DOJ Launches Cyber Unit, Claims Privacy is Mission Critical

WASHINGTON D.C. – Leslie Caldwell, assistant attorney general in the criminal division of the Department of Justice announced on Thursday the creation of a new team within its Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section CCIPS during a talk at a Georgetown Law conference titled, “Cybercrime...

Encrypt Everything Cannot Be Swayed by FREEDOM Act Rejection

Barring another vote before the end of the calendar year and the current Congressional session, the USA FREEDOM Act is dead in the water until 2015—and maybe even beyond. The Senate last night came up two votes shy of passing the bill, which would have overhauled the NSA’s current dragnet...

Cybersecurity Legislation Forecast is Grim

MINNEAPOLIS – If you’re expecting federal cybersecurity legislation any time soon, forget it. Despite the number of prospective bills on the Hill right now, Congress is unlikely to move anything forward any time soon, according to Matthew Rhoades, director cyberspace and security program Truman...

Wyden: Surveillance is a 'Clear and Present Danger' to the Digital Economy

The pervasive dragnet surveillance of Americans revealed by the Edward Snowden documents has caused serious damage to the trust that enterprises and citizens had in the United States government and unless that trust is repaired, it could have serious effects on the Internet economy, a panel of...

One in Five Massachusetts Residents Breached in 2013

Roughly one in five Massachusetts residents were affected by a data breach last year, according to numbers released today by the Commonwealth’s Office of Consumer Affairs & Business Regulation OCABR. The number, about 1.2 million residents, is nearly a 60 percent increase from 2012. “Last year wa...

Leahy Introduces Bill to End Bulk Call Record Collection

Sen. Patrick Leahy has introduced an updated, tougher version of the USA FREEDOM Act that would end the bulk collection of data under Section 215 of FISA and also would require the appointment of a panel of special legal advocates who would represent the interests of individual privacy and civil...

FTC Asks Data Brokers, Congress for Transparency, Regulation

The Federal Trade Commission called on data brokers to be more transparent and give users more control over their personal information in a comprehensive report issued yesterday. The 100-plus page document, “Data Brokers: A Call for Transparency and Acccountability,” .PDF criticizes the industry...

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...

Draft Bill to Protect Threat Information Sharing

The fear of lawsuits has – for a very long time – been among the primary reasons that public-private cyber-threat information sharing practices have never really materialized. This failure is reality in spite of repeated calls for such partnerships year after year from government and industry...

White House Releases Plan to End Section 215 Bulk Collection

The White House today unveiled a five-point plan to end the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of phone call metadata, preserving what it says is a balance between the intelligence community’s national security needs and the public’s desire to maintain its privacy. The proposal ends the...

NSA's Alexander Appeals For Threat Information Sharing

WASHINGTON– While Congress and the technology community are still debating and discussing the intelligence gathering capabilities of NSA revealed in recent months, the agency’s director, Gen. Keith Alexander, is not just defending the use of these existing tools, but is pitching the idea of shari...

EU: Harsher Penalties for Convicted Hackers in Europe

Legislation filed late last week in the European Parliament that could broadly reform how convicted cybercriminals are prosecuted, fails to adequately differentiate good hackers from bad hackers, a political group argued today. Jan Philipp Albrech, a spokesman for the Greens/European Free Allianc...

Once there was a Privacy! Cyber Security bill #CISPA passed

The United States House of Representatives on Thursday voted to approve the highly controversial cyber security bill CISPA, which stands for the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act. The Bill called the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act CISPA was presented under the guise...

Once there was a Privacy! Cyber Security bill #CISPA passed

The United States House of Representatives on Thursday voted to approve the highly controversial cyber security bill CISPA, which stands for the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act. The Bill called the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act CISPA was presented under the guise...

Avoid The Attack Attribution Distraction

Plenty has been written this month about attack attribution, but, really, if your network is under siege, how often does the “who” matter as much as the “how,” “what,” and “where”? It seems that knowing who the actor is behind a network intrusion matters little to a bank, restaurant or retail...

DHS Secretary Warns of Potential Cyber Attacks

There is no shortage of problems for President Obama and the new Congress to tackle as they settle into their offices in Washington, D.C., this week, and one of the topics that’s at the top of that list is cybersecurity. Earlier this week a group of Democratic senators introduced a new...

Senate Introduces Cybersecurity Bill that Prioritizes Information Sharing

The United States Senate says it will prioritize the passage of a comprehensive cybersecurity bill designed to fortify the nation’s public and private IT systems in this session of Congress. Senators John D. Rockefeller IV D-WV, Chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation...

Bans on Employer Demands for Personal Passwords Go Into Effect

In spring of last year, reports began surfacing that some employers were demanding that current and sometimes prospective employees hand over the log-in credentials or otherwise provide access to their various social media accounts. People were outraged. Such invasions of what many perceive as...

Capitol Hill Rhetoric Takes Aim at Wrong Cybersecurity Targets

Defense secretary Leon Panetta couldn’t resist, could he? He couldn’t fight the urge to dig deep into the information security cliché handbook and yank out that old chestnut about a Cyber Pearl Harbor. Seriously, is there a more cringe-inducing, FUD-filled phrase than Cyber Pearl Harbor? Never mi...

We Are Being Held in Cyber Handcuffs

Hello my Princes of Peace, Warriors of the Revolution, Princesses of the cause, I want you to take two minutes and watch this video: This video is the epitome of the ignorance and arrogance of governments all over the world in response to our cyber war revolution. As you will see, the power peopl...