US

A sophisticated group of hackers believed to be associated with the Chinese government, who for years targeted U.S experts on Asian geopolitical matters, suddenly began breaching computers of experts on Iraq as the rebellion there escalated, a security firm said on Monday.

CrowdStrike Inc said that the group is one of the most sophisticated of the 30 it tracks in China and that its operations are better hidden than many attributed to military and other government units.

Microsoft is one of the large US companies who are calling for a reform of the government surveillance laws, asking not only for increased transparency, but also for new laws that would basically block American agencies from accessing information stored on servers across the board.

Washington is considering using visa restrictions to prevent Chinese nationals from attending popular hacking conferences in Las Vegas as part of a broader effort to curb Chinese cyber espionage.

An official said that Washington could use such visa restrictions and other measures to keep Chinese from attending the August Def Con and Black Hat events to maintain pressure on China after the US charged five Chinese military officers with hacking into American companies to steal trade secrets. China has denied the charges, saying they were "made up."

The US government has admitted that it arranges drone strikes and assassinations based on a person's metadata.

According to the New York Review of Books, the National Security Agency claims that its sweeping collection of phone and Internet records is nothing to worry about because it is only "metadata" are bogus.

The U.S. and German governments remain far from an agreement on the appropriate level of surveillance by the U.S. National Security Agency on German residents, leaders of both countries said Friday.

The two countries still have “differences of opinion to overcome” on the appropriate use of surveillance, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said in a joint press conference with U.S. President Barack Obama. The two leaders met in Washington, D.C., this week to discuss political unrest in Ukraine and other issues.

The administration of U.S. President Barack Obama favors disclosing to the public vulnerabilities in commercial and open source software in the national interest, unless there is a national security or law enforcement need, the country’s spy agency said.

Security software maker Cheetah Mobile Inc, a unit of Chinese software company Kingsoft Corp Ltd , filed with U.S. regulators on Wednesday to raise about $300 million in an initial public offering of American Depositary Shares.

Beijing-based Cheetah, formerly known as Kingsoft Internet Software Holdings Ltd, told the U.S Securities and Exchange Commission in a preliminary prospectus that Morgan Stanley, J.P.Morgan, Credit Suisse and Macquarie Capital were underwriting the IPO. (r.reuters.com/dyr28v)

IBM has not relinquished its customers' data to the US government and would challenge any orders to do so, the company said in a blog post over the weekend.

The post by the world's largest technology service provider is the latest backlash by a tech company against US electronic surveillance practices, following reports alleging the government spread malware to break into computers.

 Law enforcement agencies in California are using devices that mimic cellular base stations to track mobile users, public records have revealed, triggering charges that the practice may be unconstitutional.

The U.S. last week brought charges against two Arkansas men for operating an e-mail hacking website, needapassword.com, which offered to obtain passwords to any e-mail account for a fee. The scheme, operated by Mark Anthony Townsend of Cedarville, Ark., and Joshua Alan Tabor of Prairie Grove, affected some 6,000 accounts, according to a Jan. 24 press release from the Federal Bureau of Investigations. Cedarville and Prairie Grove have a combined population of less than 6,000 people. Yet the investigation into the website stretched around the globe.