When data privacy and protection are rights, don’t get it wrong

Twenty-one years ago, Latanya Sweeney showed that it’s possible to uniquely identify 87% of Americans with just three pieces of personal data: gender, ZIP code and full date of birth. Long before anyone had heard the words ‘data lake’, ‘cloud storage’ or ‘big data’, nevermind ‘social media’, it w...

Exploit for Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling in Th-Wildau Covid-19_Contact_Tracing

Introduction The application is used for tracking people acco...

VPNs and Trust

TorrentFreak surveyed nineteen VPN providers, asking them questions about their privacy practices: what data they keep, how they respond to court order, what country they are incorporated in, and so on. Most interesting to me is the home countries of these companies. Express VPN is incorporated i...

800 arrests after police dupe crime groups into using backdoored phones

An international operation that monitored an encrypted device company under control of the Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI and the Australian Federal Police AFP has led to a massive, coordinated string by law enforcement in several countries. The setup Law enforcement agencies around the worl...

Supreme Court narrows CFAA

The US Supreme Court issued its long-awaited-by-cybersecurity-nerds opinion on Van Buren v. United States. The case examined whether it was a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act CFAA for a police officer to access a law enforcement database to obtain information, which the officer then...

Act Against Geopiracy with Enhanced Proxy Detection

Widespread Use of Location Spoofing to Circumvent Territorial Content Restrictions Is the image below relatable? According to the description, the service is a VPN desktop application and proxy browser extension that helps viewers mask their physical location, circumvent censorship, and restore...

Clearview Facial-Recognition Technology Ruled Illegal in Canada

Canadian authorities have found that the collection of facial-recognition data by Clearview AI is illegal because it violates federal and provincial privacy laws, representing a win for individuals’ privacy and potentially setting a precedent for other legal challenges to the controversial...

Why Data Security and Privacy in the digital age are crucial

Privacy is considered a basic human right but, with so much of our personal data now ‘out there’ in cyberspace, how private can it really be? Data is everywhere, and with rising internet usage, an increase in cloud technologies, and our growing reliance on IoT devices, it continues to grow...

CISOs Prep For COVID-19 Exposure Notification in the Workplace

With the potential of employees going back into the workplace on the horizon, chief information security officers CISOs are mulling applications that utilize exposure notifications in order to track COVID-19’s spread in the office. Steve Moore, chief security strategist with Exabeam, said he is...

Privacy breaches: Using Microsoft 365 Advanced Audit and Advanced eDiscovery to minimize impact

GDPR, HIPAA, GLBA, all 50 U.S. States, and many countries have privacy breach reporting requirements. If an organization experiences a breach of customer or employee personal information, they must report it within the required time frame. The size and scope of this reporting effort can be massiv...

Data Privacy – Now’s the Time for the US to Catch Up

The recent Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma, may have highlighted to many Americans just what happens to the wealth of personal information they regularly - and willingly - share online. It may be especially concerning, then, to know that companies in the United States aren’t required by...

Cayman Islands Bank Records Exposed in Open Azure Blob

A Cayman Island investment firm has removed years of backups, which up until recently were easily available online thanks to a misconfigured Microsoft Azure blob. The blob’s single URL led to vast stores of files including personal banking information, passport data and even online banking PINs —...

The Legal Risks of Security Research

Sunoo Park and Kendra Albert have published "A Researcher’s Guide to Some Legal Risks of Security Research." From a summary: Such risk extends beyond anti-hacking laws, implicating copyright law and anti-circumvention provisions DMCA §1201, electronic privacy law ECPA, and cryptography export...

New Guide: How Akamai Helps You Protect Privacy Data

Laws and regulations related to personally identifiable information PII are continuously being enacted around the world as data breaches and abuses persist. According to the February 2020 United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, 132 out of 194 countries had legislation put in place to...

Chinese APT group targets India and Hong Kong using new variant of MgBot malware

This blog post was authored by Hossein Jazi and Jérôme Segura On July 2, we found an archive file with an embedded document pretending to be from the government of India. This file used template injection to drop a malicious template which loaded a variant of Cobalt Strike. One day later, the sam...

State privacy laws: 2020 highs and lows

2020 is shaping up to be another interesting year for data privacy, especially given that public health agencies, private companies, and states are now working feverishly to create contact tracing apps and programs while still preserving privacy. Being thoughtful and accountable about data privac...

The Security Value of Inefficiency

For decades, we have prized efficiency in our economy. We strive for it. We reward it. In normal times, that's a good thing. Running just at the margins is efficient. A single just-in-time global supply chain is efficient. Consolidation is efficient. And that's all profitable. Inefficiency, on th...

Implementing Privacy in a Real World Application

Background Whenever Personally Identifiable Information PII is involved, it is wise to encrypt it from the get go. Strong encryption coupled with need-to-know access is key to gaining the trust of your customers and protecting their privacy. And it’s often required by ever-evolving data privacy...

What’s new in Microsoft 365 Compliance and Risk Management

The world has dramatically changed over the past three months. As Satya shared in our recent quarterly earnings, we have seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months. With that significant amount of rapid change, it’s more important than ever to make sure your business-critical...

How Imperva Advanced Mesh Topology Keeps Canadian Data In-Country

The Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act PIPEDA is a Canadian federal law that sets out how organizations can collect, use and disclose personal information in the course of commercial activity. While PIPEDA does not prohibit the transfer of personal information outside of...