NSA

You already know that laptops, desktop computers, tablets and mobile phones are all at risk of being hacked. But did you know that intruders might use the built-in camera to take surreptitious pictures and videos of you and your surroundings or hijack your microphone to eavesdrop on conversations?

The latest story from the Edward Snowden leaks yesterday drives home that the NSA and its spy partners possess specialized tools for doing exactly that. According to The Intercept, the NSA uses a plug-in called GUMFISH to take over cameras on infected machines and snap photos.

The NSA doesn’t just hack foreign computers. It also piggybacks on the work of professional for-profit hackers, taking over entire networks of already-hacked machines and using them for their own purposes.

That’s one of the surprising details to emerge from the latest Edward Snowden leaks.

Yahoo Inc has named well-known security researcher Alex Stamos as its chief information security officer, tapping a vocal critic of the U.S. government's secret surveillance programs for the position.

Stamos was one of the primary organizers of TrustyCon, a gathering of prominent technology experts last month who had pulled out of the RSA security conference in San Francisco amid growing discord over some technology companies' cooperation with U.S. intelligence-gathering efforts.

The outrage over massive, pervasive surveillance has put the NSA in the spotlight, somewhere its officials are obviously uncomfortable being. The administration's minimal efforts to address domestic surveillance have also focused on the agency. But there's an agency doing just as much privacy-invading as the NSA and its efforts are now going largely unnoticed, as Emily Berman points out at Just Security.

Julian Assange doesn’t use the blustering rhetoric you might expect from the founder of the activist publishing group WikiLeaks. Assange is responsible for leaking documents that have changed America’s political landscape— State Department cables and Iraq War logs—yet to a South by Southwest audience on Saturday, he spoke quietly and matter-of-factly even when uttering the most inflammatory statements.

On Friday, Glenn Greenwald's new website The Intercept published a number of internal NSA documents that didn't necessarily reveal any great state secrets, but instead cast some light on the NSA's office culture. Those documents, leaked by former security contractor Edward Snowden, were actually from an advice column series, written by a 20-year veteran of NSA management under the pen name “Zelda.”

The new "Blackphone" smartphone may have only debuted at last week's Mobile World Congress but concerns are already being raised that it will be targeted by hackers and the NSA.

Spanish start-up Geeksphone, Silent Circle and Pretty Good Privacy announced the Blackphone at the technology exhibition in Barcelona last week, with STMicro later demonstrating its own security-focused smartphone, the Boeing Black.

The most interesting device shown at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona this week was the secure Blackphone developed by Silent Circle and Geeksphone.

The Blackphone features anonymous search, automatic disabling of non-trusted WiFi hotspots, and private texting, calling and file transfer capabilities. It's available to the general public, and bundles additional security features that apparently go beyond the basic messaging security provided by Blackberry to enterprise customers in its Blackberry Messaging (BBM) service.

When former government contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA was conducting digital surveillance on a massive scale, many feared for the future of cloud computing. The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation estimated that Snowden’s revelations could cost U.S. cloud companies $22 billion to $35 billion in foreign business over the next three years, and countless pundits predicted that American businesses would flee the cloud as well.

Richard Clarke, chairman and CEO of Good Harbor and a member of Obama's review group on intelligence and communications technology, kicked off the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) Summit 2014 at the RSA Conference by discussing his observations about the NSA surveillance controversy.

Clarke ultimately took a positive stance regarding the NSA, explaining that the organization has been responsible for gathering intelligence on countries that have weapons of mass destruction, as well as for uprooting drug cartels and deterring various types of terrorist threats.