They say that your worst fears and your fondest dreams are rarely realized. That may well be true in most walks of life, but in the information security world, 2013 was the year that our worst fears were not only confirmed, but so were some things that few but the most paranoid among us thought possible.
A pair of academic researchers decided to have a look at whether the NSA–and by extension, the American people–is getting anything worthwhile for the untold millions spent on the metadata program.
A group of hundreds of academics from countries around the world have started a petition that demands Western governments, such as those in the United States and UK, stop the mass surveillance programs they have in place and “effectively protect everyone’s fundamental rights and freedoms”.
Dennis Fisher and Mike Mimoso talk about the year that was in the security industry, including the last six months of NSA drama, the Microsoft bug bounty program, exploit sales and attacks against major banks.
Hackers exploited a previously disclosed vulnerability in the popular photo sharing application Snapchat and leaked 4.6 million of the service’s usernames and partial phone numbers online yesterday.
Expert Jacob Appelbaum’s keynote at CCC describes the deep catalog of hacks and backdoors at the NSA’s disposal.
Rather than trying to rank the NSA revelations on any sort of scale, we’ve put together an admittedly simplified list of some of the more interesting NSA-related stories to emerge in 2013.
A federal judge today declared the NSA’s bulk telephony metadata collection program legal.
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.
AT&T and Verizon announce they will being producing transparency reports on government requests for user data in 2014.
Infosec Insider content is written by a trusted community of Threatpost cybersecurity subject matter experts. Each contribution has a goal of bringing a unique voice to important cybersecurity topics. Content strives to be of the highest quality, objective and non-commercial.
Sponsored Content is paid for by an advertiser. Sponsored content is written and edited by members of our sponsor community. This content creates an opportunity for a sponsor to provide insight and commentary from their point-of-view directly to the Threatpost audience. The Threatpost editorial team does not participate in the writing or editing of Sponsored Content.
