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While US government is always prohibiting the purchase of Huawei products due to suspected backdoors from the Chinese government, China also keep itself totally apart from the US productions. China is a bit famous for using its own operating systems, smartphone application services and lots more, rather than using the US developed Operating Systems, and now China has reportedly banned the installation of Microsoft Corporation's latest operating system, Windows 8 on any of its government computers. The Central Government Procurement Center issued a notice that was posted on its website last week prohibiting the use of Microsoft's latest operating system and the reason behind it is to support the use of energy-saving products, the report said. But the state news agency ' Xinhua ' pointed out a different reason for the ban saying the country wants to avoid any further losing of the support for an operating system like it did recently by pulling out its support from t

The United States has filed criminal charges against Chinese military officials for hacking and cyber espionage against several American companies. This case is first of its own kind in which the prosecutors have formally accused members of a foreign government with economic espionage charges. Attorney General Eric Holder and FBI are expected to reveal the new indictment later this afternoon, in which five officials of China's People's Liberation Army will be named, who are believed to be the current members of Beijing's military establishment. Accused chinese officials allegedly worked for the People's Liberation Army and have spied on U.S companies and stolen trade secrets. The alleged hackers are said to work for the PLA's Unit 61398 in Shanghai. Among the trade secrets, they are also accused for stealing information about a nuclear power plant design and a solar panel company's cost and pricing data, " They used military and intelligence faci

Identities now transcend human boundaries. Within each line of code and every API call lies a non-human identity. These entities act as programmatic access keys, enabling authentication and facilitating interactions among systems and services, which are essential for every API call, database query, or storage account access. As we depend on multi-factor authentication and passwords to safeguard human identities, a pressing question arises: How do we guarantee the security and integrity of these non-human counterparts? How do we authenticate, authorize, and regulate access for entities devoid of life but crucial for the functioning of critical systems? Let's break it down. The challenge Imagine a cloud-native application as a bustling metropolis of tiny neighborhoods known as microservices, all neatly packed into containers. These microservices function akin to diligent worker bees, each diligently performing its designated task, be it processing data, verifying credentials, or

We All now know about the existence of the extensive metadata collection program by U.S National Security Agency ( NSA ), which creates an intimate repository of our lives -- whom we love, whom we're friends with, where we work, whom we call, when we you, how long we talk over the calls, and how often calls between the two parties are made and even the your interactions on social networking sites. Although U.S Government always argues that Metadata doesn't record the actual content ( of your call ) and it is used for NSA's automated analysis, but should we be worried? You are unique in the world and therefore your metadata too. So anyone with knowledge of the subject knows that analyzing terabytes of metadata can easily reveal far more details about a person's life than ever before. Worldwide debate on mass surveillance still was not finished yet, but today is a new alarming report revealed that US government murdering people around the world based solely on the

Despite the contrary regarding NSA's DROPOUTJEEP program, Apple had always denied working with the NSA in the creation of any backdoors used to spy on its users and also claimed that the NSA doesn't have backdoor access to its data. But, Apple could legally share your phone data with the law enforcement agencies if asked for. Being a secretive company, Apple is very clear at its point of sharing its users' data with the government when U.S. law enforcement agencies request data relating to the company's users. With the release of a set of new guidelines late Wednesday regarding requests for customer data from the U.S. law enforcement agencies, Apple specifies what information can and cannot be lifted from its users devices upon the receipt of disclosure requests, search warrants, or legal orders. " These guidelines are provided for use by law enforcement or other government entities in the U.S. when seeking information from Apple Inc. about users of Apple

Edward Snowden 's leaks last year questioned the integrity of several big and reputed companies such as Apple, Google and Microsoft that were found in relation with the NSA in its surveillance programs.  Thereafter they maintained distance with the Agency and claimed to be unaware of such government spying activities. Now, email exchanges between Google executives Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt and former NSA director Gen. Keith Alexander , obtained through the Freedom of Information Act that in real do not reveal anything ridiculously outrageous but suggest that the tech companies behind the services you use are very closely in relationship with the NSA and have worked with them over the years. The series of emails obtained by Al Jazeera clearly indicate that the relationship between Google and the National Security Agency (NSA) was far cozier than anyone thought. This revelation questions not only the reputation of the largest Internet giant, but also the privac

