Security

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

Malicious Emailers Find Healthcare Firms Juicy Prey

Healthcare providers have garnered growing interest from hackers in recent months. More evidence of that trend appeared last week in a report on email trust. An email that appeared to come from a healthcare company was four times more likely to be fraudulent than an email purportedly from a social m...

Citizenfour, a film documenting interviews director Laura Poitras conducted with whistle-blower Edward Snowden, won the Oscar for best documentary Sunday. The talks took place as Snowden blew the lid off the United States National Security Agency's surveillance activities. The award highlights the d...

The United States' National Security Agency and British spy agency GCHQ have hacked into the internal computer network of Gemalto, the world's largest maker of SIM cards, and stolen the cards' encryption keys, according to information in files leaked by whistle-blower Edward Snowden. Gemalto makes a...

Google is fighting a proposed amendment to Rule 41 of the U.S. Criminal Code that might allow authorities to hack into computers abroad. The amendment seeks to empower a magistrate in a district where activities related to a crime may have occurred to issue a warrant for remote search of computers, ...

Lenovo on Thursday came under fire for preinstalling spyware on some of its laptops. The software, Superfish, uses the same techniques cybercriminals often employ to crack encrypted traffic from computers to the Internet. "Superfish is purposely designed to bypass the security of HTTPS websites in...

Kaspersky Lab on Tuesday announced the discovery of what may be the most sophisticated malware ever. The malware's creators, whom Kaspersky has dubbed "The Equation Group," use a never-seen-before tactic to infect hard drives' firmware. The technique "makes traditional antivirus and antimalware soft...

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

Encryption Can Create Stormy Weather in the Cloud

Encryption has received a lot of attention lately as a solution to the growing data breach problem, but one of the hang-ups dogging the technology has been its ability to play nice in the cloud. That's especially true if an organization wants to control the keys by which its data is scrambled and us...

Facebook this week announced ThreatExchange, an API-based platform for technology companies to share information on security threats. It had been working on the platform for about a year in a joint project with other prominent Internet firms. Facebook layered APIs on top of its existing platform inf...

The Obama Administration on Tuesday announced plans to set up a national Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center to integrate all data from government agencies and the private sector, and disseminate it appropriately. Lisa Monaco, assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterr...

Samsung Smart TV owners, already shaken by news earlier this week that their TVs can transmit voice commands and other private data to third parties, have been hit by another revelation -- that the devices sneak ads into movies they're watching without the owner's knowledge or consent. A user on the...

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

Bug Bounties Entice Researchers to Don White Hats

Bug bounty programs are used by individual software makers to improve the quality of their products, but they can have incidental benefits for all software makers, too. One of those is to encourage bug hunters to wear a white hat instead of a black one. That's particularly true for researchers attra...

Motorists in the United States are increasingly at risk of cyberattacks and violations of privacy, as more and more technology is added to their cars. A report released on Sunday by the office of Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) listed a number of key findings that are based on responses from 16 auto makers...

Owners of Samsung smart TVs need to watch what they say if they've activated the voice recognition feature on these devices. The feature may transmit some voice commands, together with information about the device, to a third-party service that converts speech to text, Samsung's global privacy polic...

Hackers broke into the databases of Anthem Inc., the second-largest health insurer in the U.S., and stole up to 80 million customers' personal information. The data includes current and former customers' names, birthdays, medical IDs, social security numbers, street addresses, email addresses and em...

There were 9 billion Internet of Things (IoT) units installed at the end of 2013 by IDC's count, and its analysts expect the figure to hit 28 billion by 2020. That's going to make life difficult for IT security administrators. A Tripwire survey found that employed consumers who took work home had an...

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