Cybersecurity labeling scheme introduced to help users choose safe IoT devices

The Internet of Things IoT is a term used to describe a wide variety of devices that are connected to the Internet to improve user experience. For example, a doorbell becomes part of the IoT when it connects to the Internet and allows users to see visitors outside their door. But the way in which...

Story of Gus Weiss

This is a long and fascinating article about Gus Weiss, who masterminded a long campaign to feed technical disinformation to the Soviet Union, which may or may not have caused a massive pipeline explosion somewhere in Siberia in the 1980s, if in fact there even was a massive pipeline explosion...

Authorities Eye Using Mobile Phone Tracking COVID-19's Spread

Authorities in the United States and Israel are eyeing ways to use mobile-phone and other location-based data to help control the spread of the new coronavirus COVID-19, raising serious privacy concerns about the practice of using and sharing people’s personal data during the time of a global...

FCC Proposes to Fine Wireless Carriers $200M for Selling Customer Location Data

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission FCC today proposed fines of more than $200 million against the nation's four largest wireless carriers for selling access to their customers' location information without taking adequate precautions to prevent unauthorized access to that data. While the...

Lawsuit Claims Google Collects Minors’ Locations, Browsing History

Google was slapped with a lawsuit this week that alleges that it has been covertly collecting data of students via its G Suite for Education program, which offers its productivity services to students for free. Google’s G Suite for Education program formerly known as Google Education offers free...

Hackers Were Inside Citrix for Five Months

Networking software giant Citrix Systems says malicious hackers were inside its networks for five months between 2018 and 2019, making off with personal and financial data on company employees, contractors, interns, job candidates and their dependents. The disclosure comes almost a year after...

Changing the Monolith—Part 3: What’s your process?

In my 25-year journey, I have led security and privacy programs for corporations and provided professional advisory services for organizations of all types. Often, I encounter teams frantically running around in their own silos, trying to connect the dots and yet unsure if those are the right dot...

Data Privacy Day: A Vision for the Future

January 28 is Data Privacy Day, an annual effort to empower individuals and organizations to respect privacy, safeguard data, and enable trust. This year, the National Cyber Security Alliance NCSA is bringing together experts on U.S. and international privacy for A Vision for the Future, an...

New Consumer Online Privacy Rights Act (COPRA) would empower American users

Despite the already dizzying number of comprehensive data privacy proposals before the US Senate—nearly 10 have been introduced since mid-2018—yet another bill has entered the conversation: the Consumer Online Privacy Rights Act. This time, the bill, called COPRA for short, is sponsored by a...

Top 5 Cybersecurity and Cybercrime Predictions for 2020

We distilled 30 independent reports dedicated to cybersecurity and cybercrime predictions for 2020 and compiled the top 5 most interesting findings and projections in this post. Compliance fatigue will spread among security professionals Being a source of ongoing controversy and debate, the...

California's Domino Effect on U.S. Privacy Regulation

LAS VEGAS – The California Consumer Privacy Act CCPA, which goes into effect in January 2020, will implement strict requirements for companies to create more transparency about how user data is being used and disseminated. Microsoft’s acknowledgement this week that it will extend CCPA to all of i...

Insider Threats, a Cybercriminal Favorite, Not Easy to Mitigate

LAS VEGAS – Insider threats are an ongoing top danger for companies — but when it comes to mitigation efforts, incident-response teams face an array of challenges. Discussions with various incident-response teams revealed that between 25 to 30 percent of data breaches involved an external actor...

Dunkin’ Donuts Gets Hit with Lawsuit Over 2015 Attack

Dunkin’ Donuts is being sued for violating New York state data breach notification laws. The lawsuit alleges that Dunkin’ parent company, Dunkin’ Brands, failed to disclose a breach in 2015 that affected nearly 20,000 customers who were part of the company’s DD Perks loyalty program. New York...

Insurance data security laws skirt political turmoil

Across the United States, a unique approach to lawmaking has proved radically successful in making data security stronger for one industry—insurance providers. The singular approach has entirely sidestepped the prolonged, political arguments that have become commonplace when trying to pass federa...

Extreme-Risk Laws Reduce Gun Violence

Opinion: Red Flag laws help prevent suicides and mass shootings, and buy time for people in crisis to get help...

Red Flag Laws Are Red Herrings of Gun Control

Opinion: There’s little data on the effectiveness of mental health reporting laws to prevent mass shootings...

How Can Akamai Identity Cloud Help With Regulatory Compliance?

Regulatory compliance related to personal identifiable information PII is continuously being enacted around the world as the amount of breaches and data abuse continues to grow. Understanding the variances between the many different privacy and data protection laws can be challenging for companie...

How Privacy Laws Hurt Defendants

Rebecca Wexler has an interesting op-ed about an inadvertent harm that privacy laws can cause: while law enforcement can often access third-party data to aid in prosecution, the accused don't have the same level of access to aid in their defense: The proposed privacy laws would make this situatio...

A week in security (July 8 – 14)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs, we looked at ways to send your sensitive information in a secure fashion, examined some tactics in incident response land, and explored federal data privacy law. We also looked at how security tools can turn against you, and took a deep dive into the rather fiendis...

1,300 Popular Android Apps Access Data Without Proper Permissions

Over 1,300 popular Android apps defy user permissions and gather sensitive data with no consent, according to a study by a coalition of academics from the International Computer Science Institute. The report examined popular mobile apps available through the U.S. version of the Google Play store,...