Robert Lemos

It’s perhaps the weirdest war of words ever. Driven by a shift in liability for fraudulent transactions, banks and retail firms have taken to lobbing critical press releases at each other, charging that the other side has not done enough to protect consumer data. At its heart, the debate boils down to whether retailers’ forced […]

Controversial legislation aimed at allowing companies to share cyber-attack information with government agencies continues to attract opposition, pitting privacy advocates and security experts against non-technical businesses and government agencies. On Oct. 22, the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 (Senate Bill 754) advanced through the legislative process, with votes expected next week on the bill’s […]

The infrequent release of security updates for Android devices has left 88 percent of smartphones and tablets vulnerable to at least one of 11 critical security flaws over the last four years, according to research published earlier this month by computer scientists at the University of Cambridge. Using data from 20,400 devices and 40 different […]

In June 2013, Austrian resident Max Schrems asked Ireland’s data-protection commissioner to prevent Facebook from transferring his data to the United States. Because all European Facebook users must agree to have their data transferred overseas for processing, they lose the protection of Europe’s Data Protection Directive, and Schrems worried that his personal data could not […]

Online thieves infiltrated the network of investment firm Scottrade nearly two years ago, stealing the names and addresses of 4.6 million customers, the company said on Oct. 2. The company did not detect the breach, but found out about the intrusion after federal law enforcement officials “recently informed” the retail investment firm of the incident. […]

When President Xi Jinping arrived in Washington, D.C., last week, the U.S. government had already started threatening to levy sanctions against China for continuing to aid, and in many cases sponsor, domestic hackers in efforts to steal sensitive information from the U.S. government and companies. Yet an 11th-hour agreement between China and the United States […]

Cyber-criminals who misconfigure their management nodes for commodity remote-access Trojans (RATs)—software used to monitor and control other computers—can be detected by simple Internet scans, possibly revealing the operator’s location, according to research published on Sept. 29 by data-analysis firm Recorded Future. The company used automated scanning service Shodan to search the Internet for default communication […]

The message started appearing in Chinese developer forums about six months ago: A high-speed download site for Apple’s latest Xcode development environment was now available. Because the hefty 3.6GB free software package often slowed downloads in China, many developers took advantage of the link, which sent them to a page that listed all recent versions […]

As Chinese President Xi Jinping promised U.S. technology leaders in Seattle that China would not support hacking for economic gain, two security research firms released a joint report linking a Chinese intelligence unit with attacks on national and international government groups in the Asia-Pacific region. The espionage group, known as “Naikon,” has been active for […]

Security firms continue to warn smartphone users of the digital dangers of mobile malware, adware and spyware, but ironically, almost 80 percent of infected devices on mobile networks are tethered Windows laptops, not phones or tablets, network-security firm Alcatel-Lucent said on Sept. 16. The company’s Motive Security Labs found that the proportion of mobile-network-connected devices […]

When the U.S. Department of Commerce proposed a rule to regulate the international trade and sharing of “intrusion software,” worried security firms immediately went on the defense. Industry giants, such as Symantec and FireEye, teamed up with well-known technology firms, such as Cisco and Google, to criticize the regulations. The proposed rules, published in May, […]

Manufacturers of connected devices still have a lot of growing up to do when it comes to security. Consumer devices are increasingly designed to be connected to the Internet, but continue to have basic design flaws and security vulnerabilities that leave them open to attack. In a test of nine baby monitors, for example, security […]