Items tagged with Government
We wrote earlier about the kind of success Google has been seeing with its Android bug bounty program -- success that has led the company to actually increase its rewards. Over the years, we've seen other major companies offer bug bounties as well, such as Facebook and Microsoft, so it's clear that they can provide...
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It's no secret that law enforcement agencies and governments at large want to have access to our personal data whether we like it or not. Hot on the heels of the FBI managing to bypass security measures that should have protected the data on a terrorist's iPhone 5c, we see that the case is definitely not closed. As...
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In December, HotHardware reported that Microsoft had entered the planning stages for introducing a tweaked version of its Windows 10 operating system in China, and just three months later, the first iteration is being delivered. You have Windows 10 Pro? China has Windows 10 'Zhuangongban'. That rolls right off the...
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Over the past couple of years, law enforcement at large has ramped up its efforts to try to gain access to communication mediums, which can include being able to browse unlocked smartphones. As it stands today, most jurisdictions do not give a member of law enforcement the ability to gain access to a smartphone...
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Last week, we learned about the company teaming up with others, such as Microsoft and Yahoo, to make SMTP 'Strict Transport Security' a reality, a protocol that would make it even harder for malicious users to gain access to our email. In a new blog post, the company draws our attention to SMTP STS as well as a couple...
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It's been an incredible month for Apple, the FBI, and all of us. We've been sitting back, watching the battle of these two giants, as a conclusion about whether or not the FBI should have a right to access encrypted data on someone's smartphone is reached. It seems like not a day can go by without an update to this...
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We have been hearing so much about the FBI's pressure on Apple in its encryption fight in recent weeks that it might be easy to forget that it's only just begun in recent weeks. But what a few weeks it's been!
In the middle of February, a federal judge ordered Apple to break encryption on an iPhone that belonged to...
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It's not often that people feel compelled to side with Google on the topic of privacy, but the company's newest CEO, Sundar Pinchai, gives us a great reason to. As Brandon covered in great detail yesterday, Apple has been ordered by U.S. Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym to provide the FBI access to an iPhone 5c that was...
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If you think that the likes of the NSA needs to rely on zero-day exploits to get their job done, you apparently have things completely wrong. At the USENIX Enigma security conference in San Francisco this week, the NSA's chief of Tailored Access Operations, Rob Joyce said that it's his team's sheer talent makes its...
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A hot topic brought up often in the search for America's next president is the security and privacy of the country's citizens. Unfortunately, such matters rarely find themselves in the hands of politicians who truly understand what they're talking about, and we saw just such an example again Saturday night, during the...
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Over the past couple of years, we've discovered case after case that highlights the extent the US government is willing to go to spy on whoever it can. It's an interesting juxtaposition, then, to keep learning about new revelations that show how the US government itself has been spied on, while remaining completely...
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A task force for the Federal Aviation Administration has laid out a proposal that would require owners of unmanned aircraft to register their drones with the government. The registration system is one that's based on the weight of such aircraft and would only exempt ones that weigh less than 250 grams, or just over...
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As great as it was to win the battle for net neutrality, it would have also been great to experience the same victory with CISA. Alas, it has not happened, and the reality of it couldn't be more unfortunate, or perhaps discouraging.
CISA stands for "Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act", and its name doesn't leave...
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Last month, US and Chinese governments agreed to a "digital truce", where neither country would knowingly support cyberattacks against each other to steal commercial secrets. While the agreement is solid overall, it does have a number of caveats, including the lack of protection where government secrets are...
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When Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the significant spying efforts conducted by the NSA two summers ago, it was hard to grasp at first what ramifications would result from the documents release. Since then, the world has been hit by one leak after the other, and ultimately, we've seen that it's not surprising to...
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We learned earlier today that if Jeb Bush becomes America's 45th president, he'll waste no time getting rid of net neutrality, which was enacted only this past summer. Contrasting that, the Obama administration feels that net neutrality remains important, and that access to good services is more important than...
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If Jeb manages to become the third Bush to lead the United States, those who support net neutrality will have some genuine cause for concern. In a letter posted to his campaign website this week, Jeb wants to tackle what he dubs a "Regulatory Crisis", with one of the bullet-points being net neutrality - something he...
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As the years pass, our lives continue to become intertwined even more with the Internet. Today, the Internet acts as a backbone to critical infrastructure, and much like the risk of someone exploiting a flaw to break into our home PC, a real risk exists that enemies of the government could break into and cause harm to...
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Maybe someday the Chinese government will take a page from O.J. Simpson and write a book titled, "If I Did It: Confessions of a Hacker." After all, China is clinging to the innocence card just as adamantly as Simpson, never mind any evidence to the contrary. In fact, not only is the Chinese government saying it's not...
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If the state of the US government's security wasn't appalling before, it sure should be now. Earlier this month, we reported on a breach of government systems that saw the information of four million current and prior government employees get taken by a third-party -- a third-party that was highly believed to be...
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At the behest of President Obama, Federal Chief Information Officer Tony Scott yesterday issued Memorandum M-15-13 calling for the provision of government service for all Federal websites via HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure).
The HTTPS standard was described by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)...
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It looks like a cyberattack that hit the White House last year by Russian hackers was a bit more serious than originally presented. The biggest takeaway is the fact that president Obama's personal emails were accessed, including both sent and received messages. That's the downside; the upside is that it appears...
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