government

Five steps to GDPR compliance

April 19, 2016

For any organisations processing personal data the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is important news. Agreed upon just days ago, after years of negotiations, the …

US government is lousy at cybersecurity

April 18, 2016

SecurityScorecard released its 2016 Government Cybersecurity Report, a comprehensive analysis that exposes alarming cybersecurity vulnerabilities across 600 local, state, and …

Microsoft sues US govt for right to tell users when their data is accessed by feds

April 15, 2016

Microsoft has filed a new lawsuit against the US government, asking the court to permit them to alert their users when their online accounts and the data in them has been …

Documentaries about an expert convicted of leaking classified information

April 12, 2016

Stephen Kim was a top level state department intelligence analyst. He went to prison under the Espionage Act. The Surrender The Surrender intimately documents Stephen Kim’s …

Developing a mobile health app? Check which federal laws apply

April 7, 2016

The Federal Trade Commission has created a new web-based tool for mobile health app developers, which is designed to help the developers understand what federal laws and …

US passport and visa database open to intrusion?

April 4, 2016

The Consular Consolidated Database (CCD), which contains over 290 million passport-related records, 184 million visa records, and 25 million records on US citizens living …

Has Reddit been served with a National Security Letter?

April 1, 2016

Reddit has published its 2015 Transparency Report, and there is one thing missing from it: the entire section about national security requests. The same report for 2014 …

US govt has unlocked San Bernardino gunman’s iPhone

March 29, 2016

The US Department of Justice has found a way to get into the iPhone 5C owned by Syed Farook, one of the San Bernardino shooters. With a short status report filed with the …

7 Iranians indicted for cyber attacks on US banks and a dam

March 24, 2016

The US Justice Department unsealed on Thursday an indictment charging seven Iranian computer specialists for conducting a coordinated campaign of distributed denial of service …

Former US Embassy employee imprisoned for sextortion

March 23, 2016

Former US State Department employee Michael C. Ford has been sentenced to four years, and nine months in prison for perpetrating a widespread, international e-mail phishing, …

Most infosec pros consider government-mandated encryption backdoors a bad idea

March 4, 2016

Apple and the FBI have been engaged in a legal battle over the federal government’s right to require built-in smartphone encryption software that could aid law enforcement …

Hack the Pentagon: Hackers asked to help secure public-facing systems

March 2, 2016

The US Department of Defense (DoD) has invited hackers participate in “Hack the Pentagon”, a program aimed at finding vulnerabilities in some of the …