New Initiative Simply Secure Aims to Make Security Tools Easier to Use

The dramatic revelations of large-scale government surveillance and deep penetration of the Internet by intelligence services and other adversaries have increased the interest of the general public in tools such as encryption software, anonymity services and others that previously were mainly of...

Apple CEO Tim Cook Says Company Dedicated to Protecting Users' Privacy

While much of the tech community is still swooning over the iPhone 6, Apple Pay and Apple Watch, the company’s top executive is spending a lot of time and energy trying to reassure customers that Apple is doing everything it can to protect their privacy and the security of their data. Apple CEO T...

2014 Google Transparency Report Requests for Data Up Again

Against a backdrop of new surveillance programs being uncovered in New Zealand and allegations of the NSA and GCHQ’s penetration of Deutsche Telekom in Germany, Google yesterday published its biannual Transparency Report for the first half of 2014. Google’s numbers reflect not only a continually...

Apple CEO Defends iMessage Security

Despite research published last year that demonstrated that Apple has the ability to decrypt users iMessages if it so chooses, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that the company does not hold the encryption key for those messages and couldn’t even produce the plaintext in response to a government order. In...

Documents in Long-Running Yahoo FISC Challenge Case Published

During a long-running secret dispute between Yahoo and government officials over the constitutionality of orders from the federal government to turn over data belonging to Yahoo users, the company was facing fines of $250,000 for refusing to comply with the order. The revelation is contained in a...

Dropbox Reports 80 Percent of Subpoenas Contain Gag Request

Most U.S. government subpoenas for data on Dropbox users are accompanied with a request not to inform the user in question. Dropbox legal counsel Bart Volkmer said those gag orders are repelled unless there is a valid court order. The revelation accompanied the release of the cloud storage...

NSA threatened Yahoo with $250,000 Daily Fine For Opposing Surveillance Request

Yahoo! has broke its silence and explained why it handed over its users’ data to United States federal officials, thereby promising to expose those court documents which ordered the snooping. The US government threatened Internet giant with a $250,000 fine per day several years ago if it failed t...

OpenSSL Security Policy Made Public for First Time

OpenSSL has been having a rough go of it for some time thanks to Heartbleed and a handful of other critical vulnerabilities. Not only did those bugs put commerce and communication at risk, but they opened many people’s eyes as to how omnipresent the open source crypto implementation is. In an...

Threat Outbreak Alert RuleID11104: Email Messages Distributing Malicious Software on August 13, 2014

Medium Alert ID: 35292 First Published: 2014 August 13 18:17 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 RuleID11104 may contain the following files: Name |...

Yahoo to Release End-to-End Encryption for Email Users

LAS VEGAS–Yahoo plans to enable end-to-end encryption for all of its Mail users next year. The company is working with Google on the project and the encryption will be mostly transparent for users, making it as simple as possible to use. Alex Stamos, CISO at Yahoo, said that the project has been ...

Twitter 'Weighing Legal Options' On Publishing National Security Requests Data

Twitter officials are pushing the United States government for more freedom to publish specific numbers about national security information requests, and said the company is considering its legal options if the government doesn’t allow more data to be made public. In its latest transparency repor...

SSL Black List Aims to Publicize Certificates Associated With Malware

Malware and botnet operators are always adapting their tactics, trying to stay a step or two ahead of defensive technologies and techniques. One of the methods many attackers have adopted is using SSL to communicate with the infected machines they control, and a researcher has started a new...

Google catches Indian Government Agency with Fake Digital Certificates

Google has identified and blocked unauthorized digital certificates for a number of its domains issued by the National Informatics Centre NIC of India, a unit of India’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology. National Informatics Center NIC holds several intermediate Certification...

New Verizon Transparency Report Shows Large Government Appetite for Location, Content Data

Verizon said in a new transparency report that though the number of some kinds of orders dropped–including wiretap orders and warrants–others rose, including general orders and pen register and trap and trace orders, and the company received nearly 150,000 total orders in the first half of 2014...

EFF Sues NSA, ODNI Over Zero-Day Disclosure Processes

The Electronic Frontier Foundation wants a peek behind the curtain of the government’s Vulnerabilities Equities Process. The advocacy group on Tuesday filed a Freedom of Information Act FOIA lawsuit against the National Security Agency and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence hopin...

Microsoft Boosts Encryption for Outlook Webmail and OneDrive

After the wide chain of scandals over US global snooping that seriously damaged the trust on the top U.S. Tech companies, Google and Yahoo! came forward and took initiative to provide more secure, encrypted and NSA-proofed service in an effort to gain their reputation again among its users. Now,...

Microsoft Expands TLS, Forward Secrecy Support

Microsoft is no exception when it comes to large technology providers committing to encrypting the services its users depend on. Today, the company announced an update on the progress it has made in engineering those changes, including the news that Outlook.com, its web-based email service,...

New Data Shows FBI Issued More Than 19k National Security Letters in 2013

The United States federal government issued more than 19,000 National Security Letters–perhaps its most powerful tool for domestic intelligence collection–in 2013, and those NSLs contained more than 38,000 individual requests for information. The new data was released by the Office of the Directo...

Facebook Set to Let Users Edit Own Advertising Info

Facebook announced today it will soon be rolling out a new feature to give users more control when it comes to the types of advertisements they see on the site. If users are tired of getting barraged with ads for shoes, video games or discount plane tickets, they’ll not only be able to stop the...

Vodafone Transparency Report Reveals Global Surveillance

Vodafone, the world’s second largest telecommunications company, today published its first transparency report, its Law Enforcement Disclosure Report, in which it revealed that a small number of countries by law have direct access to the provider’s network. The report does not identify the...