Security News
Swiss politicians only found out last year that cipher machine company Crypto AG was owned by the US and Germany during the Cold War, a striking report from its parliament has revealed. Although Swiss spies themselves knew that Crypto AG's products were being intentionally weakened so the West could read messages passing over them, they didn't tell governmental overseers until last year - barely one year after the operation ended.
Previously I have written about the Swedish-owned Swiss-based cryptographic hardware company: Crypto AG. It was a CIA-owned Cold War operation for decades. Today it is called Crypto International, still based in Switzerland but owned by a Swedish company.
As yet unidentifed hackers have managed to steal employee salary payments at several Swiss universities, officials said Sunday. "According to our information, several top schools in Switzerland have been affected," Martina Weiss, director general of the rectors group of Switzerland's public universities, told AFP. The hackers used information obtained by phishing - tricking a person into passing on their personal details - for their attacks on at least three universities, including the University of Basel.
A Swiss federal commissioner announced Tuesday that a U.S.-Swiss program aimed to protect personal information exchanged between the two countries doesn't go far enough, and has downgraded the United States to rank it as a country deemed to have inadequate data protection. Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner Adrian Lobsiger, in a new policy paper, recommends that Swiss companies or government should disclose personal data to the U.S. only if safeguards are put in place to protect people from prying U.S. authorities.
Starting in the 1970s and continuing through the 1990s, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and the German BND intelligence service secretly controlled the majority of the Swiss firm Crypto AG, giving the two agencies access to the company's communication equipment, which was used around the world for top-secret government messages, according to the reports. A former Crypto AG worker told Switzerland's SRF television station that he would find two sets of encryption algorithms within the company's devices.
US and German intelligence services raked in the top secret communications of governments around the world for decades through their hidden control of a top encryption company, Crypto AG, US, German and Swiss media reported Tuesday. Together they rigged Crypto's equipment to be able to easily break the codes and read the government's messages, according to reports by the Washington Post, German television ZTE and Swiss state media SRF. - 'Coup of the century' -.
Swiss encryption machine company Crypto AG was secretly owned by the CIA and a West Germany spy agency at the height of the Cold War, according to explosive revelations in Swiss and German media today. Although rumours had swirled for decades around Crypto AG and the backdooring of its products by the West - cough, cough, NSA - and not forgetting careless remarks by former US prez Ronald Reagan, today's publications by Swiss broadcaster SRF and German broadcaster ZDF confirm those old suspicions.
Russia has blocked a second encrypted email provider, Swiss-based ProtonMail, in efforts to halt a prolonged series of anonymous bomb threats, the security service said Wednesday. The FSB security service said Russia acted against Geneva-based ProtonMail after blocking another social network, Netherlands-based Smartmail, for the same reason last week.
read more
Researchers have found a critical flaw in the Swiss Internet voting system. I was going to write an essay about how this demonstrates that Internet voting is a stupid idea and should never be...