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.
The general in charge of the National Security Agency on Monday said the lack of national cybersecurity leglislation is costing us big and amounting to what he believes is “the greatest transfer of wealth in history.”
U.S. Army Gen. Keith B. Alexander urged politicians to stop stalling on approving a much-needed cybersecurity law – of which various versions currently are circulating in Congress. At the same time, he implored private companies to better cooperate with government agencies, many of whom remain mum because of privacy concerns.
If you’ve been scanning the headlines or watching the evening news, you may have heard that tens of thousands of Internet users in the U.S. – hundreds of thousands around the world – will be cut off from the Internet on Monday, July 9, after servers set up at the bequest of the U.S. government go dark. That’s bad, right? Well, maybe not.
Whistle blower website Wikileaks announced Thursday that it would publish nearly 2.5 million e-mails from 680 agencies in Syria over the next two months. In a press release on the organization’s site, Wikileaks’ founder Julian Assange claimed “the material is embarrassing to Syria,” and “Syria’s opponents.”
Followers and supporters of Tibetan Buddhist leader the Dalai Lama were the targets of an e-mail borne attack that used news of the spiritual leader’s birthday to trick recipients into installing a surreptitious monitoring program on their computers.
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