The Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA), an industry trade group for banks securities firms and asset managers, is worried about catastrophic attacks against their members, Bloomberg reported today. Bloomberg reports on an internal document they have seen, stating: “The document sketches an unusually frank and pessimistic view by the industry of its readiness for…
DetailsThe Senate Intelligence Committee approved a cybersecurity bill on Tuesday which is intended to help companies and government agencies defend against cyber-attackers. The Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act would make it easier for businesses and governments to share information with each other about cyberattacks. Businesses have previously shied away from formal and informal information sharing because…
DetailsThis morning a partial analysis of the NSA’s XKEYSCORE code was published in Germany. Jacob Applebaum, an evangelist for the The Onion Project (TOR), was one of the authors. The report details specific rules written for one of the NSA’s data collection tools, XKEYSCORE, which collects the IP addresses of TOR bridges, and users of…
DetailsGoogle has blocked access to a confidential Goldman Sachs email that was sent by mistake to a Gmail address. The financial company is now seeking a second court order to delete the message altogether from Google servers. An external consultant was testing changes to an internal reporting and validation process and intended to send the…
DetailsThe encryption vendor SafeNet publishes a Breach Level Index that records actual reported incidents of data loss. Whilst the number of losses attributed to malicious outsiders (58%) exceeds those attributed to malicious insiders (13%), SafeNet claims that insiders account for more than half of the actual information lost. This is because insiders will also be…
DetailsThe Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee approved a new bill intended to strengthen the Federal Information Security Management Act on June 25. The bill heads to the Senate floor for a full vote next. Introduced by committee chairman Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) and Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), the new legislation would amend the…
DetailsAccording to one of the founders of ProtonMail, a secure email startup, PayPal had suspended their account. A PayPal representative reportedly questioned the legality of an encrypted email solution. ProtonMail is hosted in Switzerland specifically to provide assurances to users that there is no legal jurisdiction for the US to interfere with it, as it…
DetailsCongressman Alan Grayson made waves last week when he sent letters to the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association(SIFMA), the Consumer Bankers Association, and the Financial Services Roundtable assailing former head of the NSA, Keith Alexander. In each letter Grayson cited a Bloomberg article that revealed that Alexander’s new consulting firm was commanding hefty fees…
DetailsFlorida Governor Rick Scott signed into a law what may be the nation’s broadest and stringent data breach law. The Florida Information Protection of 2014, which was signed last week, requires companies to take “reasonable measures” to protect and secure personally identifying information in electronic form. The new law also increases companies’ reporting and disclosure…
DetailsAs predicted (by me) email encryption solutions are proliferating rapidly. All it took was a threat actor to appear on the scene. The first time I met Mark Rasch we shared a stage a Detroit event in the ‘90s. He made a comment that stuck with me. “If email was easy to intercept we would…
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