Privacy

This weekend, the US government filed documents in two long-running cases (both in California's Northern District) related to NSA surveillance.

Security researchers at Johns Hopkins University have demonstrated a unique new attack that can force the iSight cameras in legacy MacBook and iMac models to capture images without turning on the camera's accompanying LED.

Researchers Matthew Brocker and Stephen Checkoway outline the attack, which targets the firmware inside the iSight camera's controller chip, in a paper entitled "iSeeYou: Disabling the MacBook Webcam Indicator LED." The paper was first reported by the Washington Post.

A U.S. National Security Agency surveillance review board report, to be released Wednesday, will recommend major changes in the way the agency tracks terrorism suspects, according to news reports.

The review board, appointed by President Barack Obama, will recommend that the NSA no longer hold a huge database of U.S. telephone records collected by the NSA, according to the Washington Post. The phone records should be held by the telecom carriers or by a third party, the board recommended, according to the Post.

A Harvard student was charged Tuesday with making a hoax bomb threat just so he could get out of a final exam.

Eldo Kim, 20, of Cambridge, Mass., was scheduled for a hearing Wednesday in U.S. District Court. He could face as long as five years in prison, three years of supervised release and a $250,000 fine if convicted of communicating the bomb threat that cleared four large buildings Monday.

The Indian government is planning to launch a surveillance system to spy on and record all internet traffic in India, including emails, blog posts, social media, voice calls and other communications, along with relevant IP addresses.

In addition to the privacy implications, the system will also have consequences for organisations doing business in India, especially high-tech companies with valuable intellectual property that could be exposed. The objective of scooping up 100 per cent of internet traffic in India could also impact web performance.

It isn’t just online advertisers that benefit from user-tracking cookies. The National Security Agency has been taking advantage of the cookies that companies force on users to pinpoint targets they want to hack, according to newly released Edward Snowden documents.

Card issuer JPMorgan discovered an intrusion on web servers used by the site www.ucard.chase.com.

Corporations pay employees and the government issues tax refunds, unemployment compensation and other benefits using the cards.

Singapore's central bank has called on financial institutions to tighten up cybersecurity after a database on elite customers of Standard Chartered Bank was compromised.

Police confirmed yesterday that information on private-banking clients of the British lender had been found in the laptop of a Singaporean man charged with hacking the parliamentary district website of Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong.

The president of the United States says he's not "allowed" to own an iPhone, which is why he's sticking with his BlackBerry, according to The Wall Street Journal.

It's a politically sensitive subject because the iPhone is the big American brand, and the president is a self-proclaimed fan of the late Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs. He'd love to pander to buy-America voters. (Obama is also probably not "allowed" to have an Android phone.)

Where's Waldo? Ask the NSA.

That's right, you can add location tracking to the list of surveillance activities being carried out by the secretive US National Security Agency.