Security News > 2020
Iran is widely expected to ramp up cyberattacks against the United States in response to the US killing of a top Iranian leader this month even as fears have receded about a military confrontation between the two countries. While Iran appeared to be "Standing down" from a military response, according to US President Donald Trump, the cyber threat remains real, said analysts.
The newly announced Cloudflare for Campaigns aims to deliver cyber-security services to all political campaigns and parties, especially to those that have small teams and limited resources. Cloudflare, which has provided services to 18 major presidential campaigns and various congressional campaigns during the 2020 U.S. election cycle, says it blocks over 400,000 cyber-attacks targeting political campaigns on an average day.
This includes the number of security patches it issues - which with the January 2020 update reached a joint record of 334, matching an identical number released in July 2018. Unlike rivals such as Microsoft, Oracle only releases security patches every three months so that's part of the explanation for the size of its updates, which now routinely head towards 300.
The FBI, in a change of policy, is committing to inform state officials if local election systems have been breached, federal officials said Thursday. Now the FBI will notify both counties victimized by breaches as well as the state's chief election official - in most cases, the secretary of state.
On Monday, Google pushed out an update for the iOS version of Smart Lock, its built-in, on-by-default password manager. Smart Lock - which has been available for Google's Chrome browser since 2017 - now also lets iOS users set up their device as the second factor in two-factor authentication, meaning that you no longer have to carry around a separate security key dongle.
During a House hearing on Wednesday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said that the spread of surveillance via ubiquitous facial recognition is like something out of the tech dystopia TV show "Black Mirror." At one point, Ocasio-Cortez asked Meredith Whittaker - co-founder and co-director of New York University's AI Now Institute, who had noted in the hearing that facial recognition is a potential tool of authoritarian regimes - to remind the committee of some of the common ways that companies collect our facial recognition data.
Enter European Digital Rights, a collection of human rights groups across Europe, which has published a set of guidelines for ethical website development. EDRi also includes website accessibility as a key ethical principle.
Cybersecurity firm McAfee announced on Thursday that its board of managers has appointed Peter Leav as the company's new chief executive officer after Chris Young decided to step down. Prior to joining McAfee as CEO, Leav was the CEO of BMC Software, which investment firm KKR acquired in 2018 for $8.5 billion.
Police Scotland to roll out encryption bypass technology, as one publication reported this week, causing some Register readers to silently mouth: what the hell? "The technology allows specially trained officers to triage mobile devices to determine if they contain information which may be of value to a police investigation or incident," the Scottish cops say of the program.
The latest edition of the ISMG Security Report discusses why Britain is struggling to determine whether to use China's Huawei technology in developing its 5G networks. Plus: An update on a mobile...