the underground," said Tom Kellermann, chief cybersecurity o...

The U.S. Senate on Tuesday voted to close debate on the USA Freedom Act, a measure that would prohibit the NSA from the indiscriminate collection Americans' phone call data. The bill already has passed in the House. However, the brawling over the bill is not quite over. The Senate has yet to address...

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

No Wrongdoing at NCIS, Says Defense Watchdog

The U.S. Department of Defense's Inspector General has rejected allegations that the Naval Criminal Investigative Service engaged in questionable domestic intelligence activity. The finding concluded a DoD IG probe spurred by allegations that NCIS was making available to military intelligence agenci...

Americans have been spied on by their own government for far longer than most realized, it turns out, and the United States National Security Agency's surveillance activities are just the tip of the iceberg. The FBI, which repeatedly has expressed dismay at Google and Apple securing their mobile OSe...

The United States and its leading Western allies, known as the "Five Eyes," reportedly planned to hack into smartphones through their links to Google and Samsung's app stores. They wanted to infect apps with spyware and find ways to send misinformation to targets, according to documents released ...

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

Venom Less Toxic Than Heartbleed

It was a little over a year ago that the Heartbleed bug shocked the Internet with its potential for mischief. Now another flaw in open source code has sent network administrators into damage control mode. The bug, called "Venom" for "Virtualized Environment Neglected Operations Manipulation," allows...

A security researcher who made headlines last month for bragging he'd hacked into a passenger jet's internal computer systems while in flight appears to have performed the act more than a dozen times over a three-year period. Chris Roberts, founder and CTO of One World Labs, told FBI investigators e...

FireEye and Microsoft have scotched a scheme by a group of cybercriminals based in China to use an IT pro forum to hide malicious activity, according to a report released Thursday. The Chinese gang known as "APT17" devised the scheme, which uses forum pages and profiles on Microsoft's TechNet, to co...

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

Big Data Analytics Fights Insider Threats

Cyberdefenders for years have adopted Fort Apache strategies to protect their networks. Strong perimeters could prevent attackers from reaching precious data, they reasoned. As technology marched on, however, the idea of an impermeable wall became as quaint as the Maginot Line on the eve of World Wa...

Drive-by attacks on the Internet are a particularly pernicious form of online threat, especially for individual Web surfers. On the corporate level, though, a company with good endpoint protection software can foil the malicious practice. A drive-by occurs when an infected website automatically down...

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

Apple Watch Could Be a Password Alternative

With password tolerance levels at an all time low, alternatives to the pesky and insecure authenticators are beginning to abound. One of those alternatives could be the Apple Watch. Even before Apple's latest gadget began shipping last week, MicroStrategy announced it was extending its Usher enterpr...

Have you ever heard of the Cullinan diamond? If you haven't, it was the largest diamond ever discovered: a 3106 carat diamond found in 1905 in South Africa. What's interesting about the Cullinan diamond isn't so much the discovery of the stone itself but what happened afterward: specifically, the cu...

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