Privacy

In a blog post on Sunday, Snapchat executives revealed that the payroll data of some current and former employees was exposed as the result of a scam e-mail sent to a human resources employee at the company.

"The good news is that our servers were not breached, and our users’ data was totally unaffected by this," a company spokesperson said in the post. "The bad news is that a number of our employees have now had their identity compromised. And for that, we’re just impossibly sorry."

Governments around the world are legislating to collect metadata, usually with the excuse that modern crime-fighting and national security efforts require access to records of citizens' communications.

In many nations that's sparked what I call "horizontal" scope-creep, in which, as just one example, the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA) wants access to metadata in order to identify and discipline doctors who are having affairs with their patients.

The German Interior Ministry has approved a measure allowing federal police to use a special Trojan virus to hack the computers and smartphones of their suspects, giving them almost unlimited opportunities to conduct surveillance on them.

The Trojan can already be employed this week, reports Deutschlandfunk radio.

Judge Sheri Pym informed Apple that it must provide specialized software that will allow law enforcement officials to thwart iPhone's built-in security measures, specifically a feature that automatically erases handset data after a certain number of unsuccessful login attempts, the Associated Press reports (via ABC News).

Gordon F. Kelly of Forbes is at it again, whipping up a frenzy over Windows 10. This time he claims to have found SHOCKING EVIDENCE that Microsoft's telemetry is collecting STAGGERING amounts of data from Windows 10 users.

Sadly, what Mr. Kelly's post* proves is how very, very little he understands about modern computing or networking. Seriously, his article is pure gibberish, technically. But more than 100,000 people have read it so far, and apparently they believe Mr. Kelly.

I feel sorry for those poor benighted souls.

Breaking into a run. Standing too long in once place. Repeatedly looking over your shoulder. Everyone does these things from time to time, and they aren’t usually cause for alarm. But in Esther Hovers’ series False Positives, such things are very suspicious indeed, and suggest a heinous crime may soon occur.

The so-called "going dark" problem—which various government officials claim will be the death knell to the US because Silicon Valley won't bake crypto backdoors into its wares—is greatly overblown. That's because crime fighters are not in the dark, at least technologically, and are now presented with a vast array of spy tools at their disposal. Specifically, modern espionage is piggybacking on the Internet of Things (IoT) tools, from televisions to toasters, that enable wanton spying.

"Crackas With Attitude," the hacking group that reportedly broke into CIA chief John Brennan's personal email last October (and whose contents have since been released by Wikileaks), have once again made headlines by infiltrating a number of personal accounts owned Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper's.

Claims by the Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI) that it has successfully decrypted emails stored on Blackberry smartphones have caused bafflement at the Canadian firm.

Documents seen by Dutch blog Crime News show the NFI claiming to have decrypted 275 out of 325 emails encrypted with PGP from a handset in their possession. The NFI reportedly used software from Israeli firm Cellebrite to crack the encryption.

The man selling biometric equipment at the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas this week had never seen so much interest in his booth in nearly 30 years.

And he’s horrified. He always thought widespread acceptance of their fingerprint scanners would be for convenience, not surveillance, but he’s not so sure any more.