Over the weekend David Miranda, partner of Glen Greenwald – the Guardian journalist who published the first of a series of reports detailing United States and British mass surveillance programs, based on documents obtained by Edward Snowden – was deta…
Google Responds to British Lawsuit: UK Privacy Laws Don’t Apply
There have been two new developments in the British lawsuit against Google for allegedly overriding Safari privacy settings to track users’ internet habits: firstly the High Court granted permission to serve on Google Inc, putting the papers into the p…
Are Encryption Keys Protected by the Fifth Amendment?
A man was arrested in Wisconsin this week as the latest move in a long-running battle by the authorities to force him to hand over decryption keys for hard drives believed to contain child pornography.
Washington Post (& CNN, & Time, but not NYT) Hacked by Syrian Electronic Army
The Washington Post yesterday issued a brief statement confirming that it had indeed been breached by SEA. At around the same time, the New York Times claimed that a brief outage on Wednesday had been caused by maintenance rather than hacking.
Error 451 – Unavailable for Legal Reasons
The Open Rights Group has launched a campaign for the adoption of a new HTTP 400 range status code: Error 451, designed to indicate that access to a page or website is unavailable by court order.
IBM to Acquire Financial Malware Defense Firm Trusteer
IBM has announced a definitive agreement to buy the Israeli firm Trusteer, which specializes in anti-financial malware and fraud software. Although terms have not been revealed, market estimates put the price at around $800-$900 million.
Users Have No Expectation of Privacy in Gmail Says Google
In filing a motion to dismiss a class action that it illegally intercepts and reads emails, Google lawyers have invoked a ruling from a 1979 court case (Smith vs Maryland) that originally referred to telephony.
DNS Posioning and Spoofing Made Simpler with BIND Vulnerability
Web page spoofing just got easier: One of the defenses against Domain Name System (DNS) cache poisoning and web address spoofing lies in the randomization of the IP address of the queried name server. But a newly found vulnerability in BIND, the most w…
Hacking the Lightbulb: Malware Can Produce a Sustained Blackout
Considering the hyper-connected world that we live in, a good security mantra should be: if it can be connected to the web, it can be hacked. Even light bulbs. Yes, even light bulbs.
Cyber Spies in London Recycle Bins Told to Move On
News emerged last week that a London firm had been installing wifi snooping equipment in London recycle bins, spying on the mobile phones of passers-by. But the City of London authorities have moved quickly with a cease and desist instruction.