Linux Privacy - Page 40 - Results from #780

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Study: Companies should do more to protect employees' personal information

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A study on workplace privacy found that less than half of the people surveyed believe their employers are doing a good job protecting the privacy of their personal information. The independent study, "Americans' Perceptions about Workplace Privacy," was conducted by Elk Rapids, Mich.-based Ponemon Institute LLC, which looks at information and privacy management practices in business and government. The report, which was released yesterday, is based on 945 responses from adults across the U.S. who work for companies with at least 1,000 employees.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Jun 02, 2006

Euro Security Initiatives Proposed

The European Commission today issued a report that calls for greater education on IT security, and the creation of a common framework for collecting incident data. In its report, the EC states that European spending on IT security "represents only around 5 to 13 percent of IT expenditure, which is alarmingly low." The commission calls for a cross-border effort to educate users about security and to unify disjointed national efforts to track exploits.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
Jun 01, 2006

Hackers Found to Target University Systems

Increasing numbers of university systems are becoming targets for hackers. The recent incident involves the Fairfield, Connecticut-based Sacred Heart University. The university's system containing information on 135,000 individuals was hacked recently and data consisting of personal information like names, addresses, and Social Security numbers were stolen.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
May 31, 2006

Phishing Pushes E-crime Further Upstream

Internet crime often starts with phishing, the practice of duping a user into revealing bank account or log-in credentials via a fraudulent Web site. Phishers send out reams of e-mail bait that say users' account information has expired or needs updating. The e-mail includes links to a site that may look very similar to their bank Web site, but isn't. Once those credentials are obtained, criminals use the information in a variety of creative and costly scams.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
May 26, 2006

Americans Want Better Data Security Laws

The U.S. public wants stronger federal data security legislation as its confidence wanes in current laws intended to protect them on the Internet, according to a new survey the Cybersecurity Industry Alliance released today. The April survey of 1,150 adults found that only 18 percent – less than one in five – believe that existing laws are sufficient to protect them on the Internet.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
May 25, 2006

Security vs. Privacy: The Rematch

This month USA Today reported that the National Security Agency has been compiling and searching a massive database of Americans' telephone call records and data mining it for suspicious patterns. NPR reported that this activity was part of the same eavesdropping program The New York Times revealed in April.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
May 25, 2006

Does email archiving mean keep everything?

Mark Diamond, consultant with Contoural Inc., said a survey of clients showed 29% found email archiving for the long term less risky, in terms of compliance, than attempting to reduce data, while 21% thought deleting data on a regular basis was less risky. Forty-two percent answered that they are not sure. A convincing case for long-term retention, however, was found when Diamond offered insight into the inner workings of a lawyers mind in a presentation to Chicago's storage networking user group Wednesday morning.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
May 24, 2006

Voice Encryption May Draw U.S. Scrutiny

Philip R. Zimmermann wants to protect online privacy. Who could object to that? He has found out once already. Trained as a computer scientist, he developed a program in 1991 called Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP, for scrambling and unscrambling e-mail messages. It won a following among privacy rights advocates and human rights groups working overseas — and a three-year federal criminal investigation into whether he had violated export restrictions on cryptographic software. The case was dropped in 1996, and Mr. Zimmermann, who lives in Menlo Park, Calif., started PGP Inc. to sell his software commercially.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
May 22, 2006

Computer with data on tens of millions of veterans stolen

The Veterans Affairs Department announced today that a computer containing personal, identifying data for as many as 26 million American veterans has been stolen from a VA employee's home. A VA employee took files home as part of department work. Subsequently, someone broke into the employee’s home and stole the computer containing the files. Officials said the employee was not authorized to take the files home.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
May 22, 2006

BellSouth demands retraction of NSA spying story

BellSouth is demanding that USA Today retract a story claiming it and two other carriers were under contract to the National Security Agency to surrender call records for a domestic anti-terrorism surveillance program. BellSouth claims the story's assertion that it was under contract to provide massive call record data to the NSA is untrue.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
May 22, 2006

The Eternal Value of Privacy

The most common retort against privacy advocates -- by those in favor of ID checks, cameras, databases, data mining and other wholesale surveillance measures -- is this line: "If you aren't doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide?" Some clever answers: "If I'm not doing anything wrong, then you have no cause to watch me." "Because the government gets to define what's wrong, and they keep changing the definition." "Because you might do something wrong with my information." My problem with quips like these -- as right as they are -- is that they accept the premise that privacy is about hiding a wrong. It's not. Privacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
May 18, 2006

Keylogger Spying At Work On The Rise, Survey Says

The number of companies reporting a spyware infestation has increased by almost half in the past 12 months, according to a new survey. In addition, 17 percent of companies with more than 100 employees have spyware such as a keylogger on their networks, said the authors of the annual Websense Web@Work survey, published on Tuesday. "This is almost 50 percent growth in the instances of keyloggers that organizations are reporting back," said Joel Camissar, a manager for Internet security specialist Websense.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
May 17, 2006

