You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours — all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
It has been several months since we last saw a transparency report from Dropbox, however there has been an update. Dropbox has said they have filed a legal brief asking the court to allow them to report the number of national security requests they receive, which for those unfamiliar, is something that is not allowed […]
According to Edward Snowden’s cache of documents, the NSA has been delving deeper into India’s servers than many could have imagined. The Hindu is reporting that, in addition to the usual PRISM snooping, the agency also vacuumed up data on the country’s nuclear, political and space programs. The newspaper says it has a document, entitled “A Week in the Life of PRISM reporting,” which allegedly shows that discussions between high-ranking politicians, nuclear and space scientists were being monitored in “real-time.” The revelation comes a few months after Kapil Sibal, India’s IT chief, denied that any such surveillance was being undertaken. Who knows? Maybe he was spending so much time on his other projects that he missed the clues. For its part, the US has insisted that its hands are clean in India. Back in June, Secretary of State John Kerry said that the US doesn’t look at individual conversations but instead “randomly surveys” data in order to discover communications that are “linked to terrorists.”
Filed under: Internet
Via: The Register
Source: The Hindu
FBI-themed ransomware has been around for a long time, scaring non-tech savvy computer users into believing the government agency had identified them as violating various laws, threatening jail time if a “fine” isn’t paid immediately. While many have fallen prey to the scam, never before have users been so vulnerable towards believing the nature of […]
Word surfaced not too long ago that the NSA could have a backdoor for a specific type of encryption algorithm popularly used by developers. Today RSA Security, which offers this encryption to its customers by default in a toolkit, has sent out a notification advising those users to stop using it for the time being, […]
We’re a little late to this party, but it’s too fun not to share. Last week, a group of Brazilian hackers decided to get the NSA back for all its spying with a big huge cyberattack. And hack they did! The only problem is that they mixed up their acronyms, and hit NASA instead.
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Brazil is not very happy about all these NSA revelations. As home to Latin America’s biggest economy, the country understandably hates the idea that the United States is listening to its phone calls and reading its emails. In fact, Brazil hates it so much that it wants to disconnect itself from the U.S. internet altogether.
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Have you attempted to fax your way to full or partial disclosure of government documents under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) recently? Well too bad, suckers! Because the Office of the Secretary of Defense has a broken fax machine, and it ain’t getting fixed anytime soon.
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Europeans are already jittery about possible foreign surveillance of their communications; today, those worries have reached a fever pitch. Belgian government investigators now suspect that a recently discovered virus in the internal systems of Belgacom, the country’s telecom giant, was planted as part of state-backed cyber espionage. The malware’s sophistication, scale and strategic focus suggest an attacker with “significant financial and logistic means,” according to prosecutors. Neither side has officially named a culprit. Local newspaper De Standaard isn’t quite so reticent, however — it alleges that the NSA has been spying on Belgacom’s voice traffic for at least two years, and that the discovery was prompted by Edward Snowden’s leaks. Whether or not the NSA is involved, the damage may be limited. Belgacom scrubbed its systems clean this weekend, and it doesn’t believe that the attack compromised customer data.
[Thanks, Joachim / image credit: Diluvienne, Flickr]
Dan Cooper contributed to this report.
Filed under: Cellphones, Internet
Via: Reuters
Source: De Standaard (translated), Belgacom
A document of information obtained by Edward Snowden has been revealed by SPIEGEL, in which the media company says the NSA is shown to have engaged in widespread monitoring of credit card transactions, payments, and banking of an international nature. Furthermore, it is shown that the intelligence agency has a dedicated branch for this called […]
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