Security News
About 70 members of the computer security community on Monday challenged US voting app maker Voatz's effort to dictate the terms under which bug hunters can look for code flaws. Earlier this month, Massachusetts-based Voatz filed an amicus brief in Van Buren v. United States, a case being heard by the US Supreme Court that will determine the scope of the US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a cybersecurity law long criticized for its ambiguity.
Hacker groups are ramping up activity as the US heads into the peak of election season. To help thwart such attempts, the US Department of State recently announced a multimillion-dollar bounty focused on identifying cybercriminals associated with foreign governments targeting US elections.
Tehran on Friday hit back at allegations by Microsoft that Iran based hackers had targeted the US presidential campaigns, declaring it does not care about the election's outcome. Microsoft claimed that it has thwarted cyber attacks by hackers from China, Russia and Iran who have been targeting staff from the campaigns of President Donald Trump and his Democratic rival Joe Biden, ahead of the November vote.
For the past year, Russia-linked threat actor Strontium has targeted hundreds of organizations in the United States and the United Kingdom to harvest account credentials, Microsoft reveals. On Thursday, Microsoft published information on a newly identified Strontium campaign that focused on harvesting Office365 credentials for tens of thousands of accounts at organizations in the US and UK, many of them directly involved in political elections.
Three "Grumpy old hackers" in the Netherlands managed to access Donald Trump's Twitter account in 2016 by extracting his password from the 2012 Linkedin hack. The pseudonymous, middle-aged chaps, named only as Edwin, Mattijs and Victor, told reporters they had lifted Trump's particulars from a database that was being passed about hackers, and tried it on his account.
Microsoft believes there have been extensive "Cyberattacks targeting people and organizations involved in the upcoming presidential election," and that foreign government hackers responsible for attacks ahead of the 2016 vote are back with new and nastier tactics. The Windows giant's corporate veep for Customer Security & Trust Tom Burt said both sides of US politics are being attacked, that China, Russia and Iran are all active, and that the spies are also actively targeting UK political parties and other international institutions.
Facebook may be forced to stop sending data about its European users to the U.S., in the first major fallout from a recent court ruling that found some trans-Atlantic data transfers don't protect users from American government snooping. The social network said Wednesday that Ireland's Data Protection Commission has started an inquiry into how Facebook shifts data from the European Union to the United States.
Facebook has been reportedly asked to stop sending data from Ireland to the US, on orders from the EU. This is according to a report from the Wall Street Journal, which said that Irish eyes won't be smiling come this Fall after a preliminary order to suspend data transfers to the US about its users was sent to Mark Zuckerberg's firm by the Irish Data Protection Commission. The news comes in the wake of an EU court ruling two months ago that transatlantic data protection arrangements - known as Privacy Shield - were "Inadequate".
Lawyers for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Monday failed to persuade a British judge to throw out new US allegations against him, as he resumed his fight to avoid extradition to the United States for leaking military secrets. Inside, Assange's lawyers sought to "Excise" new allegations lodged by Washington in recent weeks, saying they had not had time to formulate a proper response.
The United States has revoked visas of more than 1,000 Chinese students and researchers under an order by President Donald Trump that accused some of them of espionage, the State Department said Wednesday. Trump, in a May 29 proclamation as tensions rose with Beijing on multiple fronts, declared that some Chinese nationals officially in the United States for study have stolen intellectual property and helped modernize China's military.