Privacy

Donald Kerr, a top intelligence official with the US government, says that citizens need to change their definition of privacy to match the government's definition, the AP reports. Appointed Director of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) in 2005, Kerr is now the principal deputy director of national intelligence. Kerr is one of many in the intelligence community who finds Americans' views on privacy to be antiquated and unreasonable.

Salesforce.com's customers are targets of malicious hackers and scammers, after an employee was tricked into handing a corporate password to a phisher. In a note to customers, Salesforce said that criminals have been sending customers fake invoices and, starting just a few days ago, viruses and key logging software. The emails were sent using information that was illegally obtained from Salesforce.com.

For the third time this semester hackers have accessed private information at Montana State University.

MSU officials say that 271 people may have had their Social Security numbers exposed in a data security breach that happened last Friday. According to staff, on the same day, a data storage device was stolen and an Excel spreadsheet was found on the MSU web site.

Both contained the names and social security numbers of MSU students and employees so the web site was removed.

The EU unveiled a range of measures yesterday to combat terrorism, draft laws which would criminalise use of the internet to incite or recruit for acts of terrorism and compel airlines to supply information, to be stored for 13 years, on all air passengers flying into or out of the EU.
The proposals, likely to be in force across the EU within three years, could turn Europe into the most monitored space on the planet, according to civil rights campaigners.

The CD was lost in transit between Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs Service (HMRC) and financial services company Standard Life, and was unencrypted, HMRC revealed on Monday.

Children are being tracked by micro-chips embedded in their uniforms in a trial at a secondary school.

The devices are used to monitor pupils’ movements and register their arrival in class on the teacher’s computer. Supply teachers can also be alerted if a student is likely to misbehave.

A database of e-mail addresses and other contact information stolen from business software provider Salesforce.com is being used in an ongoing series of targeted e-mail attacks against customers of several Salesforce.com business clients, including SunTrust and Automatic Data Processing Inc. (ADP), one of the nation's largest payroll and tax services providers.

O2-owned ISP Be is fighting a constant battle to stay one step ahead of hackers because of a router vulnerability exposed back in February.

Be subscribers were exposed when London student Sid Karunaratne demonstrated it was possible to gain remote root access using poorly concealed telnet backdoors. Admin usernames and passwords had been left accessible by Be.L33tdawg: This situation I'm sure is pretty similar to other ISPs around the world - where the modem/routers have a default username and password that nobody bothers to change.

A group of hackers has disclosed the login information of approximately 79,000 forum users in Finland. The group is thought to have used a brute-force dictionary method to determine the passwords based on password hashes presumably obtained by hacking forum servers.

For the fourth time in as many months, some Pfizer Inc employees have been affected by a compromise involving personal data -- though this time in a somewhat indirect fashion, and not as a result of a security breach at the company itself.

The most recent incident involves Wheels Inc., a Des Plaines, Ill.-based company that leases cars to Pfizer employees and their spouses.