Cybersecurity

As Target data breach reaches 70 million customers, state AGs investigate

Corrected: Attorneys general in Massachusetts and New York announced Friday that they with other states are investigating the Target Corp. data breach, which resulted in millions of consumers having personal data stolen by cyber criminals. The Connecticut attorney general’s office is also investigating the security breach, Reuters reports. “We are…

Jan 10, 2014 8:00 PM CST

LinkedIn sues hackers, says they created fake accounts to scrape data

LinkedIn has filed suit against unknown hackers in federal court in San Francisco, claiming that they created fake accounts in order to obtain data from actual member profiles on the professional networking site. The practice, known as data scraping, not only violated LinkedIn’s terms of use but federal and state…

Jan 8, 2014 12:05 AM CST

Organized crime leaders and terrorists cross paths in cyberspace

The nexus between organized crime and terrorism can be tenuous and sometimes hard to see. And there can be copycat appropriation of methods and means used by terrorists for fundraising. But that nexus is growing so fast in the cyberage, we ignore it at our peril. That was the takeaway…

Jan 1, 2014 8:00 AM CST

Google Glass brings out the technophobes—and the lawyers

Waiting for its arrival has some gadget geeks in a high-tech tizzy. The anticipation is practically unbearable—sort of like when you were a kid and you ordered those naughty (you hoped) X-ray specs out of the back of a magazine. But while this new “latest thing” is an order-of-magnitude advancement…

Jan 1, 2014 7:30 AM CST

Proposed law in California would mandate smartphone ‘kill switch’

A proposed new law in California would require smartphone manufacturers to include a “kill switch” that would render a stolen phone inoperable. According to Network World, the law was proposed by two San Francisco-area officials: state senator Mark Leno and district attorney George Gascón. The kill switch would wipe personal…

Dec 20, 2013 10:57 PM CST

Shareholders suit accuses IBM of defrauding investors by hiding its cooperation with NSA program

IBM is being sued by a group of shareholders for who say it concealed its cooperation in a National Security Agency surveillance program that has cost the company sales and led to a decline in stock prices. In a suit filed Thursday in Manhattan federal court, the Louisiana Sheriffs’ Pension…

Dec 16, 2013 10:31 PM CST

NSA phone-data collection program likely unconstitutional, judge says

A National Security Agency program that collects information from nearly all telephone calls made to or from the United States is probably unconstitutional, a federal judge held Monday. In his ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon of Washington, D.C., said the NSA program appears to run afoul of the…

Dec 16, 2013 8:50 PM CST

‘Link rot’ is degrading legal research and case cites

The World Wide Web may seem like a limitless superhighway. But it is filled with dead ends: hyperlinks that point to webpages that have become permanently unavailable. It’s a phenomenon known as “link rot.” While landing on a broken link can be frustrating, a growing body of research has identified…

Dec 1, 2013 9:40 AM CST

Carriers nix proposed ‘kill switch’ solution to problem of rampant smartphone thefts

Throughout the United States, almost one in every three robberies involves the theft of a telephone, often a pricey smartphone. Yet the industry has rejected a proposal by the biggest cellphone maker, Samsung Electronics, to equip mobile phones with “kill switch” software that would allow the devices to be shut…

Nov 20, 2013 7:05 PM CST

Reuters: Snowden accessed some classified US info by persuading NSA coworkers to provide passwords

Even at one of the top U.S. security watchdogs, some workers may not be following basic rules to safeguard employer data. Edward Snowden, who was granted temporary asylum in Russia after exposing secret mass surveillance programs he learned about while working as a contract employee for the National Security Agency,…

Nov 8, 2013 9:55 PM CST

Password-hoarding computer engineer was properly convicted, appeals court says

A California appeals court has upheld the conviction of a network engineer who withheld computer passwords after he was suspended from his job with the city of San Francisco, locking the city out of the system for 12 days. Terry Childs was convicted in 2010 under a state law that…

Nov 6, 2013 1:59 PM CST

Victims are taking on ‘revenge porn’ websites for posting photos they didn’t consent to

In the summer of 2012, Hollie Toups got a disturbing call from a friend. Toups is from a small town near Beaumont, Texas, where nobody is that much of a stranger. Her friend had overheard some men talking about a pornographic website with local women on it—and they had mentioned…

Nov 1, 2013 9:30 AM CDT

Fired worker loses smartphone privileges for 3 years for hacking into law firm’s server

A former law firm employee and her husband will be on probation for the next three years after taking a misdemeanor plea in a federal criminal case over unauthorized intrusion into a Pennsylvania law firm’s computer system. But likely much worse for Alyson L. Cunningham, and her husband, Jonathan A.…

Oct 18, 2013 9:55 PM CDT

Feds arrest 8 more in Silk Road case, say others in claimed $1.2B scheme should be ‘very nervous’

After seizing the Silk Road website allegedly used to arrange some $1.2 billion in illegal drug sales and arresting its alleged operator, the feds have not slowed down. With the help of authorities in the United Kingdom and Sweden, another eight individuals have been arrested and more are expected to…

Oct 8, 2013 8:25 PM CDT

Scalia: Courts will decide legitimacy of NSA surveillance programs, but may be least equipped

Courts will determine the legality of National Security Agency surveillance programs, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said Wednesday. And in his opinion, that may not be a good thing. Speaking before the Northern Virginia Technology Council, the Associated Press reports, Scalia mentioned the Supreme Court expanding privacy rights in the…

Sep 26, 2013 6:42 PM CDT