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An executive at ScienceLogic, a company used to monitor the online networks of the FBI and the Department of Defense, among others, were missing Monday after a four-alarm fire destroyed his 16,000-square-foot Annapolis home. Don Pyle, the chief operating officer at the Reston-based technology provider, and his wife Sandy, couldn’t be located, authorities said Monday. It took 85 firefighters nearly three-and-a-half hours to get the blaze under control and firefighters had yet to set foot inside the building, uncertain about its integrity, Monday afternoon. Neighbors told The Washington Times the Pyles’ grandchildren may have been staying with them for the...

Call me a skeptic, but when I heard a report that the hack into "gov" web pages had come out of Maryland . . next to DC . . . next to the home of the CIA . . . well, that is just a little interesting. Especially if the administration uses this as a ruse to begin controlling security on the internet. As Glen Beck would say, "I'm just sayin."

President Barack Obama will propose new legislation Tuesday aimed at fostering increased sharing between government agencies and the private sector to help improve cybersecurity. The legislation would encourage the private sector to share cyber threat information with the Department of Homeland Security's National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center, according to a White House fact sheet. Companies would qualify for targeted liability protection, but would have to comply with certain privacy restrictions.

US cybersecurity experts say they have solid evidence that a former employee helped hack Sony Pictures Entertainment’s computer system — and that it was not masterminded by North Korean cyberterrorists. One leading cybersecurity firm, Norse Corp., said Monday it has narrowed its list of suspects to a group of six people — including at least one Sony veteran with the necessary technical background to carry out the attack, according to reports. The investigation of the Sony hacking by the private companies stands in stark contrast to the finding of the FBI, which said Dec. 19 its probe traced the hacking...

Thought your fingerprint was secure? Think again. The unique pattern on the tip of your fingers can easily be copied and used to access your most personal information. As PIN numbers and passwords prove redundant in protecting data, tech companies are looking to convert bodily features into secure identity authenticators. Bionym, the Toronto-based biometrics technology company, have introduced The Nymi -- a wristband that measures heartbeats to authenticate identity. Its embedded sensor reads the electrical pulses produced by your heartbeat, which is unique to each of us. "You leave your fingerprints everywhere - you actually leave this impression which can...

Will Hurd Tuesday night was an historic night for the Republican Party in a lot of ways. Mia Love became the first black Republican woman elected to Congress. Joni Ernst became the first woman elected to represent Iowa in U.S. Senate history. Elise Stefanik, at the age of 30, is the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, representing New York’s 21st congressional district. It appears that Carl DeMaio, who ran for Congress in California, will be the first openly gay Republican ever elected to Congress. And, Tim Scott became the first black Senator elected in the South since Reconstruction. But,...

A European Union cyber-security agency was in Athens to conduct the largest exercise ever held on the continent to prevent attacks on Europe’s public utilities and communications networks. The director of the European Network and Information Security Agency, Udo Helmbrecht, told The Associated Press that Thursday’s one-day exercise involving 29 countries and 200 agencies dealt with attack scenarios against “critical infrastructure.” …

Al Gore lays claim to having created the Internet but Barack Obama always knew best how to actually game it Not much ruffles the peacock feathers of B. Hussein Obama, but pals attending his most recent fundraiser say he has huge worries about cyber security on his mind. When it comes to the only-weeks-away Midterms in which the Dems could be wiped right off the electoral map, it’s “What, me worry?” more accurately put as “I’m not on the ballot this fall.” Nor in his very own words is the unruffled Obama much worried about little ole’ ISIS and Ebola....

"[The U.S. is] reducing our [nuclear] arsenal. We are investing less. All the while our enemies are exponentially increasing their expenditures, making more sophisticated weapons, flouting arms control agreements, and…Vladimir Putin announced a couple of weeks ago that he was taking titular control personally of the Russian arms control agency. So we have a crisis here, and one that’s both been unacknowledged and un-discussed.”

“In short, there is a new Cold War in progress, with our old adversaries back in the game, more powerful than they have been for decades, and with America more confused and tentative than it has been since the Carter years.”