Toddlers used in trial of identity biometrics

A Home Office department is fingerprinting under-fives, and may include babies, in a biometrics ID scheme. The trial ends the department’s technological taboo on enrolling very young children in identity checks. Details of the scheme emerged after the Home Office released an internal report under the Freedom of Information Act, which contained a section on fingerprinting under-fives. The UK could be one of the first countries to fingerprint under-fives – and possibly the first. When Malaysian police last year proposed fingerprinting of babies there were strong protests from civil liberties groups in the country.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
May 16, 2006

HIDDEN FOLDERS, "DELETED" FILES AND INTERNET CACHES HIDE CLUES CRIMINALS NEVER KNEW THEY LEFT BEHIND

The night Cindy M.* disappeared, she ate dinner with her parents and older brother in the family’s two-story suburban Pittsburgh home, then went to her room and promised to come back for apple-walnut pie. The pretty 13-year-old with dark blond hair and blue-green eyes never returned. When her parents checked her room, they found neither a note nor a sign of forced entry. It was New Year’s Day, 2002, and their daughter was simply gone. Pittsburgh police spent almost two days interviewing Cindy’s friends and family, while neighbors scoured nearby fields and gullies, but everyone came up empty.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
May 15, 2006

China campuses' Internet hall monitors

To her fellow students, Hu Yingying appears to be a typical undergraduate, plain of dress, quick with a smile and perhaps possessed of a little extra spring in her step, but otherwise decidedly ordinary. And for Hu, in her second year at Shanghai Normal University, coming across as ordinary is just fine, given the parallel life she leads. For several hours each week she repairs to a little-known on-campus office crammed with computers, where she logs on, unsuspected by other students, to help police her university's Internet forums.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
May 10, 2006

"Botmaster" Gets Nearly Five Years In Prison

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A 20-year-old who prosecutors say highjacked computers to damage computer networks and send waves of spam across the Internet was sentenced on Monday to nearly five years in prison. Jeanson James Ancheta, a well-known member of the "Botmaster Underground" who pleaded guilty in January to federal charges of conspiracy, fraud and damaging U.S. government computers, was given the longest sentence for spreading computer viruses, federal prosecutors said.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
May 09, 2006

Study: Most Malware Made To Make Money

Malicious software coded by cyber criminals for financial gain accounted for some 70 percent of all malware detected during the first quarter of 2006, according to a report released today. According to a new study from anti-virus developer Panda Software, the new malware dynamic saw financial profit become malicious software creators' top priority. Of all malware detected by the company's free online scanner, about 40 percent was spyware. Some 17 percent of the total was made up by trojans, including banker trojans that steal confidential data related to bank services and "droppers" or "downloaders" that download malicious applications onto systems.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
May 08, 2006

Researcher: Digital Signatures Can Lie To Linux, OSX and Windows Users

Digital signatures were designed to allow secure, confidential communication between two parties. As Wikipedia describes it: "A user may digitally sign messages using his private key, and another user can check that signature (using the public key contained in that user's certificate issued by a certificate authority). This enables two (or more) communicating parties to establish confidentiality, message integrity and user authentication without having to exchange any secret information in advance."

LinuxSecurity.com Team
May 08, 2006

Defeat Spam With SpamBayes

Spam email is the plague of the 21st century; SpamBayes is its cure. This client-side application analyzes all incoming email messages and automatically sorts out those that are unwanted. SpamBayes digests the contents of email messages and counts how often certain words -- e.g. Viagra -- occur in spam (bad) or ham (good) messages. Based on these word patterns, it calculates an overall score that rates a message as spam, ham, or unknown. You can manually classify unknown mail as spam or ham and SpamBayes will learn accordingly.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
May 06, 2006

Spammer Threatens Anti-Spam Group

A company that's promoted an anti-spam "Do Not Intrude Registry" and essentially spammed spammers said Monday that many of its members have received threatening e-mails from a major junk mailer. Blue Security, a Menlo Park, Calif.-based start-up, debuted its registry and BlueFrog client last summer. The company's researchers, who work out of Israel, analyze and vet the spam, trace the message to a Web site (typically the site selling the product or service), and find a form on the site that can be used to complain or opt-out. The BlueFrog client then sends automatically fills out the found form once for each spam received. The result: the site is overwhelmed with opt-out requests or complaints.

LinuxSecurity.com Team
May 03, 2006

Linux Privacy - Page 40

Navigating the Tails 6.8 Update: What It Means for Security-Minded Users

Google Chooses Passkeys Over Passwords: Examining the Security Benefits for Linux Users

Tails 6.6 Released: Unpacking Key Features & Updates