Privacy

Hackers have accessed confidential details of an estimated 5,000 customers of an American banking group.San Francisco-based Wells Fargo is notifying affected customers of the breach.

Details of the breach are contained in a letter that the bank sent to New Hampshire's attorney general. It appears to be one of several letters sent to different states where people's data has been compromised. Written by the bank's senior company counsel, Peter McCorkell, it said, "This letter is to advise you of an information compromise incident which affects residents of New Hampshire.

The Home office has issued a consultation paper for a new law that would force phone companies, ISPs and network operators to record and store every phone call, web page request and text message.

The information would have to be stored for twelve months by service providers and would be searchable by a wide variety of organisations, including local councils, health authorities and even Ofsted and the Post Office.

Google is seeking to draw clear distinctions between the methods it uses to target ad placements based on search queries and a controversial data-mining practice known as deep-packet inspection. The deep-packet technique gathers and stores information on an individual's Web-site visits and Internet usage without first obtaining the user's consent.

Before Sherri Davidoff flew out to Defcon this year, she made sure to cover up the "Global Hacking Permit 230291" sticker on her laptop with a photo of two adorable puppies.

She figured it might help things go a little more smoothly at Logan International Airport, where she eventually managed to clear her way through the Transportation Security Administration's security screening and fly out to this week's hacker convention in Las Vegas without using any ID.

Parents have admitted to spying on their children online in an attempt to safeguard them from the dangers of social networking websites.

Children as young as eight are being attracted to social networking sites such as Facebook, Myspace and Bebo, with a new study revealing more than 750,000 between the ages of 8 and 12 use one, despite minimum age restrictions of 13 or 14.

Amazing. The U.S. government has published its policy: they can take your laptop anywhere they want, for as long as they want, and share the information with anyone they want:

The encryption of Skype VoIP phone calls might not be as secure as you think.

It's possible the company keeps keys so law enforcement authorities can decrypt encrypted VoIP phone calls, a report says, but Skype won't say for sure one way or the other.

Two computer servers containing a database of Connecticut College, Wesleyan University and Trinity College library patrons were accessed by hackers, Connecticut College officials said Friday.

The database included the names, addresses, social security and driver’s license numbers of an estimated 2,800 Connecticut College library patrons.

Hillsborough Community College warned its roughly 2,000 employees on Wednesday to monitor their bank accounts because an HCC programmer's laptop was stolen from a hotel parking lot in Georgia.

The college also is looking into acquiring technology that will allow workers to remotely locate laptops and to encrypt computers or disks. In addition, it stressed to employees who use laptops to use extra caution when securing the devices, spokeswoman Ashley Carl said today.

Concerns have been raised about the security of British secrets after a top political aide lost his BlackBerry device to a suspected Chinese spy, sources say.

The Sunday Times newspaper says one of Prime Minister Gordon Brown's most senior aides was the victim of a "honeytrap" scheme in which the man was lured to a hotel room by a woman he met in a disco in Shanghai, China, only to find the next morning that his BlackBerry device had been stolen.