News

Choke chain tightened on 'general warrants' after Privacy International wins judicial review

A landmark High Court ruling has struck down Britain's ability to hack millions of people at a time through so-called "general warrants" in what privacy campaigners are hailing as a major victory.…

8-month suspended sentence for conspiracy to secure unauthorised access to computer data

An employee at emergency roadside rescue biz RAC has received an eight-month suspended prison sentence for unsanctioned access to computer systems that saw her sell customers' data to an accident claims management company.…

The week's other security news

Embattled and embarrassed network management shop SolarWinds has reportedly hired two of the highest profile security bods in the biz to sort out its woes.…

Problems for charging spies in future? Probably not, says ex-NCSC chief

The SolarWinds hack exposed sealed US court documents – which could have a serious effect on Western sanctions against state-backed hackers.…

Onward to OpenShift

IBM-owned Red Hat is to snaffle container security outfit StackRox and plans to fold the company's tech into its OpenShift platform.…

Real-world CVSS figures are a little variable, or so these folks reckon

A German academic is running a study into the effectiveness of vulnerability scores – and is hoping the research will shed more light on the occasionally controversial system.…

Chipzilla joins facial-recog race

Intel has gingerly dipped a toe into the face-based authentication market with the launch of its RealSense ID product.…

Oh yes, I'm the Great Suspender, pretending I'm doing well

Analysis  Back in November, 2020, netizens warned that a Chrome extension called The Great Suspender may be malicious. Around that time, Google was made aware of these concerns and looked into the situation.…

Maker of developer tools says it played no role in the attack, hasn't heard from investigators

The SolarWinds security breach disclosed last month, which US authorities believe was of Russian origin and led to the compromise of at least 18,000 organizations, may have been enabled in part by software from JetBrains.…

Images of evacuated and invaded offices, Senate PCs still left switched on shared online

Violent supporters of defeated American president Donald Trump today stormed the capital’s legislative halls in Washington DC, shutting down the process to confirm his replacement.…

With Fortinet, we'll help you weigh up your SASE options

Webcast  If you looked back at your list of 2020 New Year’s resolutions, would any of them make still sense for 2021?…

Alipay, WeChat and friends ‘threaten national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States’

United States president Donald Trump has signed an executive order banning the use of eight Chinese apps, namely Alipay, CamScanner, QQ Wallet, SHAREit, Tencent QQ, VMate, WeChat Pay, and WPS Office.…

Plus: US intelligence names and shames Russia as probable culprit

SolarWinds – the network monitoring biz thoroughly hacked as part of a wider espionage operation – has been sued by its shareholders who claim bosses failed to tell them about its numerous security woes.…

Only three months after latest OS version released

Blackberry Cylance's consumer antivirus product will not support macOS Big Sur until the end of January – three months after the Apple operating system’s latest version was released.…

Messaging app makes inadvertent oversharing too easy

A researcher who noted that using the "People Nearby" feature of popular messaging app Telegram exposed the exact location of the user has been told that it's working as expected.…

Though that might not be the workaround it needs

The Scottish government is sizing up the market for suppliers to develop on its low-code technology platform and support its social security overhaul.…

This year’s New Year Resolution: Update your GIAC certs

Promo  You know you’re good in the trenches when it comes to cybersecurity. You might even have done a stack load of courses to ensure that you’ve filled in any gaps in your knowledge. Your colleagues know they can depend on you.…

Privacy policy re-written, which is somewhat scary given Singapore has made trackers just-about-mandatory

The Singapore government has decided to use data gathered by its TraceTogether COVID-19-coronavirus contact-tracing app in criminal investigations.…

Outdated clients stop working, organizations with thousands of end-points told to switch out .sys files

It wasn't the best of New Year's Day mornings for some Check Point customers; in addition to possible hangovers, those who lagged with their patching had been left with inoperable systems and a tough fix ahead for some.…

Why do most PCs not support error-correcting code? Chipzilla is to blame, says Linux don

Linux creator Linus Torvalds has accused Intel of preventing widespread use of error-correcting memory and being "instrumental in killing the whole ECC industry with its horribly bad market segmentation."…