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Over the past three weeks, my family and I spent more than 22 hours driving more than 1,400 miles for our vacation. The trip involved enduring construction traffic, heavy rainstorms and unbelievably frightening, dense and fast traffic along interstates merely two lanes wide. We made it through safely, partly because I pulled over to let my husband drive through the rain (I hate driving in rain) and partly because he has learned to endure my uncontrollable need to provide commentary about his driving skills from the passenger seat -- even though his driving record is better than mine. It defies...

Hackers have stolen and leaked the personal details of users of Ashley Madison – a site that hooks up people who want to have affairs. A group or individual known as The Impact Team claimed to be behind the attack and that it had data on all of Ashley Madison's 37 million users and its partner sites, Cougar Life and Established Men, all owned by Canada's Avid Life Media (ALM). The Impact Team claims to have access to the company's user database and is threatening to release all of the information unless the site is taken down. So far the...

Could a data breach on the scale suffered by the Office of Personnel Management happen to Healthcare.gov?

SAN FRANCISCO — An elite group of security technologists has concluded that the American and British governments cannot demand special access to encrypted communications without putting the world’s most confidential data and critical infrastructure in danger. A new paper from the group, made up of 14 of the world’s pre-eminent cryptographers and computer scientists, is a formidable salvo in a skirmish between intelligence and law enforcement leaders, and technologists and privacy advocates. After Edward J. Snowden’s revelations — with security breaches and awareness of nation-state surveillance at a record high and data moving online at breakneck speeds — encryption has...

On Tuesday, someone broke into an underground vault in Sacramento, and cut several high-capacity internet cables. Nobody knows who this person is or why they did it, but since that time the FBI has revealed that it was not an isolated incident. They’ve been investigating 10 other recent attacks on the internet infrastructure of California, and they seem to be deeply troubled by the vulnerability of these cables. ........................ The article goes on to compare these incidents to similar attacks that happened in Arizona last year, as well as California in 2009. However, they may be missing the bigger picture....

Someone hacked through yet another fiber optic cable in the San Francisco Bay area early Tuesday morning, continuing a rash of incidents that have disrupted Internet traffic and vexed law enforcement officials. The latest attack occurred at around 4.30 am Pacific Time near the town of Livermore, about 50 miles east of San Francisco. Someone climbed down a manhole cover there and cut through several fiber optic cables, according to several reports. The FBI is investigating. The cables are operated by backbone providers such as Level 3 Communications, which sell capacity to other cable and Internet providers. The cables carry...

Nearly a month after news broke of a massive breach at the Office of Personnel Management -- and three weeks after first denying, then admitting, that security clearance information was stolen -- OPM has shut down its electronic background check system. The agency said the move is a proactive step, not a reaction to another hack. In a June 29 alert posted on OPM's website, the agency says, "The [Electronic Questionnaires for Investigations Processing] e-QIP system will be down for an extended period of time for security enhancements." There was no word on how background checks would be handled with...

The largest federal employee union filed a class action lawsuit Monday against the federal personnel office, its leaders and one of its contractors, arguing that negligence contributed to what government officials are calling one of the most damaging cyberthefts in U.S. history. The suit by the American Federation of Government Employees names the Office of Personnel Management, its director, Katherine Archuleta, and its chief information officer, Donna Seymour. It also names Keypoint Government Solutions, an OPM contractor

<p>The House Oversight Committee’s hearings on the massive OPM data breach have been absolutely astounding. The rank incompetence on display at this agency was mind-boggling...</p>

<p>The technical details are a little difficult here so let’s put it this way – idiotic and utterly incompetent government officials outsourced IT management of highly sensitive information to companies that had some workers in China, and gave them complete and total access to that database.</p>

In responding to China’s massive hack of federal personnel data, the government may have run afoul of computer security again. Over the last nine days, the the Office of Personnel Management has sent e-mail notices to hundreds of thousands of federal employees to notify them of the breach and recommend that they click on a link to a private contractor’s Web site to sign up for credit monitoring and other protections. But those e-mails have been met with increasing alarm by employees — along with retirees and former employees with personal data at risk — who worry that the communications...

Cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab announced that it has detected an intrusion into its own systems, and you'll never believe who the company thinks is behind it. CEO Eugene Kaspersky claims a nation-state hacked into his company's network in order to steal information about its technologies. The unidentified hackers exploited security flaws in Microsoft Software Installer files to infect Kaspersky's network with malware. Kaspersky is referring to the malware as "Duqu 2.0", because it appears to be tied to the same cybercriminals that used Duqu malware to attack Iran, India, France and Ukraine a few years ago. Back then, the hackers...

WASHINGTON DC – As officials of the Obama administration announced that millions of sensitive records associated with current and past federal employees and contractors had been exposed by a long-running infiltration of the networks and systems of the Office of Personnel Management on June 4, they claimed the breach had been found during a government effort to correct problems with OPM’s security. An OPM statement on the attack said that the agency discovered the breach as it had “undertaken an aggressive effort to update its cybersecurity posture.” And a DHS spokesperson told Ars that “interagency partners” were helping the OPM...

Privacy: In two weeks, we've learned that offshore hackers managed to steal 100,000 tax filings and personnel data on millions of federal workers. Who, exactly, is in charge of cybersecurity in this administration?

A well-known U.S. hacker told F.B.I. agents he took momentary control of an airplane’s engines mid-flight by hacking into its inflight entertainment system, according to a document filed in U.S. federal court and obtained by APTN National News. Roberts, who has been interviewed at least three times by the F.B.I. this year, is under investigation for allegedly hacking into the electronic entertainment systems of airplanes, according to an application for a search warrant to probe seized electronic equipment. The document shows F.B.I. agents investigating Roberts believe he has the ability to do what he claims: take over flight control systems...

Unless you live in a log cabin on Loon Lake without any contact with the outside world (or you are one of a certain group of unnamed politicians who have offices in Rayburn, Longworth, Cannon, Russell, Dirksen or Hart), you know that breaches have become the third certainty in life. Over one billion records containing some form of personally identifying information have been grabbed by hackers since 2005. But make no mistake, the perfect storm that hit the healthcare sector in the past 90 days is not just more of the same. Hacking healthcare is not the newest flavor of...

It was less than two weeks ago that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton assured the nation that her “homebrew” email server was safely secure in her home in Chappaqua, New York. She insisted that the hardware was fortified behind a locked door and had a Secret Service detail mentoring it night and day, as though the greatest security threat that system faced was via a physical attack by a team of cartoonish cat burglars. Nevertheless, Clinton insisted that the safeguards around the email system she constructed out of “convenience” were “effective and secure.” She added that “there were no...

FireEye's Mandiant found that the average data breach was discovered in 205 days, dropping from 229 days (2013) and 243 days (2012). Enterprises were only able to self-detect 31 percent of breaches, with third-parties and the government helping identify cybersecurity incidents.    Companies are becoming more vigilant in detecting cybercrime-related activity, such as credit card companies noticing fraudulent behavior.  "Over the last several years, organizations like the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have gotten increasingly involved in notifying US businesses that they have been identified as being compromised," said Ryan Kazanciyan, technical director at Mandiant, in a statement to eWEEK....

Google’s Android has gobbled up market share world wide, now accounting for over 80% of all smartphone shipped globally. But when it comes to actually making money, Apple is eating all the profits as it continues its focus on premium devices. Today Strategy Analytics said that Apple in Q4 last year accounted for 89% of all smartphone profits, equating to $18.8 billion, with Android taking only 11%, or $2.4 billion. The blow for Android is softened only slightly less so only by the fact that other platform players like Microsoft, Blackberry and Firefox seemingly made no profit at all.

Apple still rules the mobile enterprise space and is extending its lead. iOS gained another 4 percentage points, growing to 73 percent of global device activations in Q4 2014. Android device activations, meanwhile, dropped the same amount to 25 percent of total activations last quarter. The latest findings come from Good Technology‘s Mobility Index Report. Windows Phone activations remain consistent with the seven previous quarters: flat at 1 percent. Since BlackBerry devices use BlackBerry Enterprise Server for corporate email access, Good Technology does not have insight into BlackBerry handset activations. In Q3 2014, Apple reversed its trend of declining quarterly...