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The High Court has ordered 10 ISPs to hand over the customer details of 150 individuals accused of illegally sharing and downloading desktop software on the web. The illegal file-sharers were identified after a 12-month covert investigation by the Federation Against Software Theft (Fast), called Operation Tracker.
After years in which suppliers have absorbed most of the blame for government IT failures, the case for there being equal measures of ineptitude in the civil service is gaining momentum behind the concerted campaign against ID Cards. The latest evidence was submitted as a statement this week by Intellect, the UK's IT trade association, in a thinly veiled case of passing the blame.
A division of the Marriott International hotel empire has notified more than 200,000 clients of back-up security tapes missing from the company’s Orlando corporate offices. The breached records contained personal information of about 206,000 associates, timeshare owners and timeshare customers, the company said this week in a statement. Stephen P. Weisz, Marriott Vacation Club International president, said the company was assisting affected customers.
In part of a major Bush Administration lobbying blitz Wednesday, the Department of Justice has released a list of technology-related ramifications if the remaining provisions of the Patriot Act aren't passed by Dec. 31. Lobbying hard for the passage of the remaining portions of the broad-sweeping legislation, the department released a statement Wednesday stating that the federal government would revert back to a "pre-9/11 mode of information sharing…where terrorists and spies can use technology against us."
John Daugman, Cambridge-based pioneer of iris recognition told an audience of sixty security professionals, lawyers, and privacy advocates last night: “it is Orwellian to base a political campaign on disinformation
Trickery and technology both play key roles in managing spam, according to a study released yesterday by the Federal Trade Commission. The agency looked at three aspects of spamming and efforts to control it: the automated harvesting of E-mail addresses on public areas of the Internet; using E-mail address masking to reduce address harvesting; and the effectiveness of spam filtering by Internet Service Providers.
A draft US law to increase the security and privacy of personal information held by companies took a step forward last week, when it was approved by the influential Senate Judiciary Committee. The bill includes a duty to disclose security breaches.
In a decision hailed by free-speech advocates, the Delaware Supreme Court on Wednesday reversed a lower court decision requiring an Internet service provider to disclose the identity of an anonymous blogger who targeted a local elected official.
In a closely watched case governing Internet privacy, a federal appeals court has reinstated a criminal case against an e-mail provider accused of violating wiretap laws. The 1st Circuit Court of Appeals, in a 5-2 vote, ruled on Thursday that an e-mail provider who allegedly read correspondence meant for his customers could be tried on federal criminal charges.
Congress will vote any day now on new legislation that would renew parts of the USA PATRIOT Act scheduled to expire or "sunset" at the end of the year, while possibly handing the FBI even more unchecked power to snoop on your mail and private records, including logs of your Internet activities.
Identity thieves and impersonators thrive on publicly available personal information and data pilfering. Now that information, along with some bogus data on would-be fraud victims, is being used against the thieves in an identity verification scheme from StrikeForce Technologies.
Anti-spyware vendors and consumer groups took a stab at issuing uniform definitions for "spyware" and "adware" on Tuesday in hopes of giving computer users more control over their machines. The definitions seek clarity that could help improve anti-spyware products, educate consumers and fend off lawsuits from developers of software that sneaks onto computers.
Nine out of 10 Internet users say they have changed their online habits to avoid spyware and other Internet-based threats, according to a study released on Wednesday.
The cryptographic services offered by the Autistici/Inventati server, housed in the Aruba web farm, have been compromised on 15th June 2004. We discovered the fact on 21st June 2005. One year later. One year ago the authorities (i.e. the postal police), during the investigation that led to the suspension of an email account (croceneraanarchica-at-inventati.org), shut down our server without any notice, and copied the keys necessary for the decryption of the webmail. Since then, they potentially had access to all the data on the disks, including sensible information about our users. This happened with the collaboration of Aruba, our provider.
The UK government plans to issue its ID card as a passport with biometric identifiers stored in a chip – and the US wants those chips to be compatible with its own scanners, raising the possibility that US agencies could have access to the ID Card database.
The public believes that ID cards are the best solution to identity theft and fraud, according to a survey published this week. More than half of those polled (57%) said ID cards were their first or second preferred method to protect themselves against identity theft, the survey of 1,000 people aged 16 to 64 showed. But George Platt, general manager of US voice automation firm Intervoice, which commissioned the UK survey, warned that ID cards would “do nothing
High-schools students have a message for their parents: Trust us with technology. Security and privacy? We have it covered. A panel of teenagers speaking at the Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference told attendees on Friday that they are far more in tune with technology than their parents and have come to understand the issues of security and privacy on the Internet largely without any guidance from educators or their parents.
Macromedia's Flash media player is raising concerns among privacy advocates for its little-known ability to store computer users' personal information and assign a unique identifier to their machines. "A lot of media players come with identifiers embedded in them to track content usage and digital rights management," Chris Hoofnagle, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center's West Coast office, said. "With respect to Windows Media Player and now the Macromedia player, we're realizing that the media players themselves are creating privacy risks."
At a recent seminar on information security management, I heard that FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) is dead, that ROI is dead and that the insurance model is dead. Information security needs to give business value. This sounds like a terrific idea, but the lecturer was unable to provide a concrete example similar to purchasing justifications that companies use like: "Yes, we will buy this machine because it makes twice as many diamond rings per hour and we'll be able corner the Valentine's Day market in North America."
The second you send an e-mail from your PC, your personal privacy probably has been compromised.E-mail messages hop from your computer over a number of networks to their final destination, but like a postcard from a vacationer in Mexico, the content can be perused by anyone, at anytime, before it is delivered, experts told UPI's The Web."E-mail is completely open," said Jeff Multz, vice president of sales at SecureWorks Inc.,, a computer security services firm in Atlanta."People think it is secure when it is sent.
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