The FBI and Secret Service are investigating reports that non-government email accounts associated with CIA Director John Brennan as well as Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson were hacked. The New York Post interviewed the alleged hacker, who said he accessed an AOL account associated with Brennan that included files regarding security clearance.
Russian computer attacks have become more brazen and more destructive as the country grows increasingly at odds with the U.S. and European nations over military goals first in Ukraine and now Syria. Along with reported computer breaches of a French TV network and the White House, a number of attacks now being attributed to Russian hackers and some not previously disclosed have riveted intelligence officials as relations with Russia have deteriorated.
Amazon is going on the offensive against fake reviews, filing a lawsuit against more than 1,000 people who allegedly asked for money to post about products. The online marketplace is suing people who had been offering on Fiverr.com, a website that lets people do tasks for as little as $5, to write and post fake reviews.
German banks are increasingly being attacked by criminals using information technology to hack into their systems, the head of Germany's banking watchdog told a newspaper. "This is a huge topic which we are intensively working on," Bafin president Felix Hufeld told Boersen-Zeitung.
Companies could face action from European privacy regulators if the European Commission and United States do not come up with a new system enabling them to shuffle data across the Atlantic in three months, the regulators said. The highest EU court struck down a system known as Safe Harbour used by over 4,000 firms to transfer personal data to the United States, leaving companies without alternatives scrambling to put new legal measures in place to ensure everyday business could continue.
A U.S. jury ordered Apple Inc. to pay the University of Wisconsin-Madison's patent licensing arm more than $234 million in damages for incorporating its microchip technology into some of the company's iPhones and iPads without permission. The amount was less than the $400 million the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation was claiming in damages after the jury said Apple infringed its patent for improving the performance of computer processors.
A group of Russian hackers infiltrated the servers of Dow Jones & Co., owner of the Wall Street Journal and several other news publications, and stole information to trade on before it became public, according to four people familiar with the matter. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, Secret Service and the Securities and Exchange Commission are leading an investigation of the infiltration, according to the people.
Defendants in one of the world’s most widely followed press-freedom cases were acquitted of terrorism charges. Nine bloggers and journalists, most of them contributors to Zone 9, a blog critical of the government, were arrested in April 2014 and charged under Ethiopia’s sweeping antiterrorism law.
At the request of the United States, Malaysia has arrested a man on charges of hacking personal data of more than a thousand U.S. officials and handing it to Islamic State militants in Syria so they could target the individuals. The man, 20-year-old Ardit Ferizi from Kosovo, who entered Malaysia in August 2014 to study computer science and forensics, will be extradited to the United States, police said.
A federal appeals court in New York dismissed a lawsuit brought by an authors’ group that accused Google Inc. of copyright infringement over its digital copying project. A unanimous three-judge panel of the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals concluded that Google’s scanning millions of copyrighted books wasn’t infringement because what the company makes viewable online is so limited.
An international effort to prevent cyberweapons from reaching malicious regimes is at risk of coming apart amid objections from U.S. companies who claim it would upend the way they use and sell legitimate spyware. In the wake of the Arab Spring uprising, the U.S. and 40 other nations decided that virtual weapons should be subject to the same export control rules that have been used on heavy or unconventional weaponry like tanks and chemical weapons.
Nevada regulators ruled that playing daily fantasy sports should be considered gambling, not a game of skill, and ordered websites like DraftKings and FanDuel to stop operating immediately in the state until the companies and their employees receive state gambling licenses. It is perhaps the most significant setback yet for a booming unregulated industry that has spent the past two weeks in the midst of a firestorm of allegations that have prompted federal and state investigations into the alleged predatory practices of its employees who, armed with inside information, may have exploited its paying customers.
Hackers have stolen more than £20 million ($31 million) from British online bank accounts using hostile, intrusive software that harvested user log-in details. The UK's National Crime Agency has partnered with the FBI and European crime agency Europol to investigate the breach, which they say was perpetrated using malware called Dridex, first detected around November 2014.
The U.S. Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation are probing whether the business model of daily fantasy-sports operators violates federal law, according to people familiar with the matter. FBI agents from the Boston office have been contacting customers of DraftKings Inc. to ask them about their experiences with the Boston-based company, one person familiar with the matter said.
Calling revenge porn and other cyber-borne assaults against women "heinous" crimes, California Attorney General Kamala Harris unveiled a campaign to have tech companies and law enforcement team up to go after criminals and help victims of online exploitation. The announcement laid out a wide range of efforts to train police and bring offenders to justice while enlisting some of Silicon Valley's major players to find ways to stanch the wave of so-called revenge porn, the criminal act of posting intimate photos or videos online without the consent of the individual.
Facebook Inc. is gearing up to fight a cascade of privacy investigations in Europe, arguing that regulators are overreaching in ways that could hurt the social network’s ability to protect users against hacking and fraud. Ahead of a court ruling due in Belgium, the Menlo Park, Calif., company is attacking this case against it as an ill-thought-out attempt to regulate privacy that would instead remove one of the tools Facebook uses to stop automated programs from hacking into users’ accounts.
Oracle has won $50 million in damages against Rimini Street in a lawsuit that revolved around third party support and copyright infringement. Oracle was seeking $245.9 million in damages based on customers that defected to Rimini.
The three major music labels -- Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group -- and two of their subsidiaries, Atlantic and Capitol, filed suit in the U.S. District Court of Southern Florida, alleging "blatant" copyright infringement by the nascent app maker Aurous, whose development was led by Andrew Sampson. “This service is a flagrant example of a business model powered by copyright theft on a massive scale," writes the RIAA in a statement. "Like Grokster, Limewire or Grooveshark, it is neither licensed nor legal."
Apple Inc. could be facing up to $862 million in damages after a U.S. jury found the iPhone maker used technology owned by the University of Wisconsin-Madison's licensing arm without permission in chips found in many of its most popular devices. The jury in Madison, Wisconsin also said the patent, which improves processor efficiency, was valid.
California has leaped to the forefront of protecting digital privacy -- from Big Brother, big business and even your Smart TV -- as Gov. Jerry Brown signed a raft of bills aimed at taming a world of increasingly surreptitious technology. The new laws will prevent state and local law enforcement from snooping on emails without a warrant and alert the public when they use high-tech surveillance to tap into cellphone calls.
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