FBI Biometric Database Will Be Exempt From Some Privacy Act Protections
The FBI’s latest biometric database, which contains a host of identifying information from a wide range of sources, will be exempt from many of the restrictions of the Privacy Act. In a final rule published this week by the Department of Justice, the FBI announced that the Next Generation Identification system would not be subject to the Privacy Act. […]
Mozilla Launches Send, A Secure File-Sharing Project
File-sharing has changed quite a bit since the days of the sneakernet, but it hasn’t evolved much, if at all, in the last few years. The basic concepts of emailing or uploading and sending a link to a file have remained pretty static, but now Mozilla has created a free tool that allows anyone to […]
FCC Proposes $82 Million Fine on Robocall Operation
For the second time in less than two months, the FCC is proposing an enormous fine for someone it alleges ran an illegal robocall operation. The latest fine, announced Thursday, would be $82 million, against a North Carolin man named Philip Roesel, whom the commission says made more than 21 million illegal robocalls. The FCC […]
The Security Community, Not Government, Must Fix IoT
The Senate is considering a bill that would force some serious changes in the way that vendors handle the security of the IoT devices they sell, but while the proposed law has strong bones, it should be clear by now that no amount of government regulation or intervention is going to fix this problem. There […]
Phone Fraud Scam Drains Millions From Scottish Businesses
The bank phone fraud scheme that has been making its way through the U.S. and UK has shown up in Scotland, to the tune of £2.5 million in losses. The national police force in Scotland says that a wave of phone scams hit the Highlands region of the country in the last two weeks, targeting businesses. The scheme […]
FTC to Feed Daily Robocall Data to Carriers
Carriers are getting another tool to use in the fight against illegal robocalls. The FTC is beginning a new initiative that will feed data on robocalls that violate the Do Not Call registry rules directly to carriers each day. The plan is part of an overall strategy at the FTC to combat robocalls and illegal […]
IoT Security Bill Would Protect Research, Require Patches
Congress may be about to apply some real pressure to hardware manufacturers and software makers whose IoT devices are forming the spine of a new, wildly insecure global network. A bill introduced Tuesday in the Senate would require IoT makers to guarantee that any devices sold to federal agencies are patchable and don’t contain any known security […]
Rooting an Amazon Echo
Researchers have developed a method for getting a root shell on the Amazon Echo and then install a small piece of malware that can transmit live audio from the device to a remote computer or steal user authentication tokens. The attack relies on having physical access to the Echo and it requires quite a bit of […]