The U.S. Senate is expected to begin considering soon a long-delayed bill that would make it easier for corporations to share information about cyber attacks with each other or the government without concern about lawsuits. The House of Representatives passed its version of the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) in April.
Tech companies are still reeling from a top European court's decision invalidating Safe Harbor, a trade agreement used by thousands of American companies to transfer European's data across the Atlantic. In a new blog post, Microsoft president and chief legal officer Brad Smith argues that privacy is a human right and the Safe Harbor decision is an opportunity for stronger privacy regulations.
The simple new version of Popcorn Time built for the web has moved to a new domain after having its original site shut down. The site was launched over the weekend and allows visitors to easily browse and stream pirated movies and TV shows, but its presence on the web seems to have made it a big target.
A former U.S. federal agent was sentenced to 78 months in prison for stealing bitcoins during the government's investigation of Silk Road and for secretly soliciting payment from the operator of the online black market for information on its probe. Carl Force, a former U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent, admitted to charges of extortion, money laundering and obstruction of justice.
Facebook will now issue alerts to users who the social network believes are being targeted by state-sponsored hackers, according to a message posted by Alex Stamos, Facebook's chief security officer. "While we have always taken steps to secure accounts that we believe to have been compromised, we decided to show this additional warning if we have a strong suspicion that an attack could be government-sponsored," Stamos wrote.
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.
Hackers associated with the Chinese government have tried to penetrate at least seven U.S. companies in the three weeks since Washington and Beijing agreed not to spy on each other for commercial reasons, according to a prominent U.S. security firm. CrowdStrike Inc. said software it placed at five U.S. technology and two pharmaceutical companies had detected and rebuffed the attacks, which began on Sept. 26.
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.
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