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Finally, European companies must inform employees in advance if their work email accounts are being monitored. The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) on Tuesday gave a landmark judgement concerning privacy in the workplace by overturning an earlier ruling that gave employers the right to spy on workplace communications. The new ruling came in judging the case of Romanian engineer Bogdan Barbulescu, who was fired ten years ago for sending messages to his fianceé and brother using his workplace Yahoo Messenger account. Earlier Romanian courts had rejected Barbulescu's complaint that his employer had violated his right to correspondence—including in January last year when it was ruled that it was not " unreasonable for an employer to want to verify that the employees are completing their professional tasks during working hours. " But now, the European court ruled by an 11-6 majority that Romanian judges failed to protect Barbulescu's right to private life and cor

Image source: goldenfrog In an effort to continue its crackdown on VPNs, Chinese authorities have arrested a 26-year-old man for selling VPN software on the Internet. China's Supreme Court has sentenced Deng Jiewei from Dongguan in Guangdong province, close to Hong Kong, to nine months in prison for selling virtual private network (VPN) software through his own small independent website. VPN encrypts users' Internet traffic and routes it through a distant connection so that web surfers can hide their identities and location data while accessing websites that are usually restricted or censored by any country. Chinese citizens usually make use of VPNs to bypass the Great Firewall of China , also known as the Golden Shield project, which employs a variety of tricks to censor the Internet in the country. The project already blocked access to some 171 out of the world's 1,000 top websites, including Google, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Dropbox, and The Pirate Bay in

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

China's central bank today announced an immediate ban on all ICO—Initial Coin Offering—fundraising, to prevent fraud and illegal fundraising. ICO is the hottest new thing in the blockchain world, which is an alternative to crowdfunding that lets a firm raise funding from multiple sources. The People's Bank of China (PBoC), the country's central bank and financial regulator, has issued an official notice on Monday, forbidding "all types of currency issuance financing activities" that have "seriously disrupted the economic and financial order." This PBoC's bold move has been backed by many other Chinese government administrators and regulators including the China Securities Regulatory Commission, China Insurance Regulatory Commission and the Ministry of Industry and Commerce, and China Banking Regulatory Commission. This move marks the end of an era of ICO fundraising in China. The regulator claims that ICOs are being misused for "

Exclusive — If you have an account on Taringa , also known as "The Latin American Reddit," your account details may have compromised in a massive data breach that leaked login details of almost all of its over 28 million users. Taringa is a popluar social network geared toward Latin American users, who create and share thousands of posts every day on general interest topics like life hacks, tutorials, recipes, reviews, and art. The Hacker News has been informed by LeakBase , a breach notification service, who has obtained a copy of the hacked database containing details on 28,722,877 accounts, which includes usernames, email addresses and hashed passwords for Taringa users. The hashed passwords use an ageing algorithm called MD5 – which has been considered outdated even before 2012 – that can easily be cracked, making Taringa users open to hackers. Wanna know how weak is MD5?, LeakBase team has already cracked 93.79 percent (nearly 27 Million) of hashed passwords s

It's now official, Instagram has suffered a massive data breach , and reportedly an unknown hacker has stolen personal details of more than 6 million Instagram accounts. Just yesterday, we reported that Instagram had patched a critical API vulnerability that allowed the attacker to access phone numbers and email addresses for high-profile verified accounts. However, Instagram hack now appears to be more serious than initially reported. Not just a few thousands of high-profile users—it's more than 6 million Instagram users, including politicians, sports stars, and media companies, who have had their Instagram profile information, including email addresses and phone numbers, available for sale on a website, called Doxagram . The suspected Instagram hacker has launched Doxagram, an Instagram lookup service, where anyone can search for stolen information only for $10 per account. A security researcher from Kaspersky Labs, who also found the same vulnerability and rep