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US Allows More Talk About Surveillance Orders

The U.S. Department of Justice has acceded to requests from some large, technology firms, allowing them to post more specific information about government requests for data on their users, according to a report by The New York Times. In a statement released on Monday, Attorney General Eric Holder and James R. Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, the new rules allowing some declassification followed a speech by President Obama calling for intelligence reform. “The administration is acting to allow more detailed disclosures about the number of national security orders and requests issued to communications providers, and the number of customer accounts targeted under those orders and requests including the underlying legal authorities,” the joint statement reads. “Through these new reporting methods, communications providers will be permitted to disclose more information than ever before to their customers.” [Read more Security Ledger coverage of the NSA surveillance story.] Previously, companies were prohibited from […]

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Thingful is a Facebook for Smart Devices

The data on exactly how many Internet of Things devices will be online by the end of the decade is a matter of debate. Cisco famously put the number at 50 billion by 2020, though Morgan Stanley thinks it could be as high as 75 billion. The analyst firm IDC estimates the number at 50 billion. But others have put the number lower. Gartner puts the number of connected things at around 30 billion by 2020. We might all be better off taking a cue from McDonald’s and just start using the phrase “billions and billions” by the end of the decade. As with McDonald’s hamburgers – the exact number doesn’t really matter, so long as everyone agrees that it’s going to be big. Really big. But all those devices – and the near-limitless IPV6 address space that will accommodate them – do present a management and governance problem: how […]

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Two Million Passwords Stolen From Facebook, Twitter, ADP

The passwords to access more than two million online accounts have been recovered from a server that is part of the command and control network for the Pony botnet, a large and active network of infected computers, according to a blog post from the security firm Trustwave. The company said that it found a cache of approximately two million compromised accounts, most from popular online services such as Facebook, Yahoo, Google and Twitter. More concerning: the cache also contained tens of thousands of credentials for FTP (File Transfer Protocol) servers, remote desktop and secure shell (SSH) accounts, and a site belonging to ADP, the payments processing firm. Facebook accounts made up the lion’s share of the haul, with 318,121 user credentials discovered – 57% of the total. Yahoo was the next biggest victim, with 59,549, almost 11% of the total. Leading Russian social networking sites vk.com and odnoklassniki.ru were also in […]

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Health Exchanges Need A Fail Whale

In a blog post on Veracode’s blog today, I write about the problems encountered at government-run online health exchanges that were intended to connect millions to private insurance plans under the Affordable Care Act. The exchanges opened to the public on Tuesday, and they got off to a rocky start, with reports of web sites paralyzed as millions of uninsured Americans logged on to sign up for subsidized health insurance. In some cases, the problems appear to have been caused by “external factors.” New York State’s online health exchange was felled by the weight of more than 10 million requests of dubious origin, The New York Post reported. But other exchanges, including Healthcare.gov the federal government’s main health insurance storefront, which is used by residents or more than half of the states, were victims of their own success: overwhelmed when the doors swung open and millions of eager customers poured […]

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Internet of Things Demands New Social Contract To Protect Privacy

Changes brought about by the Internet of Things demands the creation of a whole new social contract to enshrine the right to privacy and prevent the creation of technology-fueled Orwellian surveillance states in which individual privacy protections take a back seat to security and “control.” That, according to an opinion piece penned by the head of the European Commission’s Knowledge Sharing Unit. Gérald Santucci, in an essay written for the web site privacysurgeon.org, argues that technology advances, including the advent of wearable technology and the combination of inexpensive, remote sensors and Big Data analytics threaten to undermine long-held notions like personal privacy and the rights of individuals. The essays says that current approaches to data protection are “largely inadequate” to the task of reigning in the asymmetrical changes wrought by new technology. “Data collection and video surveillance will continue to grow as ubiquitous computing pervades almost all areas of our […]

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