Security

Undeterred by its battle to convince Congress to pass the cybersecurity legislation it proposed last May, the White House on Thursday unveiled a proposal for an online consumer privacy bill of rights. This is part of a blueprint to improve consumer privacy protection in the United States. The other ...

The United States National Security Agency has cautioned that the Anonymous hacker community might be able to cause a limited power outage through a cyberattack, according to a recent report. NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander has warned of the potential attack during meetings at the White House and ...

Google is tracking users of the Internet Explorer Web browser without their knowledge, Microsoft has asserted. After news emerged last week that Google had bypassed the privacy settings of Apple's Safari browser, Microsoft researchers began looking into whether the search giant was also playing fast...

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

The Great Google Cookie Caper

Google's privacy practices came under fire again last week for undermining the privacy practices of someone else. Namely, Apple. Apple is one of the few browser makers that turns off by default a website's ability to push third-party cookies to a Web surfer. Cookies can perform a valuable service to...

Anonymous Acts Out Over ACTA

Anonymous has struck again -- this time taking down the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's consumer protection business center website as well as one touting National Consumer Protection Week. In their place was a German language video mocking ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. The FTC pr...

Google is one of four online advertising companies that have sneaked around the privacy settings in Apple's Safari Web browser to track user activity, according to research from Stanford University graduate student Jonathan Mayer. All four surreptitiously submitted a Web form and placed trackable co...

Former Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz is offering caregivers a social networking service designed to be free of confusing privacy policies and invasive advertising. Social networking is far older than Facebook, MySpace or even Friendster, according to Schwartz, CareZone founder and CEO. Fami...

Public key cryptography, a system used to secure online traffic, carries a significant flaw, a group of European and American mathematicians and cryptographers has found. Public key cryptography requires the sender and the receiver of a message to each have a digital key to encrypt and decrypt it, r...

A bipartisan group of senators has proposed legislation that would give the United States Department of Homeland Security increased power over critical IT infrastructure owned by the private sector. The Cybersecurity Act of 2012 was introduced in the Senate Tuesday by Senator Joseph Lieberman, chair...

Google Zips Up Wallet

In the wake of two security flaws reported in its Google Wallet mobile payment system last week, Google has clamped down on the system and is scrambling to come up with a fix. One of the two flaws affects only rooted devices. But it's the second that troubles Google more. That flaw lets anyone oper...

Malicious hackers attacked Microsoft's India online retail store on Sunday evening, publishing obscured screenshots that appeared to contain personal user information. A Chinese hacker group known as "Evil Shadow Team" took responsibility for the breach, posting a message on Microsoft's website stat...

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

Cracking Open Google Wallet

Mobile shopping received a setback last week when security researchers discovered flaws in Google Wallet that could potentially expose its PIN to enterprising hackers. When Google introduced its wallet, it bragged that it was secure because transaction information was stored in a "secure element" in...

News of two security flaws in Google Wallet, which lets smartphone owners pay for purchases through the devices, has caused some concern about the nascent mobile payment product. One works on rooted devices; the other works on any smartphone with the Google Wallet capability. All it needs is for som...

Politics, rather than good old-fashioned theft, is increasingly the motivation of malicious hackers who attack websites using DDoS techniques. Arbor Networks has found that ideological hacktivism was the motivation behind most distributed denial of service attacks in 2011. Attacks for profit or comp...

A hacker who was negotiating a ransom for stolen source code to a Symantec product released the data via peer-to-peer networks on Tuesday after negotiations fell through. The code is for security vendor Symantec's pcAnywhere remote access software. Symantec had last month warned pcAnywhere users to ...

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