In a public advisory, the FCC said it is "aggressively investigating and acting" against businesses that illegally interfere with Wi-Fi. The agency's Enforcement Bureau said it has noticed a "disturbing trend" in which hotels and other businesses block personal Wi-Fi hot spots.
Taylor Swift’s Twitter and Instagram accounts were hacked, a noticeable breach given Swift is the fourth most-followed tweeter on the planet with more than 51 million followers. Messages tweeted from her account encouraged those on Twitter to follow @Lizzard, the self-proclaimed leader of the hacker group Lizard Squad, the folks behind multiple attacks on the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live.
As consumers increasingly adopt devices that can collect information and transmit it to the Internet, the Federal Trade Commission called on technology companies that sell those products to institute comprehensive measures to protect users’ data security and privacy. “The only way for the Internet of Things to reach its full potential for innovation is with the trust of American consumers,” Edith Ramirez, the chairwoman of the FTC, said in a statement.
The French government is stepping up the pressure on Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. to help in the struggle against terrorist groups. President Francois Hollande said in Paris the government will present a draft law next month that makes Internet operators “accomplices” of hate-speech offenses if they host extremist messages.
Cut off from the Internet, young Cubans have quietly linked thousands of computers into a hidden network that stretches miles across Havana, letting them chat with friends, play games and download hit movies in a mini-replica of the online world that most can't access. Home Internet connections are banned for all but a handful of Cubans, and the government charges nearly a quarter of a month's salary for an hour online in government-run hotels and Internet centers.
Facebook Inc. denied being the victim of a hacking attack and said its site and photo-sharing app Instagram had suffered an outage after it introduced a configuration change. The disruption “was not the result of a third party attack but instead occurred after we introduced a change that affected our configuration systems,” a Facebook spokeswoman told The Wall Street Journal.
Hackers are opening new horizons: having learned how to break into Apple Inc.’s iPhones they may target smart televisions next, according to cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab. In the future, hackers will be able to interfere with smart TVs -- the latest generation of TVs that are connected to the Internet -- and require users to send a paid text message to get them unlocked, Chief Executive Officer Eugene Kaspersky said in an interview.
A group calling itself "Official Cyber Caliphate" said it hacked the official website of national carrier Malaysia Airlines (MAS), but the airline said its data servers remained intact and passenger bookings were not affected. In a statement, MAS said the website was not hacked, but that users were redirected to a hacker website.
Google took almost three years to disclose to the open information group WikiLeaks that it had handed over emails and other digital data belonging to three of its staffers to the U.S. government, under a secret search warrant issued by a federal judge. WikiLeaks has written to Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, to protest that the search giant only revealed the warrants last month, having been served them in March 2012.
To avoid being banned throughout Turkey, Facebook has blocked Turkish users’ access to a number of pages containing content that the authorities had deemed insulting to the Prophet Muhammad, according to a company employee with direct knowledge of the matter and a report by the state broadcaster TRT. The company acted to comply with an order from a Turkish court, the employee said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the company had not authorized the employee to speak publicly.
Law enforcement is concerned that the popular Waze mobile traffic app by Google Inc., which provides real-time road conditions, can also be used to hunt and harm police. Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck complained in a letter to Google's chief executive on Dec. 30 that Waze could be "misused by those with criminal intent to endanger police officers and the community."
Beijing censors disrupted Virtual Private Networks, thereby preventing Internet users in China from accessing websites blocked by censors. Global Times, a Communist Party-run newspaper, confirmed that Chinese authorities caused the disruptions and justified the moves.
User names and passwords of 20 million visitors to an unidentified dating site have been hacked and offered for sale on a website, according to a posting by the thief on an online forum used by cybercriminals. Hackers can use the credentials to try to access bank accounts, health records or other more sensitive data, said Daniel Ingevaldson, chief technology officer of fraud-detection software-maker Easy Solutions Inc.
Allegations that Chinese authorities hacked into Microsoft Corp.'s Outlook email service are "groundless slander", the official Xinhua news agency quoted Beijing's cyberspace regulator as saying. The comments, made by the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) spokesman Jiang Jun, were in response to a report by an online censorship watchdog which said that Chinese users of the email service were subject to a hacking attack over the weekend.
Google acknowledged that it no longer makes sense to patch security holes in the Web browser included in some older versions of its Android operating software, a move that could leave some users open to prying eyes. Its decision to leave users of older software at risk illustrates the challenge technology companies face in addressing security issues.
A Spanish court ruled that Google Inc. must remove links from a search on a man’s name, eight months after the case made a European Union court confirm a so-called “right to be forgotten” on the Internet. Google must cut the link to a notice on social security debtors in La Vanguardia newspaper because it was outdated information about the man, the Audencia Nacional ruled, according to a statement on its website in Spain.
France appealed on for U.N. member states to work together on an international legal framework that would make social network providers share responsibility for the use of their platforms to spread messages promoting violence.
Executives from Target and Home Depot were not present at the World Economic Forum, where world leaders and corporate titans are rubbing shoulders and debating weighty issues. Yet the names of those two companies are being invoked several times a day here, held up as examples of early victims in the growing battle against cybercrime.
After already having served 28 months in detention, U.S. District Judge Sam Lindsay has sentenced journalist and supposed Anonymous spokesperson Barrett Brown to five years behind bars for acting as an accessory after the fact to an unauthorized access to a protected computer. That was the only one of three remaining charges against Brown that actually stuck, stemming from an offer Brown made in hopes of helping Jeremy Hammond, an imprisoned hacktivist who made public millions of emails from the servers of security firm Stratfor.
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The GigaLaw Firm helps companies of all sizes protect their brands online, using domain name dispute policies – such as the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) – and other legal tools available to copyright and trademark owners on the Internet.