Just imagine, you are sitting in front of your laptop and your laptop is listening to your nearby conversations. What if the recorded audio from the system's microphone is being instantly uploaded to a malicious website? Google has created a speech-recognition Application Programming Interface (API) that allows websites to interact with Google Chrome and the computer's microphone allows you to speak instead of typing into any text box, to make hands-free web searches, quick conversions, and audio translator also work with them. In January, a flaw was discovered in Google Chrome that enabled malicious websites with speech recognition software to eavesdrop on users' conversations from background without their knowledge using an outdated Google speech API. CHROME IS LISTENING YOU A new similar vulnerability in Google Chrome has been discovered by Israeli security researcher, Guy Aharonovsky, claimed that the Chrome's speech-recognition API has a vulnerability that allo

We are already aware about the fact that most probably every mobile app is collecting our data in one or the other form. Thanks to Edward Snowden, who provided the secret documents that revealed that the world's most popular Smartphone applications, including gaming apps such as Angry Birds , are telling the government intelligence agencies (NSA) everything about us. We  reported earlier  that how the government intelligence agencies, such as British intelligence agency GCHQ and U.S. intelligence firm NSA, use popular games to collect users' personal data including their GPS location. Yes, the popular game Angry Bird , which is the top-selling paid mobile application in the United States and Europe for the iPhones, Android and has been downloaded more than a billion times by the devoted game players worldwide, who often spend hours squawking and playing the game.  In fact earlier this month,  CBS 60 Minutes  shows that how Rovio shares users' locations. Recently, t

Earlier this week, Microsoft admitted that they have accessed a French Blogger's private Hotmail account to identify a former Microsoft employee who had leaked the company's trade secrets in 2012. Microsoft defined this private investigation as part of " Protecting our customers and the security and integrity of our products ", mentioned in the Microsoft's terms of service, which says that the action was within the boundaries of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. U.S. Authorities arrest Alex Kibkalo , ex-Microsoft employee. The indictment states , Kibkalo " uploaded proprietary software and pre-release software updates for Windows 8 RT as well as the Microsoft Activation Server Software Development Kit (SDK) to his personal SkyDrive account in August 2012. " Kibkalo not only leaked the secret screenshots of Windows 8 , but also provided the information about ' activation of Windows ' that helped the crackers to create a keygen for

Another leak from  Edward Snowden files, but this time not about the NSA, rather the documents revealed that France's central intelligence agency, the DGSE has complete and unconditional  access to all of  telecom giant  Orange's data, not just metadata . Yes! It is the same  Orange company who threatened to sue the NSA for hacking into the underwater cable that it jointly owns with 15 other companies. According to the French paper Le Monde -- Orange, the leading telecom company in France with more than 26 million customers worldwide cooperated allegedly illegally for years with France's main intelligence agency. DGSE and Agents with military clearance have been working with Orange for at least 30 years. France has a PRISM like surveillance  program to target phone communications, emails and data from tech companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and Yahoo. Furthermore, DGSE is also sharing this data with foreign allies like GCHQ.  The revelations c

In the mob of Smart Devices, after Smartphones... Google glass would definitely be the next must-have device. It's non-other than a small computer you wear like eyeglasses allows you to surf the Web, email, text, take photos, live videos and more, -- all hands free. Google Glasses are yet in very limited release, but researchers have developed the world's first spyware that could hijack your Google's Glass computer eyepieces. Two Polytechnic graduate researchers, 22-year-old Mike Lady and 24-year-old Kim Paterson , from California designed an app that has the capability to convert the Google Glass into a Spy Camera, click a photo every ten seconds without giving any visible sign to the wearer, Forbes reported yesterday . The malware app developed by the researchers, masquerades itself as a fair piece of note-taking software, ironically dubbed as ' Malnotes ', that trick users accept the permissions which allow them to capture images of whatever the glass wearer is l

