U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said that his department has been consulting social media in reviews of immigration applications since early this year, hitting back at criticism that U.S. authorities are not doing enough to weed out potential security threats. The Department of Homeland Security has been criticized over reports it did not routinely consult social media during the vetting process for visa applications.
Hillary Clinton accelerated her call for technology companies to cooperate with the government and develop a “unified national strategy in cyberspace” to stop the Islamic State from using the Internet to recruit members in the United States and around the world. Speaking at the University of Minnesota a few hours before Republican presidential candidates were to debate in Las Vegas, Mrs. Clinton made her third speech in three weeks about how to counter violent jihadism.
European officials approved long-awaited data protection regulations, the latest effort in the region to give people a greater say over how their digital information is collected and managed. The changes, expected to go into effect by early 2017, would put into law across the 28-member European Union some policies now enforced after court rulings or in specific countries only.
Police in the UK say they've made an arrest in the hacking of kids' technology maker VTech, which compromised the personal information of more than 6 million children around the world. The South East Regional Organised Crime Unit, a regional task force made up of a handful of English police departments, says its cybercrime unit arrested a 21-year-old man was on hacking-related charges in Bracknell, a town about 30 miles west of London.
Three men were arrested for engaging in a wide-ranging hacking and spamming scheme that targeted personal information of 60 million people including Comcast customers, U.S. prosecutors announced. Timothy Livingston, 30, Tomasz Chmielarz, 32, and Devin McArthur, 27, were named in an indictment filed in federal court in Newark, New Jersey that charged them with conspiracy to commit fraud and related activity among other offenses.
After enduring more than a year of criticism, Facebook is making major changes to the way it enforces its real name policy. A new system for reporting fake names along with a new system for responding to those reports now includes specific support channels for LGBTQ issues, non-Western names, and instances of stalking or abuse.
A white hat hacker discovered a database from anti-virus provider MacKeeper containing 13 million customer records was accessible by just visiting a selection of IP addresses, no username or password required. Researcher Chris Vickery said he uncovered four IP addresses that took him straight to a MongoDB database, containing a range of personal information, including names, email addresses, usernames, password hashes, phone numbers, IP addresses, system information, as well as software licenses and activation codes.
Samsung took to the U.S. Supreme Court in a last-ditch effort to pare back the more than $548 million in damages it must pay Apple for infringing the patents and designs of the iPhone. Samsung's petition must first be accepted for review by the Supreme Court. It is the latest step in a long-running patent lawsuit between the rival companies that epitomized the global smartphone wars.
Amid a thriving and highly profitable black market overseas for smartphones, more criminals are turning to fraud and identity theft to obtain discounted devices in bulk, according to law-enforcement officials. Authorities say the kill switch, which remotely deactivates stolen phones, has made street-level smartphone theft less lucrative. But joint investigations by state and federal authorities in Minnesota, Michigan and Georgia have uncovered vast networks of criminals who use stolen information, fake credit cards and dummy corporations, among other means, to obtain discounted phones in bulk from U.S. carriers.
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman invited the public to test the speed of their Internet and submit the results online as part of an ongoing probe into whether large providers may be short-changing customers with slower-than-advertised speeds. The office launched an investigation into Verizon Communications Inc., Cablevision Systems Corp. and Time Warner Cable Inc. in October over the issue.
Government officials from more than 190 counties will meet in New York for a two-day discussion (the United Nations’ 10 Year Review of the World Summit on the Information Society, or WSIS+10 Review) that could, in principle, have a huge influence on how the Internet is governed for the next decade. “There is still an ongoing debate over this question of whether the internet and the policy environment for the Internet should be multilateral or multistakeholder. That continues to be the sticking point for many countries,” the Internet Society‘s VP of Global Policy Sally Wentworth says.
At least 11 Twitter users received notifications that their accounts might have been targeted by state-sponsored attackers. Among those impacted are mass surveillance researchers, security professionals, and at least one privacy organization.
DraftKings Inc. and FanDuel Inc. can continue doing business in New York for now, after an appeals court halted a trial judge’s order to temporarily halt daily fantasy games in the state. An appeals judge granted the companies a reprieve until an appellate panel has a chance to rule on a request to block the temporary ban while the companies challenge it.
On a day it had previously set aside for trolling ISIS, hacktivist collective Anonymous spared some time to launch an attack on the website for Donald Trump's trademark New York City skyscraper. There is evidence the group has been targeting the site since at least Wednesday, when it posted a YouTube video warning against Trump's plan to halt the immigration of Muslims into the U.S.
A New York judge ruled that the leading daily fantasy sports companies FanDuel and DraftKings must cease operating in the state, in what could be a crippling blow to the fast-growing, multibillion-dollar industry. New York Supreme Court Justice Manuel Mendez granted an injunction sought by Attorney General Eric Schneiderman after hearing arguments last month over whether daily fantasy sports games amounted to illegal games of chance or lawful ones involving skill.
Major technology companies are pushing Congress to keep any net neutrality-related measures out of an end-of-year spending bill lawmakers are seeking to wrap-up next week. More than a dozen companies and trade groups representing the largest players in the industry sent a letter to House and Senate leadership calling for a trio of provisions to be kept out of the “chaotic appropriations process.”
House and Senate negotiators announced that they have reached agreement on bipartisan legislation to make permanent a moratorium that prevents states from taxing access to the Internet. The moratorium was first enacted in 1998. State and local governments that already had Internet taxes were allowed to keep them under the current moratorium, but under the new agreement, jurisdictions with Internet taxes would be required to phase them out by mid-2020.
A new data transfer pact between the European Union and Washington will give the EU the right to pull the plug on the deal if it fears the United States is not safeguarding privacy enough, the EU Justice Commissioner said. A previous transatlantic data transfer framework, Safe Harbour, was struck down on Oct. 6 by the European Union's top court because of worries about mass U.S. surveillance practices.
The European Union is looking into whether services such as Google News and Yahoo News should pay to display snippets of news articles, wading into a bitter debate between the online industry and publishers. The European Commission, the EU's executive, said it will consider whether "any action specific to news aggregators is needed, including intervening on the definition of rights."
The Federal Trade Commission has settled a lawsuit accusing hotel group Wyndham Worldwide Corp. of failing to properly safeguard customer information, in a case arising from three data breaches affecting more than 619,000 customers. The consent order was filed with the federal court in Newark, New Jersey, 3-1/2 months after a federal appeals court in Philadelphia said the FTC had authority to regulate corporate cyber security.
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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.