About
Dennis Fisher is a journalist with more than 13 years of experience covering information security.
Barnaby Jack always seemed to find a way to make the process of banging away on an application–or a pacemaker or an ATM–look like the most fun anyone has ever had. And he wanted all of his friends to join in the fun. Jack, a respected and much-admired security researcher at IOActive, died on July 25 in San Francisco, just a few days before Black Hat, the conference that played host to some of his more memorable demonstrations.
Nearly two months after the company was part of an operation to disrupt a large number of Citadel botnets, Microsoft said that 88 percent of the botnets spawned by that malware have been taken down.
Every summer, the hacker intelligentsia descends on Las Vegas like a swarm of thirsty locusts that spends seven days chasing free drinks and avoiding sunlight at all costs. Black Hat and DEF CON week can be an overwhelming and confusing experience, especially for the uninitiated or agoraphobic. But fear not, Threatpost has your back.
Everyone loves babies, especially magical royal ones who are destined to pull a sword from a stone. As it turns out, the baby admiring demographic also includes spammers, who are using the current frenzy over the birth of Prince William and Duchess Kate’s baby boy to direct victims to a site serving the Black Hole exploit kit.
A small group of Congressmen is trying to cut off the funding for the NSA’s widespread collection of phone and Internet records under the “business records” collection provision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
Several days after taking its developer Web site down without a mention of the reason, Apple has revealed that attackers had breached the site. The company said that while it can’t rule out the theft of developers’ data, all of the sensitive personal information was encrypted.
Congress is mad.
Maybe it’s the heat. Or maybe it’s them wanting to get it all out of their systems before the August recess. But whatever the case, there are some genuinely angry politicians in Washington right now, trying to figure who they should yell at next for making them deal with the fallout from the leaks perpetrated by Edward Snowden.
Incensed at the way that the Department of Justice and the intelligence community have used the controversial section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, members of the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday angrily questioned Justice and NSA officials about their surveillance of U.S. citizens and said that when section 215 expires in two years, it won’t be renewed.
Microsoft, responding to allegations that the company has helped the NSA circumvent encryption in Skype and Outlook.com and provided direct access to data from those and other services, says that it does none of those things and is petitioning the government for permission to publish more information about how it handles requests for customer data from government agencies.
The EFF has sued the NSA over its PRISM and metadata collection programs revealed by Edward Snowden.
Infosec Insider content is written by a trusted community of Threatpost cybersecurity subject matter experts. Each contribution has a goal of bringing a unique voice to important cybersecurity topics. Content strives to be of the highest quality, objective and non-commercial.
Sponsored Content is paid for by an advertiser. Sponsored content is written and edited by members of our sponsor community. This content creates an opportunity for a sponsor to provide insight and commentary from their point-of-view directly to the Threatpost audience. The Threatpost editorial team does not participate in the writing or editing of Sponsored Content.
