Cybersecurity

The Association of Computing Machinery on Tuesday named Whitfield Diffie and Martin E. Hellman recipients of the 2015 ACM A.M. Turing Award for their contributions to modern cryptography. Their invention of public key cryptography and digital signatures revolutionized computer security, the organiza...

A federal magistrate judge on Monday ruled that Apple did not have to unlock an encrypted iPhone used in a federal drug case. The ruling gave the company a key victory against the Department of Justice in the midst of a legal struggle over an FBI request that the encrypted phone of a suspected shoot...

Apple last week filed a motion to vacate a federal order requiring the company to create a tool or code to unlock the iPhone of one of the San Bernardino, California, shooters. The order would set a dangerous precedent and release a powerful means to breach security on potentially millions of phones...

Google has announced that it was expanding its Project Shield program, offering to protect news and human rights websites from distributed denial of service attacks for free. Project Shield uses Google's security infrastructure to detect and filter DDoS attacks, which flood websites with Internet tr...

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

Security Pros to Users: Do as We Say, Not as We Do

IT pros -- the gatekeepers of company security policies -- are willing to bend the rules to get things done, according to Absolute Software, based on survey findings it released last week. Forty-five percent of IT pros confessed they knowingly worked around their own security policies, according to ...

Apple on Monday called for the creation of a government panel to help resolve a standoff between the company and the Federal Bureau of Investigation over the issue of national security vs. data privacy. The proposal for a commission followed FBI Director James Comey's Sunday post on Lawfare -- an ap...

I'm an ex-sheriff, I've been in and out of security jobs for much of my life, so I've got some familiarity with the issues underlying the drama between the FBI and Apple. Law enforcement officials would like an easier way to do their jobs. Wouldn't we all? If they could put cameras in every home and...

Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center on Wednesday announced that it paid approximately $17,000 to resume normal operations after digital extortionists knocked its computer systems offline. The Los Angeles hospital discovered its computer network infected with ransomware earlier this month. Ransomwa...

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

DHS Ready to Share Intelligence With Private Sector

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security this month will start sharing threat information with a small number of hand-picked companies under the newly enacted Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act. DHS hopes to collect threat indicators from companies and redistribute them so everyone gets a better ...

CEO Tim Cook on Tuesday brought Apple's dispute with the FBI to the public. Cook penned an open letter explaining the company's resistance to a federal magistrate's order to create software that would let authorities access data in an iPhone used by the shooters in last year's San Bernardino terrori...

U.S. Reps. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., and Blake Farenthold, R-Texas, last week introduced legislation to prevent states from passing laws banning the sale of smartphones with encryption capabilities. The ENCRYPT Act of 2016 provides that a state may not mandate or request that a manufacturer, developer, se...

The U.S. departments of Justice and Homeland Security on Monday announced they were investigating reports that a hacker broke into government computer systems and stole sensitive information about employees at the agencies. The hacker posted stolen information for about 9,000 DHS employees online Su...

SPOTLIGHT ON SECURITY

New Safe Harbor Pact Offers Temporary Port in Storm

Through an eleventh-hour maneuver, the United States and the European Union last week avoided action that could have choked the movement of data between the regions and caused financial harm to U.S. companies. It may be only a temporary respite, however. The problem stems from a European Court of Ju...

Keybase last week announced the alpha release of the Keybase app for the iPhone with a cryptographically secure file mount. Users can write data in an automatically created folder in this format: /keybase/public/username. Files written in the folder are signed automatically and appear as plain text ...

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