Officials from RSA Security are advising customers of the company's BSAFE toolkit and Data Protection Manager to stop using a crucial cryptography component in the products that was recently revealed to contain a backdoor engineered by the National Security Agency.
Countries that have pledged to support Internet freedom should allow technology vendors to report the number of electronic surveillance requests they receive, a tech advocacy group said Thursday.
The Global Network Initiative, whose members include Facebook, Google and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has made the request to the 21 governments in the Freedom Online Coalition.
Linus Torvalds, who created the open-source Linux operating system 22 years ago, took the keynote stage at the LinuxCon conference along with fellow kernel developers to talk about the state of Linux kernel development.
Throughout the hourlong session Sept. 18, the panel was peppered with a barrage of questions on a wide variety of topics, with the outspoken Torvalds providing all manner of colorful comments.
The National Security Agency is considered by some to have the best roster of hackers in the world; but sometimes even the best need some help. That may well be the reason the NSA became a customer of French hacking-tools vendor Vupen in 2012.
The spying agency, which has been scrutinized of late for its top secret surveillance programs revealed by Edward Snowden, bought a one-year subscription to Vupen's Binary Analysis and Exploits service in 2012, as revealed on Tuesday by documents obtained by MuckRock through a Freedom of Information Act request.
A branch of the NSA has been collecting global financial data, including credit card transactions and data from SWIFT, which runs an international bank messaging system, according to a report Sunday from Der Spiegel.
The German publication provided details about a U.S. National Security Agency branch called "Follow the Money" that inputs financial data into a system called "Tracfin" that it said came from documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
Marissa Mayer was on stage on Wednesday at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference when Michael Arrington asked her about NSA snooping.
He wanted to know what would happen if Yahoo just didn't cooperate. He wanted to know what would happen if she were to simply talk about what was happening, even though the government had forbidden it.
"Releasing classified information is treason. It generally lands you incarcerated," she said, clearly uncomfortable with the turn of the conversation.
The US Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has declassified 1,800 pages of documents that indicate that the NSA routinely overstepped its authority and misled oversight bodies about the surveillance of US citizens.
Leaked documents suggest the NSA could have a replica facility of the iconic Bridge of the Starship Enterprise from Star Trek.
A Foreign Policy investigation into NSA director Keith Alexander has exposed his former Fort Belvoir facility, which had a war room designed to mimic the Bridge of the Starship Enterprise from Star Trek.
The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has vigorously denied that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) tampered with NIST's process of vetting and choosing encryption algorithms.
"NIST would not deliberately weaken a cryptographic standard," NIST said in a statement Tuesday. "We will continue in our mission to work with the cryptographic community to create the strongest possible encryption standards for the U.S. government and industry at large."
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has released a new batch of secret National Security Agency (NSA) documents Tuesday afternoon. The documents come from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), and they detail NSA violations of spying protocols from 2006 to 2009. They were released in relation to an Electronic Frontier Foundation lawsuit.
On a Tuesday morning phone call with reporters, two top intelligence officials downplayed the court's findings, insisting that the court "did not find any intentional effort" to violate the law.
