FBI Director James Comey warned again about the bureau’s inability to access digital devices because of encryption and said investigators were collecting information about the challenge in preparation for an “adult conversation” next year. Widespread encryption built into smartphones is “making more and more of the room that we are charged to investigate dark,” Comey said in a cybersecurity symposium.
European privacy regulators are investigating messaging service WhatsApp’s plan to share user information including phone numbers with its parent, Facebook Inc., adding to pressure on both sides of the Atlantic over the social media firm’s privacy practices. A European Union body representing the bloc’s 28 national data-protection authorities said that its members were following “with great vigilance” changes to WhatsApp’s privacy policy.
Six U.S. senators have urged President Barack Obama to prioritize cyber crime at this weekend's Group of 20 summit in China, in the wake of the theft of $81 million from Bangladesh's central bank, according to a letter obtained by Reuters. In the letter sent to the White House ahead of the Sept. 4-5 summit, Sherrod Brown, a senior Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, and five other Democratic senators say they want the U.S. president to press leaders from the world's 20 biggest economies to commit in joint communiques to a "coordinated strategy to combat cyber-crime at critical financial institutions."
Europe’s antitrust enforcer ordered Ireland to claw back billions from Apple over illegal tax breaks, a move that will ramp up trans-Atlantic tensions over how much global companies should pay to countries where they do business. The decision by Margrethe Vestager, the European Union commissioner for competition, is the culmination of a two-year investigation into whether Ireland gave preferential treatment to Apple, part of a broader crackdown on corporate tax avoidance.
A federal appeals court has dismissed a case brought by the Federal Trade Commission against AT&T for throttling, or slowing data speeds, on millions of customers with unlimited smartphone data plans. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in a decision filed Monday, reversed a lower court's denial of AT&T's motion to dismiss the throttling lawsuit.
Germany's interior minister visited Facebook's offices in Berlin and said it should be more proactive in removing forbidden content from its social network platform. "Facebook should take down racist content or calls for violence from its pages on its own initiative even if it hasn't yet received a complaint," Thomas de Maiziere said.
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.
A website scheme run by Ian Hawes, a 25-year-old Maryland man who has no affiliation with Donald Trump or his campaign, has preyed on more than 20,000 unsuspecting donors, collecting more than $1 million in the process. At a glance, his website looks virtually indistinguishable from an official Trump website, both seemingly offering a chance for two to win dinner with the Republican presidential nominee.
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.
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