Cyber Security

The Commerce Department’s Economic Development Administration spent almost half of its IT budget last year to remediate a cyber attack that barely happened. Commerce’s inspector general found in a report released last week a string of errors and miscommunications led to EDA’s overreaction of removing employee email and website access from the main agency network. Continue Reading →

A vulnerability that has existed in Android for the past four years can allow hackers to modify any legitimate and digitally signed application in order to transform it into a Trojan program that can be used to steal data or take control of the OS. Researchers from San Francisco mobile security startup firm Bluebox Security Continue Reading →

In an update on its Public Policy Blog, AT&T disclosed that it may begin selling anonymous user data to retailers and marketers, with the end goal being “to deliver more relevant advertising to… customers.” The carrier is far from the first to sell aggregate information — here’s looking at you, Verizon — but the provider Continue Reading →

I just got an e-mail from Ubisoft, which found that “one of [its] Web sites was exploited to gain unauthorized access to some of [its] online systems,” and that even though the company “instantly took steps to close off this access, investigate the incident and begin restoring the integrity of any compromised systems,” it quickly Continue Reading →

It was discovered that the world’s largest and most popular social networking site was inadvertently obtaining phone numbers from its users without their consent. Symantec this week revealed that Facebook’s mobile application was sending individual phone numbers from Android users over the Internet to its servers. The security firm explained that users were not required Continue Reading →

When asked about the NSA's seemingly overreaching surveillance, President Obama thoughtfully said, “I think it’s important to recognize that you can’t have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience.” Continue Reading →

Although the Google Play store does a pretty good job of getting rid of apps that contain malware, it doesn’t do nearly as well when it comes to tossing out apps that contain adware. A new study from mobile security company Lookout shows that 6.5% of free Android apps on Google Play contain adware, which Continue Reading →

A hacker has exploited Facebook’s Graph Search to collect a database of thousands of phone numbers and Facebook users. Both parties agree that all the information was left public by users (even if the users themselves may still not realize it). But Facebook issued him a cease and desist after the hacker continued to scrape Continue Reading →

Facebook’s software for letting users download their data inadvertently exposed the contact information of 6 million users, the company said in a post on its security blog. Phone numbers and email addresses that are stored as part of its friend-recommendation algorithms were inadvertently attached to their contacts’ Facebook accounts, so that someone downloading an archive Continue Reading →

When Max Kelly, the chief security officer for Facebook, left the social media company in 2010, he did not go to Google, Twitter or a similar Silicon Valley concern. Instead the man who was responsible for protecting the personal information of Facebook’s more than one billion users from outside attacks went to work for another Continue Reading →