Today’s topics include Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella calling for a global GDPR, and the U.S. government warning of a DNS hijacking risk.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella renewed his company’s call for privacy on a global basis at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
During an on-stage interview on Jan. 24, Nadella said that he sees privacy as a basic human right and that he hopes the United States can adopt privacy laws similar to Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation, which he called a “fantastic start.”
Nadella has been vocal about his views on privacy since well before the GDPR went into effect on May 25, 2018. He was a driving force behind Microsoft’s refusal to provide the contents of a personal email account on a server in Ireland belonging to an EU citizen.
Shortly after the GDPR went into effect, Nadella announced that Microsoft would be adopting GDPR-like privacy standards globally. Since the GDPR went into effect, Microsoft has created an entire privacy center along with details of what data Microsoft collects, what it does with that data and how users can control the use of that data.
The U.S. government is warning of a potentially disastrous cyber-security attack targeting Domain Name System infrastructure.
DNS is the technology that translates numerical Internet Protocol addresses into web domains, such as eWEEK.com. DNS servers direct traffic to the correct location for a given domain; the risk is that if DNS is tampered with, traffic can be misdirected, intercepted or blocked.
According to the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, “[The agency] is aware of multiple executive branch agency domains that were impacted by the tampering campaign and has notified the agencies that maintain them.”
The Department of Homeland Security has not publicly disclosed which agencies have been impacted by the DNS hijacking campaign.