First lady Melania Trump plans to convene tech giants including Amazon, Facebook, Google, Twitter and Snap to discuss ways to combat online harassment and promote Internet safety, according to four people familiar with her efforts. The meeting at the White House, slated for March 20, marks the first major policy push in the first lady’s long-ago announced campaign to combat cyberbullying.
A group of major companies that includes Disney, IBM and Oracle is urging the Senate to pass an online sex trafficking bill that some internet firms believe could upend what they see as crucial legal protections for their industry. The companies, which have all been at odds with internet giants in the past, argued that the bill is necessary to crack down on the online sex trafficking trade.
Britain said it was considering taxing the revenues of internet companies like Facebook and Google until international tax rules are changed to cope with digital firms that can shift sales and profits between jurisdictions. Finance minister Philip Hammond said he had published a paper setting out proposals for taxing global digital firms before a meeting with his G20 counterparts.
The world’s financial leaders will call on international standard-setting bodies on March 20 for stronger monitoring of crypto-assets and to assess the need for a multilateral response as such assets could at some point threaten financial stability. The call appears in a draft communique prepared for the meeting of finance ministers and central bank governors of the world’s 20 biggest economies in Buenos Aires on March 19-20, seen by Reuters.
President Donald Trump issued an executive order Monday blocking Broadcom Ltd. from acquiring Qualcomm Inc., scuttling a $117 billion hostile takeover that had been subject of scrutiny over the deal’s threat to U.S. national security. Trump acted on a recommendation by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., which reviews acquisitions of American firms by foreign investors.
Yahoo has been ordered by a federal judge to face much of a lawsuit in the United States claiming that the personal information of all 3 billion users was compromised in a series of data breaches. In a decision on Friday night, U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh in San Jose, California rejected a bid by Verizon Communications Inc, which bought Yahoo’s Internet business last June, to dismiss many claims, including for negligence and breach of contract.
World Wide Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee issued an open letter, 29 years to the day after he first proposed his idea for the online information management system that would later become known as the Web. In the letter, he outlined what he thinks we need to do to save the Web from the concentration of power of a “few dominant platforms” that has “made it possible to weaponize the Web at scale.”
Weeks after Donald Trump was elected president, Russia-backed online “trolls” flooded social media to try to block Mitt Romney from securing a top job in the incoming administration, a Wall Street Journal analysis shows. The operatives called the 2012 GOP presidential nominee, then a contender for secretary of state, a “two headed snake” and a “globalist puppet,” promoted a rally outside Trump Tower and spread a petition to block Mr. Romney’s appointment to the top diplomatic job, according to a review of now-deleted social-media posts.
For years, a slew of shadowy companies have sold so-called encrypted phones, custom BlackBerry or Android devices that sometimes have the camera and microphone removed and only send secure messages through private networks. Now, the FBI has arrested the owner of one of the most established companies, Phantom Secure, as part of a complex law enforcement operation, according to court records and sources familiar with the matter.
Researchers have discovered malware so stealthy it remained hidden for six years despite infecting at least 100 computers worldwide. Slingshot -- which gets its name from text found inside some of the recovered malware samples -- is among the most advanced attack platforms ever discovered, which means it was likely developed on behalf of a well-resourced country, researchers with Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab reported.
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.) says he'd like to grill America's social media companies at a hearing about the way threats of gun violence, including against schools, spread online. Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy has said he wants the chief executives of major social media companies to testify before Graham's subcommittee.
The top U.S. general in Europe said that the U.S. government did not have an effective unified approach to deal with Russia’s cyber threat. U.S. officials have warned repeatedly that Russia is trying to interfere in the 2018 mid-term U.S. elections by hacking or using social media to spread propaganda and misleading reports, much as it did during the 2016 presidential race.
A federal judicial panel said that challenges to the Federal Communications Commission’s repeal of the Obama era open internet rules will be heard by an appeals court based in San Francisco. The U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict litigation said it randomly selected the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court circuit to hear the consolidated challenges.
Suspected North Korean hackers blitzed Turkish financial institutions and a government organization, seeking intelligence for a future heist, a new report says. The attacks on March 2 and 3, identified by cyber researcher McAfee LLC in a report, attempted to lure targets with faux links to a popular cryptocurrency platform, allowing hackers to plunder sensitive information about the breached computer networks.
Two Democratic senators asked major vendors of U.S. voting equipment whether they have allowed Russian entities to scrutinize their software, saying the practice could allow Moscow to hack into American elections infrastructure. The letter from Senators Amy Klobuchar and Jeanne Shaheen followed a series of Reuters reports saying that several major global technology providers have allowed Russian authorities to hunt for vulnerabilities in software deeply embedded across the U.S. government.
The FBI views companies hit by cyber attacks as victims and will not rush to share their information with other agencies investigating whether they failed to protect customer data, its chief said. Christopher Wray, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, encouraged companies to promptly report when they are hacked to help the FBI investigate and prevent future data breaches.
A newly released report by the Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General found many of the agency's systems, including both unclassified and national security systems containing the highest "top secret" information, were running outdated, unsupported operating systems that in some cases hadn't been patched with security updates for years. Some of the vulnerabilities were so serious that they "expose DHS data to unnecessary risks," said the investigators, and that the agency needed to protect its systems "more fully and effectively."
Bitcoin slumped for a third day amid fears of a regulatory clampdown on cryptocurrency exchanges in Japan and the U.S., the world’s most active markets for digital assets. The biggest virtual currency declined more than 3 percent in early Asia trading, extending its slump below $10,000, after Japan’s Financial Services Agency ordered two exchanges to halt operations for a month and penalized four others.
Lawmakers pushed officials to crack down on the growing number of counterfeit goods sold online. “With the rise of popular online market places, counterfeiters have greater access to the market and can easily sell their phony products directly to consumers,” said Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) during a hearing by his panel on protecting online consumers.
Virtual currencies like bitcoin can be regulated as commodities by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a federal judge ruled. U.S. District Judge Jack Weinstein in Brooklyn ruled that the CFTC had standing to bring a fraud lawsuit against New York resident Patrick McDonnell and his company Coin Drop Markets, allowing the case to go forward.
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