Privacy

Researchers at the Hack in the Box conference in Kuala Lumpur Thursday showed that Apple on its own or per orders by the U.S. government could harvest messages sent over its proprietary service, which lets people using Apple mobile devices send text messages for free.

Apple has said that its end-to-end encryption prevents the company or anyone else from descrambling the messages. That claim is "just basically lies," Cyril Cattiaux, a developer of iOS jailbreak software and a researcher at Quarkslab, said, as reported by IDG News Service.

A close look at Apple's iMessage system shows the company could easily intercept communications on the service despite its assurances to the contrary, researchers claimed Thursday at a security conference.

Apple asserted in June, following disclosures about the NSA's data collection programs, that iMessage, which lets users send texts over Wi-Fi for free, is protected by end-to-end encryption that makes it impossible for Apple or anyone else to descramble the messages.

When a high-profile public figure living in Hong Kong hired the security company Trustwave to test if its experts could get his passwords, they turned to Facebook.

While the dangers of sharing too much data on Facebook are well-known, it is surprising how little data can give hackers a foothold. The man gave Trustwave's team no-holds barred permission to try and snatch his data, a so-called "Red Team" test.

The leaders who run the internet’s technical global infrastructure say the time has come to end U.S. dominance over it.

In response to leaks by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, Fadi Chehadé, who heads the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, and others have called for “an environment, in which all stakeholders, including all governments, participate on equal footing.”

They frequently target the rich and powerful who they see as having most to lose, according to Professor Carsten Maple, a member of the Information Assurance Advisory Council.

His warning came as the Sunday Express reveals that on average one patient a day has their medical records and personal data either lost or stolen.

Figures from the Information Commissioner for the second quarter of 2013 reveal 91 data health sector security breaches. Prof Maple said patients secretly battling “stigma”, diseases such as HIV and other sexual problems are vulnerable to blackmail.

The U.S. National Security Agency has repeatedly tried to compromise Tor, the government-funded online anonymity tool, but has had little success, according to a new report in the U.K.'s Guardian.

Two major secure e-mail services shut down earlier this month, with the people who run them claiming that e-mail inherently lacks privacy, and to keep operating would give their clients a false sense of security.

We've had several requests by the press and others to talk about the Silk Road situation today. We only know what's going on by reading the same news sources everyone else is reading.

This week, as revelations about the extent of National Security Agency (NSA) spying continued to unfold, Ryan Gallagher brought us an article about the types of hardware that agencies outside of the NSA use to gather information from mobile devices. These agencies, which include local law enforcement as well as federal groups like the FBI and the DEA, use highly specialized equipment to gain information about a target. Still, the details about that hardware is largely kept secret from the public.

 France's data protection watchdog moved closer to fining Google for the way it stores and tracks user information after the search engine ignored a three-month ultimatum to bring its practices in line with local law.

The privacy watchdog, known as CNIL, said on Friday it was opening a procedure to impose formal sanctions. Under French law, Google can be fined up to 150,000 euros.