Security News
A security researcher says he has uncovered an advanced persistent threat operation that started over a decade ago and which is referenced in the collection of National Security Agency hacking tools that the Shadow Brokers made public in 2017. The researcher, who refers to the operation as 'Nazar', based on "Debug paths left alongside Farsi resources in some of the malware droppers," believes that the activity was centered around the 2010-2013 timeframe, based on submission times in VirusTotal.
The controversial surveillance program that gave the NSA access to the phone call records of millions of Americans has cost US taxpayers $100m - and resulted in just one useful lead over four years. It is perhaps no wonder that the NSA and the FBI has spent years stalling and refusing to hand over any information about the program.
A National Security Agency system that analyzed logs of Americans' domestic phone calls and text messages cost $100 million from 2015 to 2019, but yielded only a single significant investigation, according to a newly declassified study. Only twice during that four-year period did the program generate unique information that the F.B.I. did not already possess, said the study, which was produced by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board and briefed to Congress on Tuesday.
Enveil, a Fulton, Maryland-based data security company, today announced that it has secured $10 million in Series A funding. Founded in 2016, Enveil launched ZeroReveal in July 2018, its commercial homomorphic encryption product that helps protect data while it's being used or processed.
From a FOIA request, over a hundred old NSA security awareness posters. Back in 1993, during the first Crypto Wars, I and a handful of other academic cryptographers visited the NSA for some meeting or another.
More than a quarter century after its introduction, the failed rollout of hardware deliberately backdoored by the NSA is still having an impact on the modern encryption debate. Known as Clipper, the encryption chipset developed and championed by the US government only lasted a few years, from 1993 to 1996.
U.S. Senator Ron Wyden, D-Ore., has called on the National Security Agency to take steps to make sure the personal devices of high-ranking Trump administration officials are secure following a report last week that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' smartphone had been compromised. Wyden wrote to NSA Director Paul M. Nakasone on Friday, asking if the agency was sure that the Saudi government had not used the crown prince's WhatsApp account to hack the devices of senior government officials, such as White House Senior Adviser Jared Kushner, who have reportedly had contact with Bin Salman on the Facebook-owned messaging app.
The U.S. National Security Agency has published advice on mitigating cloud vulnerabilities. The document provides four basic sections: an overview of the basic components usually delivered by cloud service providers; an explanation of the concept of shared responsibility; an analysis of the primary cloud threat actors; and an analysis and description of the main cloud vulnerabilities and their mitigations.
A newly-introduced bill is proposing sweeping privacy reforms to a controversial government surveillance program, which has been previously used by the National Security Agency to vacuum up the call records of millions of Americans. The bill closes loopholes in vague language used by Section 215 for justifying mass surveillance sans warrant.
U.S. lawmakers on Thursday introduced a bill that aims to reform the National Security Agency's surveillance programs in an effort to protect citizens' rights. The senator, a vocal critic of the NSA's surveillance programs, last year introduced a bill that sought to put an end to the mass collection of Americans' phone records.