Government Archives

Tag: Government

BitCoin’s Popularity Is Undermining Promises of Anonymity

December 2, 2013 Paul Roberts

The virtual currency Bitcoin has soared in value against the U.S. dollar in recent months, topping out a staggering $913 USD to 1 Bitcoin (or BTC) as of late Tuesday. The currency had many ups and downs since it was launched in January 2009. But its main attraction, all along, has been anonymity. Unlike any other online payment system, Bitcoin transactions – like cash transactions – cannot be traced back to specific individuals. Also like cash, they cannot be reversed. Both those factors give Bitcoin users the confidence that their online purchasing activity – whether computer hardware or contraband will remain private. But a group of researchers at two U.S. universities have released a paper that suggests reports of Bitcoin’s anonymity may (to paraphrase Twain) “be greatly exaggerated.” Specifically: the researchers found that, by culling a variety of open source data using public data from the Bitcoin Peer to Peer network and from […]

At FTC Forum, Experts Wonder: Is Privacy Passé?

November 20, 2013 Paul Roberts

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) used a one-day workshop to highlight security and privacy issues prompted by so-called “Internet of Things.” But attendees at the event may have walked away with a more ambiguous message, as prominent technologists and industry representatives questioned whether conventional notions of privacy had much relevance in a world populated by billions of Internet-connected devices. “I don’t feel like privacy is dead,” keynote speaker Vint Cerf, a Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, told an audience at the FTC workshop. “I do feel like privacy will be increasingly difficult for us to achieve,” Cerf warned. And Cerf wasn’t alone in wondering whether that might not be such a bad thing – or even that unusual. “Is privacy an anomaly?” Cerf wondered aloud, recalling his experience living in a small, German town where the “postmaster knew what everyone was doing.” Our modern concept of being ‘alone […]

FTC Taps Data Privacy, Security Experts For Top Posts

November 19, 2013 Paul Roberts

Amid high-profile scandals over government spying and concerns about the security of individuals’ data, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) appointed experts in privacy and data security to two senior positions this week. FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez on Monday announced the appointments of Latanya Sweeney as the agency’s Chief Technologist and Andrea Matwyshyn as a Senior Policy Advisor on privacy and data security issues. The appointments bring expertise in data privacy into the FTC’s senior ranks, as the agency wrestles with the implications of headlong expansion of Internet connected device, sometimes referred to as the “Internet of Things.” Sweeney is a professor of government and technology at Harvard University and the founder and director of Harvard’s data privacy lab. A Ph.D in computer science with degrees from Harvard and MIT, her research has focused on the de-identification of data, developing privacy technologies, and the protection of health information, according to the FTC. At […]

Snowden Borrowed from APT Playbook In NSA Hack

November 16, 2013 Paul Roberts

We know for sure that Edward Snowden made short work of the protections that the National Security Agency used to segregate classified data. Snowden’s revelations about government spying on foreign governments, domestic and foreign firms and…well…just about everyone else first appeared in print in May. Since that time, a looming question is “how?” In other words: how did a single contractor gain access to such a massive trove of classified intelligence while working for the most security conscious organization in the world? While the exact methods used by Snowden are still not known, there are many theories. Now the security firm Venafi thinks that it has an answer, and is challenging the NSA to prove it wrong. In a blog post on Wednesday, the company laid much of the blame on poor management of digital certificates and user credentials, which allowed Snowden to move laterally within the NSA’s classified […]

Malware Supply Chain Links Eleven Attacks

November 12, 2013 Paul Roberts

Fresh off their discovery of a previously unknown (‘zero day’) security hole in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser, researchers at the security firm Fireeye say that they have evidence that a string of sophisticated attacks have a common origin. In a report released on Monday (PDF), the firm said that many seemingly unrelated cyber attacks identified in the last year appear to be part of a “broader offensive fueled by a shared development and logistics infrastructure” — what Fireeye terms a ‘supply chain’ for advanced persistent threat (APT) attacks. At least 11 APT campaigns targeting “a wide swath of industries” in recent months were found to be built on a the same infrastructure of malicious applications and services, including shared malware tools and malicious binaries with the same timestamps and digital certificates. “Taken together, these commonalities point to centralized APT planning and development,” Fireeye wrote. The attacks link at least 11 separate […]