Government



The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) released a new report yesterday that details plans to complement the nation’s existing cybersecurity policy, according to a blog entry on the office’s site co-authored by U.S. Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra and Cybersecurity Coordinator Howard Schmidt.

You only have to glance at the headlines to know that the state of computer application security is bad. But a new report from Veracode makes clear how bad: just 16 percent of almost 10,000 applications tested in the last six months received a passing security grade on their first attempt.

Yesterday was election day in Russia, and the occasion brought with it a coordinated campaign reportedly designed to silence some specific groups. A report from GlobalVoices.org details a massive wave of DDoS attacks against blogging platforms, election watchdog Websites, and various independent sources of media and content aggregation in the days leading up to the elections. In harmony with these relatively new methods of silencing dissent, a number of opposition voices were arrested in classic fashion as well.

In the wake of a highly visible hack of its network infrastructure, a spokeswoman for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) says that hackers from the group TeamP0ison compromised an unpatched server and that e-mail addresses and account passwords exposed in the attack were outdated.