Cybersecurity

In its annual worldwide threats assessment released Thursday, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence says that a catastrophic destruction of infrastructure is unlikely, but it nonetheless placed cyber attacks above terrorism on the list of dangers facing the nation. "Cyber threats to U.S. national and economic security are increasing in frequency, scale, sophistication, and severity of impact," the assessment says.

The White House is ratcheting up its warnings on the dangers of cyberspace, calling on tech companies and other private-sector outfits to share more information about emerging threats, and appealing to Congress to enact legislation in the cyber arena.

If consumers want TVs that can hear their conversations and cars that gather their driving histories, they certainly have the right to possess them. The onus is on organizations that take advantage of these technologies to educate their evolving consumers about how the technology works, what information is gathered and used, and how it can deliver on customer expectations.

At a recent House hearing, members of a subcommittee on education generally agreed that the 41-year-old Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) needs is due for an update that would restrict the collection and usage of education data, while at the same time leaving room for new technologies to flourish.

A multinational gang of cyber criminals has stolen as much as $1 billion from as many as 100 financial institutions around the world in about two years, Russian computer security company Kaspersky Lab said on Saturday. The company said it was working with Interpol, Europol and authorities from different countries to try to uncover more details on what it being called an unprecedented robbery.

High-profile data breaches and cyber-attacks on well-known brands and businesses have dominated the news cycle for more than a year.  Yet during the same time, less visible, but no less important efforts have been made to improve privacy safeguards for a much more vulnerable population:  our school children.

At the 2015 Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) this week in San Jose, Calif., National Science Foundation (NSF) staff and NSF-funded investigators will present results and insights representing the full scope of science, from graduate education to the biochemistry of extremophiles.

In the wake of the Sony and Anthem hacks, President Obama is expected to announce, in what appears to be an end run against post-Snowden privacy demands by tech companies, a new executive order on cybersecurity that would direct the government and private U.S. companies to share threat data. Reuters’ Joseph Menn, who broke the story, said that the announcement will likely be made either tonight or tomorrow at a Stanford University event.

Data breaches in the health care industry happen more often than you might think. The recent attack on Anthem exposed the personal information of about 80 million patients and is the largest data breach in the history of the industry.

The White House on Tuesday announced the creation of a new federal agency to analyze threats to the nation's cybersecurity and coordinate strategy to combat them.The Obama administration is launching the Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center as a central place to coordinate cyber threat intelligence from the FBI, the National Security Agency, the Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies.

With fraud and identity theft rising and advertising becoming increasingly targeted, the challenge is to protect student privacy without undermining the educational benefits of 21st-century technology.

“A lot of education sites have glaring security problems,” said Mr. Porterfield, the principal engineer at a software start-up in Los Altos, Calif. “A big part of the problem is that there’s not even any consensus of what ‘good security’ means for an educational website or app.”

The U.S. government wastes 50 percent or more of the $70 billion to $80 billion that it spends on IT and IT security each year, according to a report released on Thursday by the International Association of Information Technology Asset Managers (IAITAM). The report, entitled “Understanding the Federal Government’s ‘IT Insecurity’ Crisis,” warns that waste places federal agencies at greater risk of data breaches, lost and stolen hardware, and other cybersecurity dangers.

President Barack Obama’s fiscal 2016 budget proposal calls for $14 billion in spending on federal efforts to bolster cybersecurity and encourages legislation to ease data sharing between the government and the private sector in order to quickly detect and respond to online attacks. But that won't be enough to address the key weakness of U.S. cybersecurity – companies are not doing enough to protect their own networks.

The U.S. defense intelligence chief warned Tuesday that America's technological edge over China is at risk because of cybertheft. Lt. Gen. Vincent Stewart, director of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, told a congressional hearing the U.S. retains technological superiority. But he said China had stolen "a lot" of intellectual property from U.S. defense contractors and that effort continues.