The Home Depot Inc. has reached a contingent settlement with MasterCard International Inc. over the home improvement giant's massive 2014 data breach. Attorneys representing the financial institutions suing Home Depot over the data breach are unhappy about notices of the potential settlement that were sent to banks, calling them "misleading and coercive."
The Chinese military scaled back its cybertheft of U.S. commercial secrets in the wake of Justice Department indictments of five officers, and the surprising drawdown shows that the law enforcement action had a more significant impact than is commonly assumed, current and former U.S. officials said. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has not substantially reengaged in commercial cyberespionage since then-Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced charges against the officers in May 2014, the officials said.
Ryanair has launched legal proceedings against Google and online travel agent eDreams in the Irish High Court over what it says are misleading adverts for Ryanair flights, the airline said. Ryanair said Google was allowing eDreams to use "misleading subdomain" www.Ryanair.eDreams.com and a web site with branding similar to Ryanair's to sell tickets at higher prices than on Ryanair's own web site.
After a decade of court battles, the Internet entrepreneur who filed the first legal challenge to a type of secret administrative order known as a national security letter revealed the breadth of an FBI demand in 2004 for information about a customer. National security letters, which empower federal investigators to seek certain customer records without court approval or oversight, were significantly expanded as part of the USA Patriot Act after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
At least two U.S. states plan to investigate a breach at Hong Kong-based toymaker VTech Holdings Ltd, which surfaced late last week and exposed data of millions of customers who use a portal for downloading content including children's games. Security experts said the attack, which was disclosed on the crucial Black Friday start of the holiday U.S. shopping season, was noteworthy because it had exposed data of children.
China's Public Security Minister Guo Shengkun is in the United States to take part in the first high-level dialogue on cyber crime between the two countries, state media reported. During his visit, Guo will meet Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson, Xinhua state news agency said.
BlackBerry will shut down operations in Pakistan at year's end because demands from the country's Telecommunications Authority would result in a massive invasion of user privacy, the company said. BlackBerry refuses to agree to the Pakistani government's order to monitor BlackBerry Enterprise Services (BES), including encrypted emails and BBM messages sent and received in the country.
A convicted software pirate has been handed an unusual punishment. The man, named only as Jakub F, was told he would be spared having to pay hefty damages as long as a film denouncing piracy he was made to produce got 200,000 views.
The European Union wants to enhance the power of the bloc's national privacy regulators in policing a planned new EU-U.S. data pact after the previous one was struck down by a top EU court on concerns about mass U.S. surveillance. Brussels and Washington are locked in negotiations to forge a new framework enabling data transfers from Europe to the United States, which are otherwise subject to cumbersome and lengthy legal processes under EU data protection law.
Copyright laws don’t shield a major Internet provider from liability for illegal music downloading by its subscribers, according to a ruling in a closely watched case between cable company Cox Communications Inc. and two music publishers. The ruling, by U.S. District Judge Liam O’Grady in Alexandria, Va., could open the door to more downloading lawsuits against the cable industry by movie studios and music publishers, according to some legal experts.
VTech, a Chinese company that makes popular electronic toys for kids, had its app store hacked. An "unauthorized party" accessed customer information in a database for VTech's Learning Lodge app store on November 14, the company said in a statement.
The Federal Communications Commission has hired Jonathan Mayer, a rising star in privacy circles, to serve as its technical lead for investigations into telephone, television and Internet service providers. He will work primarily on consumer protection issues, especially those having to do with security and privacy, agency spokeswoman Shannon Gilson confirmed.
Texas halted dating service Lone Star Introductions and others from operating in the state because it said the firms had harassed and threatened clients, the Attorney General's office said. A state district court issued an injunction that calls on the dating service and affiliated dating sites, including eLove Matchmaking, International Dating Ventures and International Introductions, to cease operations in the state.
Alphabet Inc.'s Google said it has evaluated more than 1.2 million Web pages for compliance with Europe’s “Right to Be Forgotten” ruling, and removed 42% of them from its search results. Facebook Inc.'s domain was the top one affected by link removals.
The number of piracy takedown requests sent to Google is continuing to balloon: The search giant now receives around 2.2 million demands every single day. According to new data published by Google on Sunday as part of its Transparency Report, it received 66,318,159 "URLs Requested to be removed" over the last month.
Cyber attacks on the private sector are an increasingly important risk in corporate credit analysis, U.S. ratings agency Moody’s Investors Service said. The threat of computer hacking varies from sector to sector and remains hard to measure because intrusions often go undetected or are not publicly disclosed, Moody’s said.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has teamed up with data and design company Visualizing Impact to launch onlinecensorship.org, which collects and tracks content takedown requests.The site collects user-submitted reports of "erroneously or unjustly removed" content and writes reports about these takedown practices (in addition to featuring certain individual takedown stories).
Austrian student Max Schrems's attempt to bring a class-action lawsuit against Facebook over its privacy policies will head to Austria's Supreme Court to determine whether such collective legal action is allowed, his group said. The law student has claimed 500 euros ($531) in damages each for the more than 25,000 signatories to his lawsuit -- the latest in a series of European challenges to U.S. technology firms and their handling of personal data.
A political candidate sued to identify the author of an unusual comment on a newspaper's website. After $35,000 in legal fees, the Illinois Supreme Court ruled Comcast had to give up its subscriber's info and the name was finally made public.
Domain name overseer ICANN has spent $2.5 million in the past year lobbying the U.S. government, putting the small non-profit on a par with multi-national corporations. The figure is five times larger than the organization has previously admitted to.
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