Data Privacy – Page 20 – Computer Security Articles

Credit to Author: Grant Gross| Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2017 08:33:00 -0700

Reacting to concerns about the mass collection of photographs in police databases, U.S. lawmakers plan to introduce legislation to limit the use of facial recognition technology by the FBI and other law enforcement organizations.

The FBI and police departments across the country can search a group of databases containing more than 400 million photographs, many of them from the drivers’ licenses of people who have never committed a crime. The photos of more than half of U.S adults are contained in a series of FBI and state databases, according to one study released in October.

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ComputerWorld Independent

March 20, 2017 admin

FBI confirms probe of Russian hack of U.S. election, possible Trump involvement

Credit to Author: Grant Gross| Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2017 08:36:00 -0700

The FBI is actively investigating Russia’s attempts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election and possible cooperation from President Donald Trump’s campaign, agency director James Comey confirmed.

The existence of an investigation isn’t a surprise, but Comey’s announcement Monday is the first time the FBI has acknowledged an active case. The FBI typically does not comment on active investigations, but the Russian actions targeting the U.S. election represents an “unusual” case, he told members of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee.

Comey told lawmakers he couldn’t comment more on the investigation, but he said the FBI is looking into possible contacts and cooperation between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. The FBI is looking into “the nature of any links” between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, he said.

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ComputerWorld Independent

March 18, 2017 admin

US-CERT: Some HTTPS inspection tools could weaken security

Credit to Author: Lucian Constantin| Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2017 15:14:00 -0700

Companies that use security products to inspect HTTPS traffic might inadvertently make their users’ encrypted connections less secure and expose them to man-in-the-middle attacks, the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team warns.

US-CERT, a division of the Department of Homeland Security, published an advisory after a recent survey showed that HTTPS inspection products don’t mirror the security attributes of the original connections between clients and servers.

HTTPS inspection checks the encrypted traffic coming from an HTTPS site to make sure it doesn’t contain threats or malware. It’s performed by intercepting a client’s connection to an HTTPS server, establishing the connection on the client’s behalf and then re-encrypting the traffic sent to the client with a different, locally generated certificate. Products that do this essentially act as man-in-the-middle proxies.

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ComputerWorld Independent

March 15, 2017 admin

Court blocks American from suing Ethiopia for infecting his computer

Credit to Author: John Ribeiro| Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2017 04:10:00 -0700

An appeals court has barred an Ethiopian-born U.S. citizen from filing a civil suit against the African country, which allegedly infected his computer with spyware and monitored his communications.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled Tuesday that foreign states are immune from lawsuits in a U.S. court unless an exception to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA) applies.

The person, who is referred to in court documents by the pseudonym Kidane, was born in Ethiopia and lived there for 30 years before seeking asylum in the U.S. He lives in Maryland.

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ComputerWorld Independent

March 14, 2017 admin

DOJ: No, we won't say how much the FBI paid to hack terrorist's iPhone

Credit to Author: Gregg Keizer| Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2017 11:31:00 -0700

The U.S. Department of Justice yesterday argued that it should not have to reveal the maker of a tool used last year to crack an alleged terrorist’s iPhone or disclose how much it paid for the hacking job, court documents showed.

That tool was used last year by the FBI to access a password-protected iPhone 5C previously owned by Syed Rizwan Farook, who along with his wife, Tafsheen Malik, killed 14 in San Bernardino, Calif., in December 2015. The two died in a shootout with police later that day. Authorities quickly labeled them terrorists.

In March 2016, after weeks of wrangling with Apple, which balked at a court order compelling it to assist the FBI in unlocking the iPhone, the agency announced it had found a way to access the device without Apple’s help. Although the FBI acknowledged it had paid an outside group to crack the iPhone, it refused to identify the firm or how much it paid.

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ComputerWorld Independent

March 14, 2017 admin

The NSA's foreign surveillance: 5 things to know

Credit to Author: Grant Gross| Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2017 09:27:00 -0700

A contentious piece of U.S. law giving the National Security Agency broad authority to spy on people overseas expires at the end of the year. Expect heated debate about the scope of U.S. surveillance law leading up to Dec. 31.

One major issue to watch involves the way the surveillance treats communications from U.S. residents. Critics say U.S. emails, texts, and chat logs — potentially millions of them — are caught up in surveillance authorized by Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

U.S. residents who communicate with foreign targets of the NSA surveillance have their data swept up in what the NSA calls “incidental” collection. The FBI can then search those communications, but it’s unclear how often that happens.

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ComputerWorld Independent

March 14, 2017 admin

It's time to turn on HTTPS: The benefits are well worth the effort

Credit to Author: Lucian Constantin| Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2017 05:30:00 -0700

After Edward Snowden revealed that online communications were being collected en masse by some of the world’s most powerful intelligence agencies, security experts called for encryption of the entire web. Four years later, it looks like we’ve passed the tipping point.

The number of websites supporting HTTPS — HTTP over encrypted SSL/TLS connections — has skyrocketed over the past year. There are many benefits to turning on encryption, so if your website does not yet support the technology it’s time to make the move.

Recent telemetry data from Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox shows that over 50 percent of web traffic is now encrypted, both on computers and mobile devices. Most of that traffic goes to a few large websites, but even so, it’s a jump of over 10 percentage points since a year ago.

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ComputerWorld Independent

March 13, 2017 admin

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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