The U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) has asked for views on whether the handover of domain name system functions from the agency to a multi-stakeholder model should be "unwound." The NTIA published a request for public comments in the Federal Register on June 5 and has since extended the comment period from July 2 to July 17 in response to requests for additional time to provide feedback.
Britain’s data watchdog fined Yahoo roughly $334,000 for its handling of a massive email cyberattack in 2014 that exposed the personal data of millions of users worldwide. The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) focused its investigation on approximately 515,121 email accounts of United Kingdom (U.K.) customers, which Yahoo's London-based U.K. Services oversaw.
An Indiana couple and their accomplice were sentenced to federal prison for launching and operating a scheme that defrauded Amazon of $1.2 million in consumer electronics. Erin and Leah Finan, both 38, a married couple from the Muncie-Anderson area, pleaded guilty to federal mail fraud and money laundering charges and were sentenced to 71 months and 68 months in prison, respectively.
Facebook Inc. told the U.S. Senate the company has launched a design lab that will work to improve the way people get informed about sharing their personal data. The initiative, called TTC labs, was started “in recognition of the need for improved approaches to data transparency across all digital services,” and involves partnerships with others in academia, design and industry, Facebook told the Senate in its response to 2,000 questions posed after Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg testified at congressional hearings in April.
Vietnam’s plans to vigorously police the internet took a step forward when it adopted a cybersecurity law that requires Internet companies such as Facebook and Google to store their Vietnam-based users’ data on servers in the country. Critics say the new law could make it easier for authorities in the one-party communist state to track down critics online.
Apple has added new language to its App Store review guidelines related to cryptocurrency. Under the Hardware Compatibility section, Apple now states that "apps, including any third party advertisements displayed within them, may not run unrelated background processes, such as cryptocurrency mining."
After more than a year of vicious accusations and a flurry of lawsuits and counter claims, Apple Inc. and Qualcomm Inc.’s multibillion-dollar legal dispute is about to get serious. Hearings in the three most important markets -- the U.S., China and Germany -- will soon determine whether Apple’s attempt to save itself billions in technology licensing payments by forcing one of the world’s biggest chipmakers to change the way it does business is legal.
The repeal of Obama-era net neutrality protections officially took effect on Monday, nearly six months after the Republican-led Federal Communications Commission voted to roll back the rules. In a press release, the FCC said the repeal does away with "unnecessary, heavy-handed regulations" and replaces them with "common-sense regulations that will promote investment and broadband deployment."
The U.S. Treasury imposed sanctions on three Russian individuals and five companies, saying they had worked with Moscow’s military and intelligence services on ways to conduct cyber attacks against the United States and its allies. “The United States is engaged in an ongoing effort to counter malicious actors working at the behest of the Russian Federation and its military and intelligence units to increase Russia’s offensive cyber capabilities,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in a statement.
The U.S. has arrested 74 people including nearly 30 in Nigeria, as part of an effort to combat email scam artists. It said the arrests reflect a coordinated crackdown on people who convince correspondents to wire them money for fraudulent activities.
Australia has established a security task force to guard against cyber attacks and interference in elections, the government said, amid concerns foreign powers are meddling in domestic affairs and ahead of five elections next month. The newly-created Electoral Integrity Task Force will identify and address risks to Australia’s electoral process, a Department of Home Affairs spokesperson told Reuters by email.
South Korean cryptocurrency exchange Coinrail said it was hacked over the weekend, prompting an extended sell-off of bitcoin to a 2-month low amid growing concerns about security at small- to mid-sized virtual currency exchanges. In a statement on its website, Coinrail said its system was under “cyber intrusion,” causing a loss for about 30 percent of the coins traded on the exchange.
Customers who use social media to vent frustration at their banks when services go down are inadvertently making themselves targets for fraudsters, law enforcement officials and industry insiders said. That was the case for customers of Britain’s TSB, many of whom took to social media to complain after a computer systems migration by the bank left thousands of users locked out of their accounts.
Chinese government hackers have compromised the computers of a Navy contractor, stealing massive amounts of highly sensitive data related to undersea warfare — including secret plans to develop a supersonic anti-ship missile for use on U.S. submarines by 2020, according to American officials. The hackers targeted a contractor who works for the Naval Undersea Warfare Center, a military organization headquartered in Newport, R.I., that conducts research and development for submarines and underwater weaponry.
Spies are increasingly hacking into the smartphones of political opponents and dissidents around the world, security researchers say, giving them access to data far more sensitive than what most people keep on personal computers. The increase is being driven by the proliferation both of low-cost smartphones and of companies selling spyware and hacking tools to access them, said Claudio Guarnieri, a security researcher with the human-rights group Amnesty International.
A Facebook bug that was live for four days in May set millions of users’ default sharing settings to public, the company revealed. Facebook said it would be notifying the 14 million users who had posted publicly between May 18 and 22.
Google faces fines for hindering competition with its Android mobile phone system as European Union antitrust watchdogs get ready to add to last year’s record 2.4 billion-euro ($2.8 billion) penalty against the U.S. tech giant, according to people familiar with the case. The EU is in the final stages of the Android probe and could issue a fine as soon as July, according to the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the process isn’t public.
A U.S. senator is seeking responses from Google parent Alphabet Inc. and Twitter Inc. on whether the U.S. companies have any data sharing agreements with Chinese vendors, following a disclosure from Facebook Inc. Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat who is vice chairman of the Intelligence Committee, said in a statement he has written letters to the companies for information on data sharing agreements, noting that since 2012 “the relationship between the Chinese Communist Party and equipment makers like Huawei and ZTE has been an area of national security concern.”
An interesting ruling by Europe’s top court could have some major implications for data mining tech giants like Facebook and Google, along with anyone who administers pages that allow platforms to collect and process their visitors’ personal data — such as a Facebook fan page or even potentially a site running Google Analytics. Passing judgement on a series of legal questions referred to it, the CJEU has held that the administrator of a fan page on Facebook is jointly responsible with Facebook for the processing of the data of visitors to the page — aligning with the the Advocate General’s opinion to the court.
Facebook admitted that it allowed Huawei, a Chinese telecom company with alleged ties to the country’s government, to have special access to data about the social site’s users, an arrangement that could stoke fears that consumers’ personal information is at risk. The relationship between Facebook and Huawei was one of the special agreements brokered between the social giant and device makers over the past decade that sought to make it easier for Facebook users to access site services on a wide array of technologies.
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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.