Canada

The legal saga between Apple and the FBI has thrust encryption into the government’s policy spotlight again – but only if you live in the United States. In Canada, you could be excused for not knowing such a debate exists .

Ever since FBI director James Comey characterized the rising tide of encrypted data as “going dark” in an October, 2014 speech, American civil liberties groups, cryptographers, private companies and politicians have argued ceaselessly about encryption’s merits and the dangers of so-called backdoors.

Cyberattacks like the one against the National Research Council of Canada are increasing around the world. But by knowing the steps hackers would use for a sophisticated attack, security experts try to gain the upper hand.

"Sometimes in breaches, companies call it a 'highly sophisticated cyberattack' (as the Government of Canada's chief technology officer said in a statement Tuesday) in order to make it seem like they were beaten by the best," Geoffrey Vaughan, a security consultant with Security Compass, told CTV News Channel.

A breach of B.C.’s PharmaNet prescription medication system has compromised enough information to commit identity theft against roughly 1,600 people, the province revealed Friday.

The Ministry of Health said an unauthorized person used a doctor’s PharmaNet account without the doctor’s knowledge to access patients’ names, birth dates, addresses, telephone numbers and personal health numbers earlier this year.

A 16-year-old boy from Ottawa has been arrested by Canadian authorities on suspicion of making prank calls known as swatting.

Swatting is the term used for pranks in which the prankster calls emergency services with a fake story, in many cases bomb threats or hostage situations. These types of pranks are becoming more and more common.

A 19-year-old student has been arrested for allegedly exploiting the Heartbleed vulnerability to steal taxpayer data from as many as 900 Canadians, authorities said Wednesday.

The arrest of Stephen Arthuro Solis-Reyes by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police marks the first time authorities anywhere have publicly levied charges in connection to the malicious exploitation of a defect in the widely used OpenSSL cryptography library.

A top secret document retrieved by U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden and obtained by CBC News shows that Canada's electronic spy agency used information from the free internet service at a major Canadian airport to track the wireless devices of thousands of ordinary airline passengers for days after they left the terminal.

After reviewing the document, one of Canada's foremost authorities on cyber-security says the clandestine operation by the Communications Security Establishment Canada ( CSEC) was almost certainly illegal.

As the world economy struggles, more and more professionals are looking to join one of the few industries that’s still growing: software development. People seeking to change careers — or beef up their existing code skills — are increasingly turning to the six- to 12-week web development crash-courses commonly known as “bootcamps.” These programs are now springing up everywhere from San Francisco to France to Israel.

Canadian password security firm, PasswordBox, is bursting out of the gate today, coming out of private beta to hit the mainstream market. The company is hoping its mostly free, multi-device password management system will catch on with consumers beyond the 500,000 that have been using the service while it was in stealth development.

The CEO of the company, which was founded last year and has offices in San Francisco and Montreal, is Daniel Robichaud, a serial entrepreneur whose last venture, StreamTheWorld, was acquired by Triton Digital in 2009 for about $46 million.

For Bitmaker Labs, the trouble started with a flattering newspaper profile. In April, Canada’s Globe & Mail ran a piece of the Toronto-based hacker school, calling it “an intense program for programmers” and saying that founder Matt Grey is “dedicated to changing the world.”

Two months later, Bitmaker has temporarily ceased operations. The problem? Local educational regulators read the article and — two weeks ago — came knocking on Bitmakers doors.

In a move showing it looks beyond Silicon Valley to fill gaps, Google is also tapping into centers of higher learning for acquisitions.

That can be seen through the Internet giant's newly-revealed purchase of DNNresearch Inc., a company spawned from the computer science department at the University of Toronto.