Security

Today’s security challenges are real and significant.  We want governments to detect and disrupt terrorist networks before they inflict harm on our society, our citizens, and our systems of government.   We also want to live in countries that respect their citizens’ basic human rights.  The tension between security and freedom has become one the most pressing issues of our day.  Societies wracked by terror cannot be truly free, but an overreaching government can also undermine freedom.

A former Subway sandwich shop franchisee pled guilty to taking part in a scheme to hack point-of-sale terminals for at least 13 stores and obtaining gift cards worth $40,000.

In a report that documents the activities of the Iranian Ajax Security Team, FireEye contends that Iran-based hacker groups are becoming increasingly more sophisticated in their attacks and could mirror the evolution of elite Chinese hacking organizations to become a hacking superpower.

While FireEye stops short of making a connection between the hackers and the Iranian government, the report notes “the objectives of these groups are consistent with Iran's efforts at controlling political dissent and expanding offensive cyber capabilities.”

The NSA has been covertly implanting interception tools in US servers heading overseas – even though the US government has warned against using Chinese technology for the same reasons, says Glenn Greenwald, in an extract from his new book about the Snowden affair, No Place to Hide

Alan Solomon, creator of Dr Soloman's Antivirus, has admitted to using Linux to avoid viruses rather than try to combat them on Windows.

His comments come after Symantec's Brian Dye estimated that antivirus systems do not even catch half of cyber attacks.

As Chinese President Xi Jinping completed his tour of Xinjiang province last week and vowed “resolute measures” against “violent terrorists,” explosions tore through crowds at Urumqi’s largest train station.

The suicide bombing in the provincial capital of China’s far western Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region left three dead (including two perpetrators) and 79 injured.

Twitter updated some of its security features recently and now allows users to reset passwords directly through a text message, which means you can be up and running on Twitter quicker than ever, should you forget your password or need to change it do to privacy concerns. Also, Twitter said it has bolstered its security in general.

The wounds caused by Heartbleed remain at the front of many minds, just a few weeks after a bug in the OpenSSL cryptographic library threatened to throw the world's Internet population under the bus.

The flaw could have allowed hackers to reveal contents of secured communications — such as passwords and credit card transactions. But to make matters worse, the fears around the flaw were only compounded when another separate vulnerability was found, this time in OAuth and OpenID, a few weeks later.

Twitter has changed the way it handles passwords and has made it harder for attackers to take over users' accounts.

Post Heartbleed and a number of assaults on personal accounts, security is high on the agenda. Twitter said in a blog post that its changes are designed to preserve individual account integrity and clean up its authentication and password reset processes.

French telecommunications group Orange said Wednesday that a breach last month resulted in the theft of the personal information of 1.3 million of its customers, including phone numbers, dates of birth, and email addresses.

No payment information or credit card numbers were stolen in the breach, but the Paris-based company sent emails to affected customers warning that they may be targeted by phishing scams that attempt to extract more sensitive financial information, such as credit card numbers or passwords.