A European police chief says the sophisticated online communications are the biggest problem for security agencies tackling terrorism. Hidden areas of the internet and encrypted communications make it harder to monitor terror suspects, warns Europol’s Rob Wainwright. “Tech firms should consider the impact sophisticated encryption software has on law enforcement”, he said. A spokesman for TechUK, […]
Continue readingMonth: March 2015
FBI Quietly Removes Recommendation To Encrypt Your Phone… As FBI Director Warns How Encryption Will Lead To Tears
Back in October, we highlighted the contradiction of FBI Director James Comey raging against encryption and demanding backdoors, while at the very same time the FBI’s own website was suggesting mobile encryption as a way to stay safe. Sometime after that post went online, all of the information on that page about staying safe magically disappeared, […]
Continue readingMultiple Digital Certificate Attacks Affect 100% of UK Businesses
All—as in 100%—of UK organizations have responded to multiple attacks on keys and certificates in the past two years. The Ponemon Institute found that attacks are becoming more widespread as the number of keys and certificates deployed on infrastructure such as web servers, network appliances and cloud services has grown by 40% to almost 24,000 […]
Continue readingBee behaviour mapped by tiny trackers
A tiny new tracker designed to monitor bee behaviour is being tested by ecologists at Kew Gardens in London. It is made from off-the-shelf technology and is based on equipment used to track pallets in warehouses, said its creator Dr Mark O’Neill. Readers, used to pick up a signal from the kit, are connected to […]
Continue readingEncryption not the way to tackle DStv: DOC
Government should make better use of regulatory tools and legislation to foster a more competitive environment in South Africa’s pay-television industry rather than requiring that conditional access technology be included in state-subsidised set-top boxes. That’s the view of Solly Mokoetle, the head of the digital migration project at the department of communications (DOC). “The issue […]
Continue readingEncryption today: how safe is it really?
When checking your email over a secure connection, or making a purchase from an online retailer, have you ever wondered how your private information or credit card data is kept secure? Our information is kept away from prying eyes thanks to cryptographic algorithms, which scramble the message so no-one else can read it but its […]
Continue readingNew bugs uncovered in encryption software
New bugs in the widely used encryption software known as OpenSSL were disclosed on Thursday, though experts say do not pose a serious threat like the “Heartbleed” vulnerability in the same technology that surfaced a year ago. “Heartbleed” triggered panic throughout the computer industry when it was reported in April 2014. That bug forced dozens […]
Continue readingYahoo Rolls Out End-To-End Encryption For Email
Back in 2012 (pre-Snowden!), we wrote about why Google should encrypt everyone’s emails using end-to-end encryption (inspired by a post by Julian Sanchez saying the same thing. Since then, securing private communications has become increasingly important. That’s why we were happy to see Google announce that it was, in fact, working on a project to […]
Continue readingCan software-based POS encryption improve PCI compliance?
In the wake of the recent Verizon report that shows that 80 percent are out of PCI DSS compliance between audits, some vendors are urging the PCI Council to consider approving software-based point-to-point encryption, in addition to the current hardware-based standard. PCI-approved, hardware-based P2PE allows merchants to drastically shrink the systems subject to compliance, reducing […]
Continue readingTired of forgetting your password? Yahoo says you don’t need one any more
Passwords: easily forgotten, but also easily guessed. It’s a bitter irony that minutes can be spent racking brains trying to remember whether a required security question answer is a pet’s name, first school or place of birth – meanwhile a cyber-criminal is merrily typing in a person’s favourite colour and relieving bank accounts of hard-earned […]
Continue reading