Security News

Switzerland benefitted from a spectacular espionage scheme orchestrated by the CIA and its German counterpart who used a Swiss encryption company to spy on governments worldwide, a parliamentary probe showed Tuesday. A large media investigation revealed back in February an elaborate, decades-long set-up, in which US and German intelligence services creamed off the top-secret communications of governments through their hidden control of the Crypto encryption company in Switzerland.

Schneider Electric this week released advisories for vulnerabilities impacting various products, including flaws that can be exploited to take control of Modicon M221 programmable logic controllers. "By bypassing authentication protections and having direct access to manipulate the PLC, an attacker could take over complete control of the PLC actions, which could be catastrophic depending what type of OT environment the PLC is deployed," Sigler explained.

New Zscaler threat research reveals the emerging techniques and impacted industries behind a 260-percent spike in attacks using encrypted channels to bypass legacy security controls. Researchers witnessed a 5x increase in ransomware attacks over encrypted traffic beginning in March, when the World Health Organization declared the virus a pandemic.

Zoom has been forced to agree to a range of security improvements in a settlement with America's consumer watchdog, the Federal Trade Commission, as a result of earlier wrongly claiming it offered true 256-bit end-to-end encryption. The pact [PDF], announced Monday, obliges the video-conferencing giant to carry out an annual security assessment of its software and have its internal security program assessed by a third-party every two years.

Learn how you can enable the new Nextcloud end-to-end encryption.

Trenton Systems has partnered with cybersecurity solutions company FUTURA Cyber to provide customers with access control security management for FIPS 140-2 self-encrypting drives. "FUTURA Cyber is led by people with an unparalleled depth and experience in cybersecurity, software, and systems engineering," said Sean Campbell, Vice President of Sales, Marketing, and Business Development at Trenton Systems.

Zoom has finally added what it says is end-to-end encryption to its video conferencing service at no additional cost for all users, whether they are paying subscribers or not. "We're very proud to bring Zoom's new end-to-end encryption to Zoom users globally today," said Zoom CISO Jason Lee.

Ubiq Security announced the launch of its API-based encryption platform for developers. Ubiq has eliminated the traditional complexities of encryption, allowing developers and information security teams - even those without encryption or cryptography expertise - to integrate data encryption directly into applications in minutes, with nothing more than a few lines of code and two API calls.

The embrace of remote collaboration, and specifically video collaboration, has been swift and robust. While uncertainty remains on what exactly a post-pandemic working experience will look like, it is without a doubt that video will remain a fundamental part of the collaboration tool kit.

Encryption is vital to protecting people's use of data, it says, alongside human rights activists in repressive regimes, journalists researching corruption, and all those good things. You cannot make an encryption system insecure without making it insecure.