A new Republican proposal to resolve the long-running fight over taxing internet sales across state lines drew praise from Amazon.com Inc. and House Speaker Paul Ryan, but other retailers and conservative groups remain wary. Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R., Va.), Judiciary Committee chairman and the draft bill’s author, must persuade conservatives he isn’t pushing a tax increase or a sharp expansion of state power.
The FBI is warning state officials to boost their election security in light of evidence that hackers breached related data systems in two states. In a confidential "flash" alert from its cyber division, first reported by Yahoo News and posted online by others, the FBI says it's investigating the pair of incidents and advising states to scan their systems for specific signs of hacking.
Recent initiatives by technology companies to push back against Islamic State’s social-media messaging highlight a sobering fact: The U.S. government’s battle on that front has mostly sputtered. In a number of terrorist attacks over the past year, the attackers were found to have been inspired by Islamic State propaganda and videos, which are often described as Hollywood-level productions.
Iran has detected and removed malicious software from two of its petrochemical complexes, a senior military official said, after announcing last week it was investigating whether recent petrochemical fires were caused by cyber attacks. The official said the malware at the two plants was inactive and had not played a role in the fires.
The son of a Russian lawmaker was convicted in federal court in a hacking and fraud case that has provoked Moscow’s ire. Roman Seleznev of Vladivostok, Russia, was called “one of the most prolific credit card thieves in history” by prosecutors after he allegedly hacked into hundreds of businesses in the U.S. and around the world, stole credit-card data, and sold it on the internet, resulting in more than $169 million in fraud losses.
Despite the lurking threats, many small businesses still don’t have cyber insurance coverage, said Michael Carr, a certified information privacy professional (CIPP/US) and technology practice leader at Argo Group International, who has been involved with the industry for more than a decade. Carr recommends small business owners purchase cyber insurance for multiple reasons, mainly because it may not be covered by traditional insurance policies. He says the ever expanding industry now covers “any kind of liability arising out of network security perils,” as well as data restoration costs, business interruption, regulatory fines, ransomware demands and obligations to third-parties.
In what might be Michigan's first revenge-pornography case resulting in a monetary judgment, a woman was awarded $500,000 after her ex-boyfriend posted nude photographs of her on multiple Internet sites. Revenge-pornography cases usually involve someone else obtaining photos of a former partner and posting them on the Internet in a retaliatory matter.
China is taking a more inclusive tack in instituting cybersecurity standards for foreign technology companies, allowing them to join a key government committee in an effort to ease foreign concerns over the controls. The committee under the government’s powerful cyberspace administration is in charge of defining cybersecurity standards.
WhatsApp announced its first privacy policy update in four years as it let users know how and why it will share data with Facebook. If bothered by that potential privacy issue, users have 30 days from agreeing to the terms to stop Facebook grabbing the data.
One of the world’s most evasive digital arms dealers is believed to have been taking advantage of three security vulnerabilities in popular Apple products in its efforts to spy on dissidents and journalists. Investigators discovered that a company called the NSO Group, an Israeli outfit that sells software that invisibly tracks a target’s mobile phone, was responsible for the intrusions.
Facebook Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Twitter Inc. are deliberately shirking responsibility in the fight against Islamic State and other terrorist groups, an influential committee of British lawmakers said in a report, reigniting a war of words over the role social media plays in radicalization. “Huge corporations like Google, Facebook and Twitter, with their billion-dollar incomes, are consciously failing to tackle this threat and passing the buck by hiding behind their supranational legal status, despite knowing that their sites are being used by the instigators of terror,” said lawmaker Keith Vaz, a member of the opposition Labour Party, who heads the committee.
Over 25 million accounts associated with forums hosted by Russian internet giant Mail.ru have been stolen by hackers. Two hackers carried out attacks on three separate game-related forums in July and August.
South Korea said it will extend a review of a request by Google Inc. in June for permission to take government mapping data out of the country for use in servers worldwide, with a decision due by Nov. 23.
Leslie Jones, a co-star of this year’s “Ghostbusters” movie who has been besieged in the past month by online abusers who have targeted her appearance and her race, was victimized again when her personal website appeared to have been hacked. The hackers inserted a picture of the gorilla Harambe on the site, and exposed what appeared to be explicit photos of the actress, along with pictures of her driver’s license and a passport, and images of her with stars like Rihanna, Kanye West and Kim Kardashian West.
France and Germany urged the European Union’s executive body to propose new rules that would compel operators of internet messaging services to help authorities decrypt private communications as part of terror investigations. French and German intelligence services are struggling to intercept messages of Islamic State militants and other terrorists, who increasingly use chat apps like Facebook’s WhatsApp, Apple Inc.’s iMessage or privacy-centric app Telegram to plan their attacks.
The parent company of infidelity dating website Ashley Madison was responsible for numerous violations of privacy laws at the time of a massive release of customer data in a cyber attack last year, privacy watchdogs in Canada and Australia said. The two countries launched an investigation after the 2015 breach of Avid Life Media Inc's computer network, when hackers exposed the personal details of millions who signed up for the site with the slogan "Life is short. Have an affair."
Fitbit Inc. did not steal rival Jawbone's trade secrets, a U.S. International Trade Commission judge ruled, dashing Jawbone's hopes of securing an import ban against Fitbit's wearable fitness tracking devices.
Hackers thought to be working for Russian intelligence have carried out a series of cyber breaches targeting reporters at the New York Times and other U.S. news organizations, according to U.S. officials briefed on the matter. The intrusions, detected in recent months, are under investigation by the FBI and other US security agencies.
WikiLeaks' global crusade to expose government secrets is causing collateral damage to the privacy of hundreds of innocent people, including survivors of sexual abuse, sick children and the mentally ill, The Associated Press has found. In the past year alone, the radical transparency group has published medical files belonging to scores of ordinary citizens while many hundreds more have had sensitive family, financial or identity records posted to the web.
Questions surrounding Hillary Clinton’s email practices flared up again, with a Federal District Court judge ordering the State Department to provide a timetable for releasing nearly 15,000 new emails uncovered by the FBI investigation of her personal email account and server while she was secretary of state. The judge, James E. Boasberg, pressed the State Department to accelerate its review of those emails, which were on a disc that the FBI turned over to the department in late July.
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