Top 10 Stories

IT Security Guru: The NSA set fire to the internet, and the rest of the world needs to be the fire fighter. Speaking at the SXSW Conference in Austin, Texas, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden said that the stories of the past eight months showed the “adversarial internet” and said that what he found and reported was “nothing which we asked for or wanted, but something we have to protect against”  

IT Security Guru: Encryption does work, is not an “arcane black art” and has improved since revelations of surveillance were made. Speaking at the SXSW Conference in Austin, Texas, NSA whistle blower Edward Snowden praised end-to-end encryption as it makes life harder for those who want to watch you and makes “mass surveillance impossible on a network level”.  

Infosecurity: Microsoft once again gave up only a small percentage of content data to law enforcement agencies that asked for it in the last six months of 2013. Only 2.32% of requests from police and other organizations globally resulted in disclosure of data regarding specific activities or messaging content, it said. Microsoft has published its latest Law Enforcement Requests Report, which details the number of legal demands for customer data it received from law enforcement agencies around...

BBC News: Troubled Japanese bitcoin exchange Mt Gox has won temporary bankruptcy protection in the US. A judge in Dallas, Texas, agreed to protect the firm's assets and temporarily halt two US lawsuits while bankruptcy proceedings occur in Japan.  

Net Security: Initially created to help political dissidents bypass traffic restrictions and hide their online activity from authoritarian governments, the Tor anonymity network has long since become a great tool for cyber crooks to hide their criminal activities and infrastructure. "Although the Tor infrastructure and cybercriminal resources are not on the same scale as the conventional Internet, we managed to find approximately 900 hidden services online at the current time," Kaspersky Lab expert Sergey Lozhkin shared in...

USA Today: Sasha Panin called himself "Gribodemon," and his evil works in the world of cybercrime have bedeviled millions. Panin is a 20-something Russian computer whiz who until a few years ago lived in obscurity with his grandmother in this struggling riverside city.    

BBC News: The UK government will spend an extra £45m on developing so-called "internet of things" technology, David Cameron has announced. The pledge more than doubles the funds available to UK technology firms working on everyday devices that can communicate over the internet.  

Krebs on Security: In October 2013, KrebsOnSecurity published an exclusive story detailing how a Vietnamese man running an online identity theft service bought personal and financial records on Americans directly from a company owned by Experian, one of the three major U.S. credit bureaus. Today’s story looks deeper at the damage wrought in this colossal misstep by one of the nation’s largest data brokers.   Last week, Hieu Minh Ngo, a 24-year-old Vietnamese national, pleaded guilty to running an...

Infosecurity: Close on the heels of the discovery of an Android remote administration tool (RAT) known as AndroRAT – believed to be the first ever malware APK binder – comes a new variant of the idea, dubbed Dendroid. Dendroid is a HTTP RAT that is marketed as being transparent to the user and firmware interface, with a sophisticated PHP panel and an application APK binder package that shares links to the author of the original AndroRAT...

ZDNet: The asylum seekers that were caught up in the Australian Department of Immigration and Border Protection's data breach ordeal in February is now taking legal action against the federal government, The Guardian first reported. The Department had accidentally published the full names, nationalities, locations, arrival dates, and boat arrival information of nearly 10,000 asylum seekers on its website.