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OPN News Release: ” The U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) today announced the award of a $133,263,550 contract to Identity Theft Guard Solutions LLC, doing business as ID Experts, for identity theft protection services for 21.5 million individuals whose personal information was stolen in one of the …
News release: “Ernst & Young LLP and Los Alamos National Laboratory have formed a strategic alliance to deliver some of the most advanced behavioral cybersecurity tools available to the commercial market. “Cybersecurity attacks are ever more frequent and more sophisticated, and they destroy the trust needed to conduct business,” said Duncan McBranch, Chief Technology Officer …
EPIC – “Harvard Professor Dr. Latanya Sweeney has launched Technology Science, a new online journal for “original material dealing primarily with a social, political, personal, or organizational benefit or adverse consequence of technology.” Among other papers, Technology Science currently features research on Facebook Messenger’s geolocation collection and disclosure, medical privacy, and price discrimination in international …
FCW.com: “An official timeline of the Office of Personnel Management breach obtained by FCW pinpoints the hackers’ calibrated extraction of data and the government’s step-by-step response. It illuminates a sequence of events that lawmakers have struggled to pin down in public hearings with Obama administration officials. The timeline makes clear that the heist of data …
Office of Inspector General Office of Veterans Affairs – Report Number: 13-03054-463 – Redacted – 8/17/2015. “VA employees improperly used Yammer.com, a Web-based collaboration technology, which was not approved or monitored as required by VA policy. Further, the website had vulnerable security features, recurring website malfunctions, and users engaged in a misuse of time and …
“In June 2015, the Nation learned that the personnel records of 21.5 million United States citizens had been exfiltrated by an unknown adversary from the Office of Personnel Management, one of the largest known breaches in the history of the U.S. Government. The immediate public outcry included congressional hearings attributing the breach to OPM administrators and …
Nextgov: “Malicious code Russians reportedly used to jimmy open a White House network and malware Chinese hackers reportedly used to rupture insurer Anthem’s network were similar — and free, according to new research…The Anthem hackers compromised the Social Security numbers and other personal information of about 80 million customers. The White House hackers infiltrated an …
National Security Letters in Foreign Intelligence Investigations: A Glimpse at the Legal Background, Charles Doyle, Senior Specialist in American Public Law. July 31, 2015. “Five federal statutes authorize intelligence officials to request certain business record information in connection with national security investigations. The authority to issue these national security letters (NSLs) is comparable to the …
NYT and ProPublica investigative reports: “The National Security Agency’s ability to spy on vast quantities of Internet traffic passing through the United States has relied on its extraordinary, decades-long partnership with a single company: the telecom giant AT&T. While it has been long known that American telecommunications companies worked closely with the spy agency, newly …
Legal Insider – “In an idea that has yet to be fully embraced by its staff, DLA Piper has introduced its own internal Twitter for enterprise called Grapevine. Using Greets instead of Tweets, Grapevine is an open security model which is being used to send messages; spread news, information and know-how across the firm; and send …
Cora Currier – The Intercept: “There are lots of ways that government spies can attack your computer, but a U.S. drone company is scheming to offer them one more. Boeing subsidiary Insitu would like to be able to deliver spyware via drone. The plan is described in internal emails from the Italian company Hacking Team, which makes off-the-shelf software that can remotely infect …
“There is good news this month on the email-based front of the threat landscape. According to our metrics, the overall spam rate has dropped to 49.7 percent. This is the first time this rate has fallen below 50 percent of email for over a decade. The last time Symantec recorded a similar spam rate was …
