Security

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

Black Box Keeps Cybersnoops in Dark

Following Edward Snowden's revelations about indiscriminate government snooping on U.S. citizens, many Net surfers would like to find a way to lower their visibility on the Internet. There are a number of tools in cyberspace that can help a soul do that, but they can take time and savvy to set up. T...

FBI director James Comey, in a speech last week at the Brookings Institute, reiterated his concerns about encryption built into iOS 8 and Android stymieing law enforcement. "I'm a huge believer in the rule of law, but I also believe that no one in this country should be beyond the law," he said. H...

The BBC will publish and continually update a list of its published articles that were removed from Google searches under Europe's "right to be forgotten" rule. David Jordan, director of editorial policy and standards for the BBC, announced the move at a public meeting hosted by Google. The decision...

iSight Partners this week revealed that a cybergang it dubbed "Sandworm" has been exploiting a zero-day vulnerability that impacts all supported versions of Microsoft Windows, including Windows Server 2008 and 2012. The announcement was held off until Microsoft issued its patch earlier this week. If...

A woman whose car rolled 500 feet down an embankment near San Jose, California, was located through the Find My iPhone feature on her smartphone after spending 19 hours in the ravine where her Chevy Cruze ended up. The OnStar feature in her car triggered two calls to police, at 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. Mon...

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

Spam Still Packs a Punch

The days of in-boxes flooded with spam messages on an assortment of sordid subjects are a faint memory to most email users, but what spam has lost in volume it's gained in power. More than two-thirds of some 200 IT decision makers in companies with five to 1,000 employees said a spam incident in the...

The United States Drug Enforcement Agency reportedly co-opted a woman's identity to create a fake Facebook page as a ruse to investigate suspects. The agency posted racy pictures of the woman, then known as "Sondra Prince," as well as a photo of her young son and niece, to the sham page. The photos ...

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

Phishers Find Apple Most Tasty Target

"Follow the money" isn't just the war cry of journalistic bloodhounds hot on the trail of political corruption. It's the mantra of Web predators, too. That's why PayPal consistently has been the top brand targeted by phishers -- although that appears to have changed. Apple now has the dubious distin...

The Food and Drug Administration last week released long-awaited recommendations aimed at better managing cybersecurity risks to protect patient health and information in a document titled "Content of Premarket Submissions for Management of Cybersecurity in Medical Devices." The new standards recomm...

Facebook on Thursday announced it had developed a framework for conducting research on its 1.3 billion or so users. The announcement clearly is a response to the onslaught of criticism the company received this summer, when it blithely reported the findings of a study about how News Feed content aff...

ComputerCOP software, a parental monitoring application that long has been recommended and distributed by law enforcement agencies, is little more than spyware with significant potential for abuse, the Electronic Frontier Foundation reported Wednesday. The software includes a keylogger that could ex...

Most of today's books about Big Data delve into highly technical tools, cloud technology, and high-level computer-assisted math calculations and algorithms. For most people in the business world, this is far from motivating readers to appreciate just what Big Data does and how to let it get you ther...

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

Consumers Fed Up With Data Breaches

Consumers are beginning to lose their patience with the custodians of their personal information. Survey results from 2,000 consumers released last week by HyTrust, suggest that 51 percent of those polled would bolt from any business involved in a data breach that compromised personal information su...

FBI Director James Comey on Thursday strongly criticized Apple and Google for hardening information stored in smartphones by encrypting data, making it inaccessible to law enforcement even with a court order. The FBI has had conversations with both Apple and Google over the encryption features, Come...

Researchers on Thursday discovered proof-of-concept code that could take advantage of unpatched computer systems, and found evidence of attacks exploiting the BASH Shellshock bug in the wild. Shellshock, revealed Wednesday, could become a major threat to Linux/Unix and Apple operating systems if pub...

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