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ComputerWorldIndependent
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WikiLeaks dump spotlights CIA spying powers

Credit to Author: Michael Kan| Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2017 10:51:00 -0700

Has the CIA ever spied on you? That’s a key question swirling around the WikiLeaks document dump that allegedly details the U.S. agency’s secret hacking tools.

The documents themselves don’t reveal much about who the CIA might have snooped on. But the agency certainly has the power to spy on foreigners outside the U.S., said Paul Pillar, a former deputy counterterrorism chief with the CIA.

That’s its job after all: To collect foreign intelligence. But even so, the CIA is pretty selective with its targets.   

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ComputerWorldIndependent
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Of course your TV’s spying on you

Credit to Author: Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols| Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2017 10:22:00 -0700

Julian Assange, Wikileaks’ founder and Russian propagandist, must be proud of himself. In his latest “revelation” that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) can hack Apple and Android smartphones, PC operating systems and smart TVs, he has people throwing fits about how awful the CIA is.

Please. Give me a break.

Wikileaks uncovered nothing really new. Zero. Zilch.

As my fellow Computerworld writer buddy Mike Elgin said, “The Wikileaks/CIA stories simply remind us anything with a camera, microphone or IP address could theoretically be hacked.”

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ComputerWorldIndependent
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How much are vendor security assurances worth after the CIA leaks?

Credit to Author: Lucian Constantin| Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2017 08:40:00 -0700

Following the recent revelations about the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s cyberespionage arsenal, software vendors reiterated their commitments to fix vulnerabilities in a timely manner and told users that many of the flaws described in the agency’s leaked documents have been fixed.

While these assurances are understandable from a public relations perspective, they don’t really change anything, especially for companies and users that are the target of state-sponsored hackers. The software they use is not less safe, nor better protected, than it was before WikiLeaks published the 8,700-plus CIA documents last Tuesday.

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ComputerWorldIndependent
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Android devices coming with preinstalled malware

Credit to Author: Darlene Storm| Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2017 07:52:00 -0700

The phone, given to you by your company, could be targeted at some point and end up with a malware infection, but you wouldn’t expect the malware to be preinstalled “somewhere along the supply chain.” Yet preinstalled malware is precisely what one security vendor found on 38 Android devices.

Check Point Software Technologies did not name the affected companies, saying only that the phones belonged to “a large telecommunications company” and “a multination technology company.” A good chunk of the infected phones were Samsung models, but phones by Lenovo, LG, Asus, ZTE, Vivo, Oppo and Xiaomi were also preinstalled with malware after leaving the manufacturers but before landing in the hands of the companies’ employees.

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FortinetSecurity
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FortiGuard Labs Telemetry: Round up of 2015 and 2016 IoT Threats (Part 2 Home Routers)

Credit to Author: Gavin Chow| Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2017 08:37:05 -0700

In our last post [Round up of 2016 IoT Threats] we compared 2015 and 2016 global threat telemetry for IoT devices collected by our FortiGuard Labs. In this post, we will examine why home routers had a such a huge increase in IPS signature hits in 2016, when compared to 2015. Home Routers In 2015, home routers had the most IPS signature hits at around 821,000. But this number exploded exponentially in 2016, to more than 25 billion hits. We can see the exponential increase more clearly when we compare both years using a size comparison chart…

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ComputerWorldIndependent
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GOP senator alleges password-hijack attempts after blasting WikiLeaks founder

Credit to Author: Gregg Keizer| Date: Mon, 13 Mar 2017 06:31:00 -0700

Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) Saturday claimed that hackers were trying to gain access to his personal and government-issued devices through bogus password-reset notifications.

In a short flurry of Twitter messages, Sasse blamed the hacking attempts on his criticism of WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, earlier in the week.

“Heads-up…I’ve been critical of Assange & WikiLeaks this week. So…big surprise: Am having multiple ‘password reset’ attempts right now,” Sasse tweeted Saturday. The probing was hitting “basically every device, every platform, personal and govt,” he added in a follow-up tweet.

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