• Texas’s E-Verify law operating under honor system

    After former Gov. Rick Perry issued an executive order in December 2014 mandating the use of E-Verify for state agencies, some lawmakers noted the directive lacked a mechanism to ensure compliance. But more than nine months after Gov. Greg Abbott signed a separate E-Verify bill, some of those gaps still exist.

  • Bangladesh central bank governor resigns after discovery of $81 million cybertheft

    Bangladesh’s central bank governor, Atiur Rahman, resigned on Tuesday after $81 million was stolen from the bank’s account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. It was one of the largest cyber-heists in history. The Bangladesh central bank said that the hackers had tried to withdraw $951 million from its account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, but the other transactions were blocked after a typo in one of the instructions raised alarms.

  • WhatsApp to add encryption to voice chats

    Reports say that WhatsApp is planning to add encrypted video chats to its app in order to make it impossible for, so that nobody could snoop on its users. Adding encrypted voice chats will mean that all of the messages that pass through WhatsApp will be secure. Text messages are already encrypted.

  • Identifying national security threats posed by everyday commercial technologies

    For decades, U.S. national security was ensured in large part by a simple advantage: a near-monopoly on access to the most advanced technologies. Increasingly, however, off-the-shelf equipment developed for the transportation, construction, agricultural, and other commercial sectors features highly sophisticated components, which resourceful adversaries can modify or combine to create novel and unanticipated security threats. DARPA’s “Improv” effort asks the innovation community to identify commercial products and processes that could yield unanticipated threats.

  • How organizations can secure their teleworkers, data

    As the number of employees who telework trends upward — and new kinds of devices are used in telework — the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) says it is updating its guidance to include the latest technology available to strengthen an organization’s remote-access data security.

  • Snowden dismisses FBI's claim it cannot unlock San Bernardino killers’ iPhone

    Edward Snowden has joined the debate over the FBI’s attempt to force Apple to help it unlock the iPhone 5C used by one of the San Bernardino terrorists. The FBI says that only Apple can deactivate certain passcode protections on the iPhone — for example, the 10-attempt limit, which makes the phone permanently inaccessible after ten attempts to guess the password —which would allow law enforcement to guess the passcode by using brute-force.

  • The staggering cost of war to Syria, neighbors

    A new report evaluates the economic losses to Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey to date and into the future. The report concludes that the cost of conflict to Syria is an estimated $275 billion in lost growth opportunities. If the conflict continues to 2020, the cost of conflict to Syria will be $1.3 trillion.

  • Calif. terrorists’ iPhone may have been used to introduce malware into data networks: DA

    San Bernardino County District Attorney Michael Ramos has advanced what experts describe as an unusual reason for forcing Apple to allow the FBI to break the password of the iPhone used by the two terrorists as part of the agency’s investigation of the attack. Ramos says the phone might have been “used as a weapon” to introduce malicious software to county computer systems.

  • 2014 French nuclear accident more serious than official reports suggested

    German media charges  that the French nuclear authority and the French company operating the aging Fessenheim nuclear facility in France, concealed the seriousness of the April 2014 incident at the site. The French nuclear authorities withheld information not only from the German government, but also from the IAEA, to which they were required to submit a detailed report about the incident.

  • French law would penalize encrypted phone makers who refuse to help police probes

    French lawmakers on Thursday voted for a measure which would impose penalties on manufacturers of smartphone who refuse to cooperate with law enforcement in inquiries of terrorism cases. The measure stipulates that a private manufacturer of smartphones, which refuses to hand over encrypted data to an investigating authority, would face up to five years in jail and a 350,000 euro ($380,000) fine.

  • Candidates' plans to change controversial H-1B guest worker program highlight need for an overhaul

    Since its inception in 1990, the H-1B guest worker program that allows employers to bring in high-skilled foreign workers on six-year visas has been steeped in controversy. Critics accuse it of depressing wages and outsourcing American jobs, while advocates call it an essential source of the best and brightest talent. The H-1B program is an important program that serves as a bridge to permanent immigration for talented foreign workers. It should be used to recruit truly specialized workers from abroad when the labor conditions are tight and a qualified American can’t be found. But no American worker should ever be displaced by an H-1B worker – that was never the program’s intent – and this practice should be ended.

  • Hackers hold hospitals’ medical data hostage

    Hackers attacked several hospitals in Germany with ransomware – locking medical files and demanding ransom payment for releasing the encrypted data. The blackmailing of hospitals by encrypting their medical file has become a growing problem around the world. In California, for example, a Hollywood hospital earlier this month had to pay about $17,000 in the digital currency bitcoins to hackers in order to regain access to medical files.

  • More Americans support Justice Dept. than Apple in locked iPhone dispute

    As the standoff between the Department of Justice and Apple Inc. continues over an iPhone used by one of the suspects in the San Bernardino terrorist attacks, 51 percent say Apple should unlock the iPhone to assist the ongoing FBI investigation. Fewer Americans (38 percent) say Apple should not unlock the phone to ensure the security of its other users’ information; 11 percent do not offer an opinion on the question.

  • Passwords, privacy and protection: can Apple meet FBI’s demand without creating a ‘backdoor’?

    The point of encryption is to make decryption hard. However, hard does not mean impossible. The FBI could decrypt this data, with sufficient effort and computational power, and they could do this with no help from Apple. However, this route would be expensive, and would take some time. In effect, what they’re requesting of Apple is to make their job easier, cheaper and faster. Ultimately, how this matter gets resolved may depend more on the big-picture question of what privacy rights we as a society want for the data we record on our personal devices. Understanding the technical questions can inform this discussion.

  • How mobile ads leak personal data

    The personal information of millions of smartphone users is at risk due to in-app advertising that can leak potentially sensitive user information between ad networks and mobile app developers, according to a new study.