Editor's News

Parliament and the press have been “astonishingly complacent” when it comes to personal privacy issues following the Edward Snowden surveillance revelations. At a Q&A session following a private screening of the Snowden documentary ‘Citizen Four’, former Conservative party chairman and Shadow Deputy Prime Minister, David Davis, said that the freedom for surveillance needed to be “brought under control” as for the past couple of years we have been in a benign state and become “appallingly complacent” to...

More than 1,600 cloud-based applications are vulnerable to the Poodle flaw.   According to Netskope, while it was seeing fewer detections of the flaw in version 3.0 of the SSL protocol every day, there were still 1,632 vulnerable cloud applications as of Wednesday.  A week before, on the 16th and two days after the flaw was first revealed, the number of vulnerable apps was 3,562, and this dropped to 2,754 a day later.   The number has continued...

Online auction website eBay has defended its sale of an ATM machine, saying that the sale fell within its policies.   The sale, which ended early on Monday, saw a Triton 9100 ATM machine sold, with the seller describing the item as “removed from a working environment” and “ATM has error code”. The ATM was listed for sale at £300, and swiftly disappeared from sale with the message “Les enchères sur cet objet sont terminées”...

Facebook has announced plans to scour lists of breached credentials to identify its own users. In a blogpost, Facebook security engineer Chris Long said that as it is common for attackers to publicly post the email addresses and passwords they steal on public 'paste' sites. Therefore, it has built a system dedicated to further securing people's Facebook accounts by actively looking for these public postings, analysing them and then notifying people when it discovers that their...

A fresh zero-day flaw in Microsoft PowerPoint is being exploited, which has caused Microsoft to issue a warning.   In an advisory, Microsoft said that the vulnerability could allow remote code execution and affects all supported releases of Microsoft Windows, apart from Windows Server 2003. ”At this time, we are aware of limited, targeted attacks that attempt to exploit the vulnerability through Microsoft PowerPoint,” it warned.   The vulnerability is in Microsoft Object Linking and Embedding...

Zscaler has entered the advanced persistent threat (APT) market with the launch of Fall 2014.   Combining robust internet security, APT protection, data loss prevention, SSL decryption, traffic shaping, policy management, security assessment and threat intelligence, the company said that the technology comes with a capability to monitor and manage a deployment via a mobile device.   Daniel Druker, chief marketing officer at Zscaler. “As a cloud-based system deployed at massive global scale, we at...

BAE Systems is to acquire commercial cyber service provider Perimeter Internetworking Corp, which trades as SilverSky. In a $232.5 million (approximately £144.4 million) cash deal and debt free basis, the acquisition is expected to close before the end of 2014. A cloud-based managed security services provider of services including email protection, network security and managed applications, SilverSky is largely focused on the US market, with a growing business in Asia and Europe. Ian King, chief...

Staples has said it is investigating a possible breach of payment card data. Following other retailers including Target, Home Depot, Kmart and Dairy Queen, Staples said it has contacted law enforcement about the matter and is in the process of investigating a potential issue involving credit card data. Company spokesman Mark Cautela said in a statement, published by Reuters, that it takes the protection of customer information very seriously, and is working to resolve the situation....

The USA is to adopt the Chip and PIN model after President Barack Obama signed an executive order to add security measures for federal credit cards.   The order will see microchips and PIN numbers added to Government credit cards and debit cards starting in January, with Obama also announcing that several major companies will take steps to make their own systems more secure and offer more customer protections.   He said: “The idea that somebody...

According to a survey of 100 professionals working in legal departments and law firms in the UK, 57 per cent believe that email constitutes the greatest security risk to their business. The survey, by logistics firm DX, also revealed that over half of legal professionals know of at least one incident in the last 12 months when an email had been sent to the wrong person, and 80 per cent of these emails had been sent...