The U.S. Federal Trade Commission today announced it had finalized its settlement with Facebook, which is now subject to biennial privacy audits for the next 20 years and requires its nearly 1 billion users opt in to any future privacy policy changes.
In an unprecedented move, the Federal Communications Commission ended a 10-month investigation of Verizon Wireless with a $1.25 million settlement for restricting Android customer access to “tethering” software used to relay Internet signals to other devices.
LAS VEGAS–It’s not difficult to find people here who are excited about security. There are roughly 10,000 of them in town this week. But there’s a smaller group of people who are on a different level, who are so passionate and amped up about their ideas that they can’t stop themselves from talking about them. Shawn Henry is one of those people.
Black Hat is upon us and, with it, a lot of chatter about the dangers posed by so-called “APT,” or advanced persistent threats. Rather than get trapped in the hype bubble, Threatpost editor Paul Roberts took the opportunity to check back in with a recognized expert on detecting and combating APT-style attacks: Amit Yoran, the former CEO of NetWitness Corp. and now a Senior Vice President at RSA, The Security Division of EMC. Yoran says that the darkest days may yet be ahead in the fight against APT style attacks, with mounting attacks and a critical shortage of security talent. To cope, both private sector firms and the government need to stop fighting the last war and pivot to the kinds of practices and monitoring that can spot sophisticated attackers.
The controversial Lieberman-Collins Cybersecurity Act has been scrapped and replaced by a new bill that online rights advocates still consider unnecessary, but which they also acknowledge is a vast improvement on the slew of other bills that have cropped up in recent months.
Residents of Washington State will soon be able to access voter registration forms on the secretary of state’s official Facebook page, according to an Associated Press report.
A group of civil-liberties organizations, software companies and popular Web sites are launching a new effort called the Internet Defense League that aims to “help Internet users, organizations, and companies fight back whenever online rights are threatened.” Inspired by the collaborative fight against the SOPA bill earlier this year, the new organization counts Mozilla, the EFF, WordPress and Reddit among its charter members.
A new variety of spyware has been targeting users in Iran, Israel and the Middle East for the last eight months according to joint research from Israeli security software firm Seculert and Kaspersky Lab. The new malware is using a variety of odd techniques and misdirection to entice users to install it, and researchers say it is targeting a specific group of potentially high-value targets.
The Chinese Government has “pervasive access” to 80 percent of the world’s communications even military-grade encryption no longer provides sufficient protection to sensitive data, a former Pentagon analyst warns.
Some of the nation’s largest wireless carriers say they last year collectively received some 1.3 million requests from law enforcement for customers’ phone records – a number that continues to rise. The information shared with police includes geolocation information, content of text messages, wiretaps and aggregated cell tower activity for a specific block of time.
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