NSA Watchdog Will Review Tucker Carlson Spy Claims

The National Security Agency’s Inspector General Robert Storch has announced a review of whether the agency illegally conducted cyber-espionage and collected the electronic communications of Fox News opinion-show host Tucker Carlson, who has accused the NSA of trying to capture embarrassing...

‘Glowworm’ Attack Turns Light Flickers into Audio

Virtual meetings are vulnerable to a new, exotic attack called Glowworm, which measures an audio output device’s LED power light changes and converts them to audio reproductions — allowing cyberattackers to listen to sensitive conversations. As an increasing amount of business is being conducted...

Threat Outbreak Alert RuleID30961: Email Messages Distributing Malicious Software on October 13, 2017

Medium Alert ID: 55618 First Published: 2017 October 13 16:04 GMT Version: 1 Summary Cisco Security has detected significant activity related to spam email messages distributing malicious software. Email messages that are related to this threat RuleID30961 may contain the following files: Name |...

Spanish Court Agrees to Extradite Russian Spam King to the United States

Spain's National Court ruled on Tuesday to extradite a 36-year-old Russian computer programmer, accused by American authorities of malicious hacking offences, to the United States, according to a court document. Peter Yuryevich Levashov, also known as Peter Severa, was arrested in April this year...

Lawmakers Reintroduce Popular Email Privacy Act

A group of bipartisan lawmakers reintroduced the Email Privacy Act, a bill that would require law enforcement to get a warrant before searching email, Facebook messages and files stored on cloud services no matter how old the archives. The Email Privacy Act is an attempt to reform the decade-old...

Microsoft Wins Widespread Support in Privacy Clash With Govt.

Microsoft’s lawsuit against the U.S. government for the right to tell its customers when a federal agency is looking at their emails is getting widespread support by privacy advocates. For many, Microsoft’s stance lends an important and powerful voice to ongoing efforts to reform the Electronic...

Legal Line Between Security Research, Cybercrime Murky

LAS VEGAS — In his keynote address at Black Hat Wednesday, Dan Geer, the CISO of In-Q-Tel and a respected security luminary noted that the industry has never been closer to the forefront of corporate and government policy decision making. Despite this, security research remains a dangerous busine...

White House Calls for Transparency from Data Brokers

The White House redirected attention away from the data collection efforts of the intelligence community yesterday with the release of a report that urged data brokers to be more transparent about their own data harvesting. Companies such as Facebook, Google and others make a living collecting th...

Microsoft Reads User Email without Warrant

Late last week it emerged that Microsoft had searched through the contents of a French blogger’s Hotmail account in order to track down the source of a leak of proprietary information from the Redmond, Wash., tech giant. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and transparency advocates have expressed...

NSA Metadata Program Likely Not Cost-Effective, Researchers Say

While much of the coverage of the surveillance programs revealed by Edward Snowden have focused on the legality and constitutionality of the collection of metadata and Internet traffic in the name of counter-terrorism and national security, the question of whether these programs are actually cost...

Frequently Unanswered Questions on the NSA Leaks

The flood of documents regarding the NSA’s collection methods and capabilities that have been leaked this summer has produced thousands of news stories and several metric tons of speculation about what it all means. But for all of the postulating, analysis and reporting, there are still a lot of...

Australia's Telstra Wiretapping undersea cables from past 12 years for FBI

According to a secret agreement it signed in 2001 with the FBI and US Department of Justice - Telstra, Australia's largest phone company is storing huge volumes of electronic communications it carried between Asia and the US for potential surveillance by US intelligence agencies. The contract was...

Australia’s Telstra Wiretapping undersea cables from past 12 years for FBI

According to a secret agreement it signed in 2001 with the FBI and US Department of Justice - Telstra, Australia’s largest phone company is storing huge volumes of electronic communications it carried between Asia and the US for potential surveillance by US intelligence agencies. The contract was...

Justice Department Backs Closing Loophole For Government E-mail Snooping

The U.S. Justice Department on Tuesday joined a chorus of privacy advocates supporting changes to a 1986 law that currently allows the government to review some emails without a warrant. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act was created before commercial e-mail existed, let alone became a...

FBI ordered to disclose "Going Dark" surveillance program

A federal judge ordered the FBI to disclose more information about its "Going Dark" surveillance program, an initiative to extend its ability to wiretap virtually all forms of electronic communications. Why shocking ? because a federal judge just ruled that police can place surveillance cameras o...

NSA intercepting 1.7 billion American electronic communications daily

NSA intercepting 1.7 billion American electronic communications daily Since 9/11, the Agency has been able to "spy" on electronic communications without the need for court-approved warrants. The group has a large complex in Utah that cost $2 billion and holds the data. In 2006 the New York Times...

Cryptosystems Showing Signs of 'Wear and Tear'

SAN FRANCISCO– It’s been an interesting year in the cryptography world, with new attacks on several algorithms, continued problems with hash functions and the recent research on weak RSA keys. With all of that as a backdrop, some of the brightest minds in the field, gathered here for the RSA...

Troubling Cracks Showing in Internet's Security Foundation

The revelation last week that researchers Thai Duong and Juliano Rizzo had developed a new attack on SSL that gives them the ability to decrypt some protected sessions on the fly sparked a lot of discussions about the inherent problems of the protocol and whether it has outlived its usefulness. B...