The United States Court of Appeals on Tuesday reversed a lower court’s decision, ruling that the IT security system used by a domestic bank was not “commercially reasonable” to protect its customers.
UPDATE: Residents in two Illinois communities are settling their nerves after civil defense sirens blared for around 30 minutes last Saturday – an incident that authorities say may be the result of hacking.
A new Trojan that uploads users’ phonebooks to a remote server is making the rounds, circulating on both Apple’s App Store and the Google Play marketplaces, according to research by Kaspersky Lab posted on the Securelist web site earlier today.
Here’s the good news on America’s birthday: the last year has seen the U.S. emerge as an undisputed global leader in the use of offensive cyber operations. Averting another “Sputnik” moment, the nation’s longest running and most successful democracy blazed new trails in non-kinetic warfare, effectively ending speculation that the world’s lone superpower was asleep at the wheel as nations like China and Russia dashed ahead in the cyber realm. Now for the bad news: we’re screwed.
Cisco appears to have retracted a controversial addition to its privacy policy that allowed the company to track data, including complete Internet histories, for users of its Linksys E2700, E3500 and E4500 routers.
The policy revisions were part of an automatic firmware update that outraged users last week, who tried to log in and found they must instead install the new Cisco Cloud Connect service. The automatic upgrade came without notice and with forced acceptance of a less-private user agreement.
And then there was NASA. Poor NASA. This was a tough year for the formerly high-flying and universally beloved U.S. space agency. Not only has their budget seen deep cuts as the US Government tries to balance its books, but they also celebrated the bitter-sweet final mission of their once marquee Space Shuttle Program.
There are a number of US government branches, offices, and agencies that, by their very nature, have giant targets painted on their computer networks. America’s national library would not seem to be among that lot, but alas, not even the Library of Congress could escape the ire of hackers this year.
Earlier this year the Anonymous hacking collective took credit for knocking offline a couple of sites belonging to the Federal Trade Commission. They claimed that the attack was in retaliation for the U.S.
It’s not always malicious hackers and purported state actors that expose weaknesses in government systems. Sometime it’s other government agencies as well. This was the case when federal watchdog, the Government Accountability Office, audited and subsequently called out the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation for its lax IT security practices.
In July of last year, the infamous hacking group LulzSec managed to compromise the websites belonging to the upper house of the United States legislature.
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