Security

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

Malware in the Office, in the Sky and on the Phone

October is National Cybersecurity Awareness Month, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and various federal agencies are ringing it in with a couple of slaps to the head and a kick or two to the shins. First, the Government Accountability Office issued a report that stated 24 major...

Adolescents growing up in a digital, highly mobile world are increasingly coming to grips with questions of ethics and behavior, with mixed results. On the one hand, cyberpranking and cyberharrassment have increased. On the other, more kids are willing to intervene when they see cyberharrassment. Fo...

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

Facebook Enlists Websense for Neighborhood Watch

Facebook, long a darling of cybercriminals looking to lure in unsuspecting cybersocializers, has partnered with content security vendor Websense to help protect members from links that lead to malware and malicious sites. That may prove good news to corporations, where many IT managers consider empl...

Facebook's Timeline Tension

Facebook's Timeline feature has been a focus of controversy since it was announced by CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the company's f8 developers' conference last month in San Francisco. Privacy advocates immediately raised concerns. A coalition of 10 privacy and consumer groups has written to the Federal Tr...

A recently revealed U.S. Department of Justice document has provided details about what kind of usage information is retained by the nation's largest mobile phone providers, as well as how long they retain it. In some cases, information is stored for many years. The document, a single-paged memo, wa...

The Kindle Fire made its big debut this week as Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos introduced the tablet along with other new members of the Kindle family on Wednesday. The Fire's been touted as a challenger to the Apple iPad, but the real threat to Apple's iconic tablet may come from the Silk browser that will ...

Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., and Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, co-chairmen of the Congressional Bi-Partisan Privacy Caucus, have sent a letter to Joe Leibowitz, chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, addressing Facebook's use of cookies to gather information from members who surf the 905,000 sites that d...

EXPERT ADVICE

Next-Gen Firewalls Make Old Arguments New Again

The last few years have brought us arguably the most significant change in firewall technology in decades. Ever since "stateful inspection" was introduced by Check Point in the late 1990s, firewall administrators and information security officers have been defining security policies based primarily ...

The problem with hitching your wagon to a shooting star, as online music service Spotify is beginning to discover, is that sometimes you can get burned. Spotify is one of several online music services that have teamed up with Facebook recently and was singled out by the social networking giant at it...

Facebook's most recent API allows applications to post status updates to a user's wall without their intervention. This is part of Facebook Instant and is known as frictionless sharing. This means users no longer have to proactively decide to share an item, and there's a risk that something could be...

The United States Department of Defense is reportedly extending its Defense Industrial Base Cyber Pilot program, first announced by deputy defense secretary William Lynn in June, to defense contractors. Under this program, the DoD, together with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, will share c...

New developments announced by Facebook at its F8 Developer Conference in San Francisco on Thursday might give the social networking king new advantages over Google as the two battle for dominance. They may also create a world of hurt for Apple. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Timeline, which ...

Smart Devices, Dumb Security?

Right now, you can buy a car that you can unlock by just touching the door handle. No need to struggle with key fobs or keys. Known by various names, including "Keyless Go" and "Smart Key," this feature is available for a cool grand or so as an option on various cars, including the Mercedes-Benz S-C...

It's a myth that ostriches bury their heads when they spot danger. It sounds plausible, but in reality, they're just like us: In the face of imminent danger, they either run or attack. This makes sense when you stop to think about it. After all, one thing that seems almost painfully obvious is tha...

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

Malware Munches on Mitsubishi, and Certificates Can Lie

In the wake of repeated hacker attacks on defense contractors in the United States comes news that the systems of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Japan's biggest defense contractor, have been breached. Mitsubishi's submarine, missile and nuclear power plant component factories were reportedly targeted ...

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