Shades of J. Edgar and dirty politics! I’m classifying this as a privacy breach and also an infosec breach as these data were supposed to be protected. Carol D. Leonnig and Jerry Markon report: The Secret Service’s assistant director urged that unflattering information the agency had in its files about a congressman critical of the service should be made public,…
Month: September 2015
FBI and DEA under review for use of NSA mass surveillance data
Patrick Howell O’Neill reports: The Justice Department is investigating the FBI’s use of information taken directly from mass surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA)’s collection of telephone metadata. The yield of that NSA spying program was described by a judge as a “staggering” amount of data when the agency’s ability to collect it was struck down…
Australian university dumps Google for Microsoft over data hosting location concerns
Peter Sayer reports: It’s little surprise that European governments prefer to host their data in Europe than in the U.S. — but now even Australian academics are expressing a preference for the Old World over the New. On Monday, the CIO of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, told staff that Google can no longer be…
Experts warn of morphing threat to voice biometrics
Researchers from a US university say that voice imitation attacks using samples could increasingly be used to breach automated and human authentication systems. Voice morphing software will enable hackers to launch these attacks, found a team at the University of Alabama, Birmingham (UAB). Read more on Planet Biometrics.