Government


New Malware Attacks Target Syrian Activists

A new set of malware campaigns targeted at Syrian activists, journalists and NGOs has emerged, and security researchers say that the attackers are employing a variety of tactics, including a new OS X Trojan that could be part of a “false flag” operation. The details of the new round of attacks on government opposition groups […]

Stanford Researchers Find Connecting Metadata With User Names is Simple

One of the key tenets of the argument that the National Security Agency and some lawmakers have constructed to justify the agency’s collection of phone metadata is that the information it’s collecting, such as phone numbers and length of call, can’t be tied to the callers’ names. However, some quick investigation by some researchers at Stanford University who have been collecting information voluntarily from Android users found that they could correlate numbers to names with very little effort.

RSA Denies NSA Backdoor Payment Allegations

The report that the NSA paid RSA Security $10 million in 2004 to implement a compromised random-number generator as the default in one of its key products–has shaken the security community and sent shockwaves through the industry that may be felt for years to come.


The volume of government requests to Google for user data is continuing to increase, something that should come as no surprise in the current climate. In its latest transparency report, the company said that it received more than 25,000 requests for user data in the first six months of 2013, an increase of about 18 percent.

On the same day that a panel of experts delivered a report to the United States president recommending sweeping changes to the way that the National Security Agency collects, handles and stores intelligence, the United Nations unanimously adopted a resolution calling for the protection of users’ right to privacy and emphasizing their right to be […]

A United States District Court judge has ruled that the bulk metadata collection program maintained by the National Security Agency for years now likely is unconstitutional. The judge, ruling on a pair of law suits that claimed the NSA’s methods violated users’ privacy and civil rights, said that the metadata program “significantly intrudes on that […]