Former acting director of cyber security for the Department of Health and Human Services Timothy DeFoggi was convicted for a myriad of gruesome child pornography charges Tuesday, the Department of Justice announced. DeFoggi, who had top security clearance in his capacity as cyber security director, first joined the child pornography website PedoBook in March 2012. The Omaha World-Herald reported that he was arrested in April of last year, when law enforcement officials serving a search warrant found him downloading child pornography in his home. In addition to viewing and soliciting child pornography, reportedly asking another member of the site whether...

Justice Department officials today announced that Timothy DeFoggi, former director of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Cyber Security division was convicted for his role in a child pornography ring. DeFoggi, 56, was convicted of engaging in a child exploitation enterprise, conspiracy to advertise and distribute child pornography, and accessing a computer with intent to view child pornography in connection with his membership in a child pornography website by a federal jury in Nebraska\, according to an official statement by officials with the FBI's Omaha Division. DeFoggi is the sixth individual associated with the child porn ring...

On what was a basic discussion of personal privacy between the host of Varney & Co, Stuart Varney, and the founder of McAfee Antivirus (no longer associated), John McAfee, a startling prediction was made by the latter. Mr McAfee stated that the prior credit card breaches at Target and NM were beta tests and that in this year he predicts that there will be a much larger breach of such customer information.

The online auction and sales giant eBay posted a message Wednesday morning saying that it had been hacked, urging all of its members to change their passwords. The company said in a statement that a database containing encrypted passwords had been breached, but that financial data, including credit card information, was stored separately and was still safe. Hackers were able to gain access to eBay employee log-ins, eBay said, which in turn gave them access to the encoded passwords. eBay says that no unauthorized transactions have yet been made with the information. But if you’re an eBay user, you still...

A sophisticated hacking group recently attacked a U.S. public utility and compromised its control system network, but there was no evidence that the utility's operations were affected, according to the Department of Homeland Security. DHS did not identify the utility in a report that was issued this week by the agency's Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team, or ICS-CERT. ICS-CERT said in the report posted on its website that investigators had determined the utility had likely been the victim of previous intrusions. It did not elaborate.

Federal systems remained vulnerable to hackers even after researchers identified the bug. Google knew about a critical flaw in Internet security, but it didn't alert anyone in the government. Neel Mehta, a Google engineer, first discovered "Heartbleed"—a bug that undermines the widely used encryption technology OpenSSL—some time in March. A team at the Finnish security firm Codenomicon discovered the flaw around the same time. Google was able to patch most of its services—such as email, search, and YouTube—before the companies publicized the bug on April 7. The researchers also notified a handful of other companies about the bug before going...

WASHINGTON — Stepping into a heated debate within the nation’s intelligence agencies, President Obama has decided that when the National Security Agency discovers major flaws in Internet security, it should — in most circumstances — reveal them to assure that they will be fixed, rather than keep mum so that the flaws can be used in espionage or cyberattacks, senior administration officials said Saturday. But Mr. Obama carved a broad exception for “a clear national security or law enforcement need,” the officials said, a loophole that is likely to allow the N.S.A. to continue to exploit security flaws both to...

There are probably only a small handful of you who actually remember the debate about the Panama Canal Treaty of 1977, which ceded control of the Panama Canal back to Panama. I opposed it at the time; I still oppose it. In fact, my father and I continue to despise the Senators, such as the late Robert C. Byrd (D.-WV), who deliberately ignored the cries of their constituents and chose to ratify it anyway.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has put himself in charge of a new body to coordinate cybersecurity, in a sign of Beijing’s concern over its vulnerability to online attacks and desire to control the Internet. […] Xi also is quoted as saying online opinion must be properly guided. China has 618 million Internet users, the most of any country. …

Debacle: U.S. intelligence agencies report that developers linked to the Belarus government helped create the Healthcare.gov website and may have inserted malicious code making it vulnerable to cyberattacks and hacking. The disastrous rollout of Healthcare.gov was bad enough. But as if Americans need another reason to avoid Healthcare.gov, we now hear that the Obama administration, through the Department of Health and Human Services, has indirectly contracted with developers in the worker's paradise of Belarus, a former Soviet republic still closely tied to Russia, to write some of the software code used for the website. The Washington Free Beacon's Bill Gertz...