An Office of Personnel Management investigative official said the agency entrusted with millions of personnel records has a history of failing to meet basic computer network security requirements. Michael Esser, assistant inspector general for audit, said in testimony prepared for delivery that for years many of the people running the agency's information technology had no IT background.
The Supreme Court declined to review a pair of antitrust cases involving an international price-fixing cartel, despite the urging of some legal experts, economists and the National Association of Manufacturers. In one of the cases, a judge concluded that Motorola Mobility, a corporate victim of a price-fixing scheme, could not sue because America’s antitrust laws did not apply to Motorola’s overseas subsidiaries, even though 42 percent of the phones they assembled were shipped to the United States.
Russian parliament gave initial approval to a law that would require Internet search sites to remove outdated or irrelevant personal information from search results on request from users. The bill, passed by the State Duma lower house in its first reading, seeks to emulate European Union rules on the "right to be forgotten", under which search engines must take down certain results that appear under a search of a person's name.
The FBI and Justice Department prosecutors are investigating whether front-office officials for the St. Louis Cardinals, one of the most successful teams in baseball over the past two decades, hacked into internal networks of a rival team to steal closely guarded information about player personnel. Investigators have uncovered evidence that Cardinals officials broke into a network of the Houston Astros that housed special databases the team had built, according to law enforcement officials.
LastPass, a popular password manager program, just admitted it's been hacked. In a blog post published today, LastPass’s Joe Siegrist writes, "The investigation has shown ... that LastPass account email addresses, password reminders, server per user salts, and authentication hashes were compromised."
Now that new net neutrality rules are in effect, the Federal Communications Commission has appointed a new ombudsperson to field any complaints. Parul Desai, an FCC staffer in the consumer division, has been named the new handler of net neutrality complaints, the agency announced Monday afternoon.
The Belgian Privacy Commission has sued Facebook and will take the world's largest social network to court for allegedly violating privacy laws both in Belgium and in the European Union. Speaking to Belgian news outlet DeMorgen, the country's chairman of the Privacy Commission William Debeuckelaere said that Facebook's behavior "cannot be tolerated."
The European Union’s top antitrust cop says Amazon.com Inc. has gotten too big for its own good. Margrethe Vestager, speaking in the second of two events in Paris to discuss competition policy, fired a new warning shot at the online retailer, saying that the EU is targeting it not because the firm is U.S.-based, but because it is trying to “close the way of innovation.”
Further research into the sophisticated computer virus used to hack into hotels where the Iran nuclear talks took place has found it took advantage of digital credentials stolen from the world's top contract electronics maker Foxconn. Russian security company Kaspersky Lab said that researchers learned the Duqu 2.0 virus had redirected computer traffic by using a legitimate digital certificate from Taiwan's Hon Hai, also known as Foxconn.
Amazon for the first time has released a report on the number of government data requests it receives, offering the public more information on how often it hands over its customers' data to judges and law enforcement agencies. The e-commerce company, which runs the largest public cloud-infrastructure business in the world, hadn't previously released a biannual transparency report, despite repeated criticism from the American Civil Liberties Union and the digital rights advocacy group the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The White House revealed that hackers had breached a second computer system at the Office of Personnel Management, and said that President Obama was considering financial sanctions against the attackers who gained access to the files of millions of federal workers. Investigators had already said that Chinese hackers appeared to have obtained personal data from more than four million current and former federal employees in one of the boldest invasions into a government network.
European governments endorsed a plan for the U.S. to step back from overseeing the Internet, part of an effort by the group that administers Web addresses to win more independence. The U.S. government last year said it plans to give up the job it has held since 1998 overseeing the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, which hands out Web addresses.
Foreigners in North Korea no longer have access to the country's 3G network, the country's mobile phone provider said in a message sent to its subscribers in the country. North Koreans are unable to access outside uncensored Internet, except for on rare occasions, but foreign residents and visitors to the isolated country are able to buy 3G mobile SIM cards which are largely unrestricted.
Chinese hackers have found a way around widely used privacy technology to target the creators and readers of web content that state censors have deemed hostile, according to new research. The hackers were able to circumvent two of the most trusted privacy tools on the Internet: virtual private networks, or VPNs, and Tor, the anonymity software that masks a computer’s true whereabouts by routing its Internet connection through various points around the globe, according to findings by Jaime Blasco, a security researcher at AlienVault, a Silicon Valley security company.
A Canadian appeals court upheld injunctions mandating that Google remove certain pirate sites from its search engine on a worldwide basis. The ruling will certainly be cheered by the entertainment industry, which has given Google's links ample attention over the years, but struggled through the failure of the Stop Online Piracy Act.
France’s privacy watchdog called on Google to apply a European data protection ruling to its global domains or face financial penalties. The move relates to a decree from Europe’s top court last year that allowed anyone with connections to the region to request that links about themselves be removed from search engine results.
More federal personnel records have been hacked than previously reported and U.S. officials are weighing responses ranging from new counterintelligence initiatives to destroying the data in the intruders’ servers, according to people briefed on the investigation. Already considered one of the largest thefts of U.S. government personnel data in history, investigators now estimate that it may include data on as many as 14 million people, more than triple the 4 million current and former government employees reported by the Office of Personnel Management last week, according to one lawmaker who asked not to be identified when discussing the investigation.
It’s not okay to raise thousands of dollars through Kickstarter and keep the money without producing anything, the Federal Trade Commission said as it took its first consumer protection action on a crowdsourcing campaign. The FTC case involved Erik Chevalier, an Oregon man who launched a business called The Forking Path.
The U.S. Senate blocked a proposal to shield companies from lawsuits when they share cyber-attack information with each other and federal agencies after Democrats opposed adding it to a defense-funding bill. The Senate voted 56-40, falling short of the 60 votes required to advance the measure, which Majority Leader Mitch McConnell decided to bring up as an amendment to the annual defense policy bill.
European regulators announced an antitrust investigation into whether Amazon used its dominant position in the region’s e-books market to favor its own products over those of rivals. The European Commission said it was evaluating the legality of clauses that Amazon had used with European publishers, which required them to inform the e-commerce giant of more favorable terms for books that were offered to other digital retailers.
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