Cybersecurity

"In five years I think education technology will be completely ubiquitous, and it will be integrated into parts of the curriculum that we are just beginning to conceive of," said Leah Plunkett, a fellow at Berkman Center for Internet and Society, speaking at a session she hosted with colleague Paulina Haduong Thursday at the FETC 2015 convention in Orlando, FL. This ubiquitousness will require that new privacy and security policies are implemented at schools.

Nearly every U.S. weapons program tested in fiscal 2014 showed "significant vulnerabilities" to cyber attacks, including misconfigured, unpatched and outdated software, the Pentagon's chief weapons tester said in his annual report released Tuesday.

As Bloomberg reports, schools have long maintained files on their students, keeping information such as their home addresses, grades, and family income. In recent years, however, school districts have turned to private contractors to provide software systems for this confidential data. These companies, as well as those who operate all of the software, tools, and platforms used in the classroom, can track not only personal information but a range of classroom data on how students perform.

The question now is how the administration and Congress will respond. "This is a whole new day in cyberspace for a host of reasons," Rogers said in remarks at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington think tank. "Now the United States is going to have to show that it will not tolerate it because everyone's watching. Iran is watching, Russia's watching. China's watching. Every international criminal organization is watching."

The White House has not publicized details of the proposed legislation, called the Student Digital Privacy Act, saying only that it will be modeled on a California law that passed last year and is considered the toughest among a raft of new state laws that address the issue of securing student data.

As highlighted by the President earlier in the week, the rapid growth of cybercrime is creating a growing need for cybersecurity professionals across a range of industries, from financial services, health care, and retail to the US government itself. By some estimates, the demand for cybersecurity workers is growing 12 times faster than the U.S. job market, and is creating well-paying jobs.

In 2014 we’ve seen more evidence that manufacturers of IoT devices have failed to implement basic security standards, so any attack on them is likely to have nasty real world impact. As well as manufacturers taking responsibility for properly securing IoT devices, the security industry also needs to evolve to deal with them.

President Barack Obama on Monday announced that his administration would push for two new pieces of federal internet privacy legislation, one pertaining to consumers and one pertaining to students. He also announced that the Department of Education would offer new tools to help students and teacher help protect their privacy.

President Barack Obama on Monday is expected to call for tough legislation to protect student privacy, adding his voice to a sizzling debate about the best way to bring the benefits of technology into the classroom without exposing students to commercial data mining.

A federal weather service employee charged with stealing sensitive infrastructure data from an Army Corps of Engineers database met a Chinese government official in Beijing, according to court documents that reveal the case to be part of an FBI probe of Chinese economic espionage.

The high-profile hack at Sony Pictures has injected new urgency into the years-old push for cybersecurity legislation, with a broad spectrum of lawmakers suddenly vowing to take action in the new Congress. “It’s basically fair game for everything cyber” after the cyberattack on Sony, said Jessica Herrera-Flanigan, a lobbyist at Monument Policy Group, which represents tech giants like Microsoft.

It was the year that we landed on a comet and launched a new era in NASA space exploration, turned to science to find a possible cure for Ebola, made robots and drones topics of everyday conversation and watched as Silicon Valley continued its rapid transition to the wearable computing revolution.

(The Christian Science Monitor) - Cybersecurity experts say that targets in a cyberwar wouldn't be Hollywood studios but instead the nation's critical infrastructure, which is already under attack by hackers trying to infiltrate, study, and potentially cripple US utilities.

(toptechnews.com) - The attack Relevant Products/Services is possibly the costliest for a U.S. company ever, said Avivah Litan, a cybersecurity analyst at research firm Gartner. "This attack went to the heart and core of Sony's business Relevant Products/Services -- and succeeded," she said. "We haven't seen any attack like this in the annals of U.S. breach history."

The FBI has connected Pyongyang to the cyberattack, a federal law enforcement source told Fox News Wednesday. Experts warn that Sony’s decision could spur politically motivated hackers to launch even more ambitious assaults against corporations and governments. “Capitulation to cyber extortion will incentivize other actors to achieve political gains via cyber intrusions and threats,” Sean Doherty, president of security firm TSC Advantage, told FoxNews.com, in an email.