EFF | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

In this era of mass surveillance, we have always learned from security folks to protect and encrypt our communication and networks, especially widely open private Wi-Fi networks. It is always recommended to use a strong password and encryption on Wireless Routers in an effort to safeguard the privacy and security of our web communication and personal data. Quite the contrary, a group of activists says opening up your home Wi-Fi network could not only enhance your privacy, but actually increase it in the process. A new movement dubbed as " Open Wireless Movement " is encouraging the users to open-up their private network or at least a small portion of the available bandwidth to strangers. It really sounds quite annoying! Isn't it? In this case any unknown can consume a large part of your network bandwidth or can use your network to perform illicit activities, and it will come as a great boon for those cyber thieves who are in wake of finding such open networks to carr

The United States House of Representatives on Thursday voted to approve the highly controversial  cyber security bill CISPA , which stands for the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act. The Bill called the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) was presented under the guise National Security , but in reality opens up a loop hole for companies that collect personal information about their users and in some cases want to trade of even sell these to other companies for money or other services.  This was the second time that the US House of Representatives passed the CISPA. Senators had earlier rejected the first draft of this bill on the grounds that it wasn't providing enough for protecting the privacy. Some lawmakers and privacy activists worry that the legislation would allow the government to monitor citizens' private information and companies to misuse it. The first parts of CISPA are relevant and necessary. If we're " hacked ," CISPA a

Shadow apps, a segment of Shadow IT, are SaaS applications purchased without the knowledge of the security team. While these applications may be legitimate, they operate within the blind spots of the corporate security team and expose the company to attackers.  Shadow apps may include instances of software that the company is already using. For example, a dev team may onboard their own instance of GitHub to keep their work separate from other developers. They might justify the purchase by noting that GitHub is an approved application, as it is already in use by other teams. However, since the new instance is used outside of the security team's view, it lacks governance. It may store sensitive corporate data and not have essential protections like MFA enabled, SSO enforced, or it could suffer from weak access controls. These misconfigurations can easily lead to risks like stolen source code and other issues. Types of Shadow Apps  Shadow apps can be categorized based on their interac

Aaron Swartz has committed suicide on January 11, 2013 in New York City.  I have long been fought if you write something about this extraordinary boy, but not dedicate a tribute would be a shame. Aaron Swartz has decided to leave a huge void in the IT scenario.  For me, as the entire world he is a legend, a guy that has profoundly changed our daily work. Aaron Swartz is an eclectic persona; he is an hacker and active activist, co-founder of social news website Reddit and founder of the group Demand Progress. The EFF in a blog post states: " Aaron did more than almost anyone to make the Internet a thriving ecosystem for open knowledge, and to keep it that way. His contributions were numerous, and some of them were indispensable. When we asked him in late 2010 for help in stopping COICA, the predecessor to the SOPA and PIPA Internet blacklist bills, he founded an organization called Demand Progress, which mobilized over a million online activists and proved to be an inval

A federal judge ordered the FBI to disclose more information about its " Going Dark "  surveillance program, an initiative to extend its ability to wiretap virtually all forms of electronic communications. Why shocking ? because a federal judge just ruled that police can place surveillance cameras on private property without a search warrant and another federal judge quickly overturned a previous decision blocking the indefinite detention provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2012. The EFF ( Electronic Frontier Foundation)   has filed filed two freedom of information requests, in response to which they received damned little. Judge Richard Seeborg says the feds need to go back and try again. FBI's wiretapping system is robust and advanced, so request sought documents concerning limitations that hamper the DOJ's ability to conduct surveillance on communication networks including encrypted services like BlackBerry, social-networking sites like