Security News

The report concludes that, far from modern phones being a bastion of privacy and security, there are in fact routinely rifled through for trivial crimes without a warrant in sight. The report gives numerous other examples of phones taken from their owners and searched for evidence, without a warrant - many in cases where the value of the information was negligible such as cases involving graffiti, shoplifting, marijuana possession, prostitution, vandalism, car crashes, parole violations, petty theft, and public intoxication.

The "Five Eyes" intelligence alliance demanded Sunday that tech companies insert "Backdoors" in encrypted apps to allow law enforcement agencies the access they say they need to police online criminality. Law enforcement globally has complained of the difficulty encrypted communications poses to criminal investigations.

Aussie telco Telstra has apologised after a Border Gateway Protocol routing oddity caused traffic destined for encrypted email service ProtonMail to wrongly pass through Telstra's servers. Switzerland-headquartered ProtonMail raged in a blog post that Telstra had engaged in "BGP hijacking" through what it described as "Incompetence and not malice", complaining that "Around 30 per cent of the global internet looking for us got pointed to Telstra instead".

The combination of Actian Avalanche and Sotero KeepEncrypt 360 offers enterprises robust and comprehensive end-to-end encrypted data security across all enterprise data, both at rest and in motion, and ensures that regardless of workload or location, data is protected. This critical capability enables enterprise-class levels of data security for data migrations across enterprise systems and operational data warehouse analytical workloads, both in the cloud and the data center.

Kingston Digital announces the availability of the 128GB DataTraveler 2000 encrypted USB flash drive. DataTraveler 2000 features an alphanumeric keypad that allows users to lock the drive with a word or number combination for an easy-to-use PIN, providing an extra layer of protection.

Encrypted email biz Tutanota has apologised for accidentally shutting its own users out while fending off the latest of a series of distributed denial-of-service attacks. "It is a challenge to protect a privacy-focused service such as Tutanota from DDoS attacks because we need to block high-level application attacks ourselves," co-founder Matthias Pfau told The Register.

Kingston Digital, the flash memory affiliate of Kingston Technology Company, announced the addition of 128GB capacity options to three of its encrypted USB flash drives. The simple inclusion of encrypted USB flash drives into a daily workflow is a simple step to ensuring data is safe.

By default, macOS does not maintain integrity while hibernating. The problem is that while the key is stored in resident memory, it is unencrypted, allowing an attacker the opportunity to recover the non-obfuscated key using freely available tools to repeal FileVault's protections and gain unauthorized access to the now decrypted data stored on your device.

In a joint operation, European and British law enforcement agencies recently arrested hundreds of alleged drug dealers and other criminals after infiltrating into a global network of an encrypted chatting app that was used to plot drug deals, money laundering, extortions, and even murders. Dubbed EncroChat, the top-secret encrypted communication app comes pre-installed on a customized Android-based handset with GPS, camera, and microphone functionality removed for anonymity and security.

In May, police in France, assisted by the Netherlands' cops, infiltrated EncroChat's core network - and in mid-June the operator pulled the plug, having realised the game was up. The takedown of the network has been a poorly disguised secret, with Northern Irish suspects reportedly being arrested last week after data from EncroChat's servers was shared around European police forces.