Security News
Tyler C. King, a 31-year-old from Dallas, Texas, was sentenced this week to 57 months in prison for crimes related to the hacking of an unnamed major tech company based in New York. According to the Justice Department, King gained access to the technology firm's systems in 2015 with the help of Ashley St. Andria, who at the time was an employee of the company.
In a shock ruling today, the UK Court of Appeal has declared that South Wales Police broke the law with an indiscriminate deployment of automated facial-recognition technology in Cardiff city centre. Despite police promises that his image and data derived from it would have been instantly deleted if he was not a person of interest to them, he filed a lawsuit saying that police broke human rights and data protection laws.
The ioXt Alliance announced that major technology companies and manufacturers including Google, T-Mobile, Silicon Labs and more, certified a wide range of devices through the ioXt Alliance Certification Program. The ioXt Alliance is backed by the biggest names in tech and is the only organization positioned to handle the rapidly increasing demand for IoT device certifications that meet security requirements across every product category.
The British offices of Barclays Bank are under investigation over allegations that managers spied upon their own staff as part of a workplace productivity improvement drive. Back in February, the bank trialled tracking software to detail the amount of time employees spent at their desk, as revealed by City AM. Last week an employee received a "Work yoga" assessment on their daily performance informing them they had spent "Not enough time in the Zone yesterday," the City paper reports.
Smart home tech is marketed to enhance your home and make life easier. To better understand consumers perceptions of the desirability of the smart home, researchers from WMG and Computer Science, University of Warwick have carried out a nationally representative survey of UK consumers designed to measure adoption and acceptability, focusing on awareness, ownership, experience, trust, satisfaction and intention to use.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Wednesday called for a big expansion of U.S. government curbs on Chinese technology, saying that it wants to see "Untrusted Chinese apps" pulled from the Google and Apple app stores. Pompeo called out popular video app TikTok and the messaging app WeChat, which people in the U.S. use to communicate with others in the U.S. and China, as "Significant threats to the personal data of American citizens, not to mention tools for CCP content censorship." CCP refers to the Chinese Communist Party.
Verimatrix announced new protection for Bitcode-enabled iOS applications. Publishing an app to Apple's App Store with Bitcode enabled allows Apple to optimize the app's code for each target device.
"According to a Ponemon Institute study sponsored by ID Experts, a provider of identity protection and data breach services, consumers have taken notice. The study, Privacy and Security in a Digital World: A Study of Consumers in the United States, found that, on a scale of 1 to 10, 86% of adults said they are"Very concerned" about how Facebook and Google use their personal information. "Most consumers do not believe big tech companies alone will protect their privacy rights through self-regulation."
Cybersecurity professionals are in more demand than ever and jobs in this sector are expanding beyond traditional tech hubs, according to a new report. Larry Whiteside Jr., the president of International Consortium of Minority Cybersecurity Professionals, and Simone Petrella, CEO of cybersecurity training firm CyberVista, today released a report on the state of cybersecurity jobs.
A study from North Carolina State University and Microsoft finds that the technical interviews currently used in hiring for many software engineering positions test whether a job candidate has performance anxiety rather than whether the candidate is competent at coding. The interviews may also be used to exclude groups or favor specific job candidates.