Besides collecting metadata and inserting backdoor to the devices and softwares, the US National Security Agency (NSA) has an eye on each post, picture, message you have ever sent on Facebook. I know you won't be feeling free considering your privacy, but, this is what the NSA is doing to you. The new revelation from the Glenn Greenwald 's desk remove the mask from one more secret surveillance operation carried out by the US intelligence agency NSA, the extensive program dubbed as ' TURBINE ', according to the classified files provided previously by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden . Yes, the NSA, who has been working with its dedicated hacking unit, Tailored Access Operations (TAO) from the past several years on enlarging its caliber to infect devices with spyware and creating its own command-and-control servers to manage millions of infected systems at a time. The secret documents presented by The Intercept  website shows that the NSA with its British counterpart G

Last week, The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) ruled the National Security Agency (NSA) to do not keep Internet and phone metadata gathered through bulk surveillance programs longer than five years and destroy them. Judge Reggie Walton said, keeping records for more than 5 years " would further infringe on the privacy interests of United States persons whose telephone records were acquired in vast numbers and retained by the government ," Later, The Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Internet privacy and civil liberties group asked the Court to temporarily hold the destroy orders, saying the records may be used as an evidence in its lawsuits challenging the NSA surveillance . U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White, who is overseeing an invasion-of-privacy lawsuit against the National Security Agency (NSA), ruled to stop the destruction of millions of Telephone records collected by the National Security Agency's surveillance program and ruled to safeguard th

With revelations of NSA spying and some of the most jaw-dropping surveillance leaks, many people feel unencrypted and central-server service is bad in most of the cases, but end-to-end encryption can be used to reduce this problem. Worldwide Government surveillance raises privacy concerns and acquisition of WhatsApp by Facebook also made us think about the security concern with chat applications as well; though it was not so secure previously. People who care about having their SMS and Instant messages protected from prying eyes, now they can use end-to-end encrypted services, like  TextSecure .  It is a free Android-based messaging app, completly open-source , easy to use and designed with privacy in mind. Encrypting the stored data on the servers is as important as transferring data over an encrypted connection, but the most important factor of the encryption is that ' who has the decryption key '. If the company has the keys, then Government could snoop through your fi

Spying on the world by injecting sophisticated backdoors in software, systems, and mobile phones, leads to violation of the Privacy and Security of every individual. Yes, we are talking about Surveillance , but this time not about NSA . Instead, Countries including some with poor human-rights records and a much less technically advanced nation are the likely culprits, as they apparently used commercial spyware in making surveillance capabilities that once were the exclusive expertise of the known spy agencies, such as National Security Agency (NSA) and GCHQ. Citizen lab , a nonprofit research lab has  found traces of a remote hacking tool  in 21 countries , developed by  Hacking Team,  including Ethiopia, Sudan, Azerbaijan and Saudi Arabia, which the team had already  denied  back in 2013. Hacking Team, also known as HT S.r.l , is an Italian company, which is known for its powerful surveillance software, Remote Code System (RCS) that it sells to Governments and law enforcement

WhatsApp acquisition may have had a negative impact on the reputation of the company, it seems many users are planning to switch the service and a few of them have already done it. In our previous article, we have mentioned that why you should switch from WhatsApp to an encrypted Chat messaging service . Mobile messaging apps often used to deliver sensitive data or used for personal and corporate communications, so the data stored by the service provider should be encrypted end-to-end, which is not yet in the case of WhatsApp. There are many mobile messaging applications like Japan-based  Line , China's  WeChat , Korea-based  KakaoTalk , and Canada's  Kik , India-based  Hike  and many more, but they are not end-to-end encrypted messengers. Time is loudly announcing the need to shift to some alternates which provides end-to-end encryption for communication between two devices and respect your Privacy. There are a number of solutions available includes -  Telegram,  Surespot

The US Government has allotted a large share of its ' Black Budget ' for secret military research and weapons programs, along with surveillance programs, that is harvesting hundreds of millions of Metadata from emails, web activity, chats, social networks, and everything else around the world. To make this happen, NSA has used a number of unethical ways, but labeled as legal solutions.  Today, on February 11th, we all unite to fight against the Government intrusion on the privacy of innocent people worldwide, under one banner of ' The Day We Fight Back ', along with other 7000 websites by hosting a large banner at the bottom of the websites; reading " Dear Internet, we're standing with 300+ nonprofits worldwide in demanding an end to mass, suspicionless surveillance ", asking people of the world to vote against proposed NSA reforms that the American Civil Liberties Union has labeled " Bad for Privacy ". The Banner, you can see at the bottom of this page, e