President Barack Obama took over the White House Instagram account Monday, posting a photo from Air Force One with the caption “Incredible view as we near Anchorage.”
Former Secret Service special agent Shaun Bridges, 32, pleaded guilty Monday to pocketing $820,000 worth of bitcoins and to obstruction of justice in connection with his theft of digital currency during the federal investigation into the online black market called Silk Road, a Justice Department news release said. Bridges admitted in his plea agreement to impeding a full investigation into Silk Road by blocking access to the site and by providing multiple false and misleading statements to investigators. A sentencing hearing is scheduled for Dec. 7 before U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg in San Francisco.
Google updated its logo and branding for a “world of seamless computing across an endless number of devices and different kinds of inputs” like tap, type and talk, wrote Vice President-Product Management Tamar Yehoshua and Director-User Experience Bobby Nath in a blog post Tuesday. The new logo “doesn’t simply tell you that you’re using Google, but shows you how Google is working for you,” they said. “New elements like a colorful Google mic help you identify and interact with Google whether you’re talking, tapping or typing.” Google is “bidding adieu” to the little blue “g” icon and replacing it with a four-color “G” that matches the logo, Nath and Yehoshua wrote. Google search engine users saw in Tuesday's Google Doodle an erasing of the old company logo and the painting of a new sans serif design in primary colors that's part of a broad branding redesign aimed at tying together company products. Google noted that it's changing the logo to reflect the many different family-owned platforms, apps and devices users encounter “sometimes all in a single day.” The new logo and identity family “reflects this reality and shows you when the Google magic is working for you, even on the tiniest screens,” it said.
The Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate's fourth technology, a network anomaly-detection tool, has “successfully advanced through the Transition to Practice (TTP) program to the commercial market,” a DHS news release said Tuesday. Known as the PathScan technology, it was developed by Los Alamos National Laboratory, and “quickly detects the movements of hackers once they breach the network and allows operational teams to quickly defend network information,” the agency said. DHS Undersecretary-Science and Technology Reginald Brothers said innovative technology solutions are “key to keeping pace with today’s cyber threats,” and the TTP program bridges the gap between private sector and national labs to help transition lab technology to the commercial market. The technology has been licensed to Ernst & Young, said DHS.
Content services provider Vubiquity acquired over-the-top encoding and digital delivery service Juice Worldwide, the buyer said in a news release Monday. The acquisition boosts Vubiquity's network of content providers, which includes Amazon, iTunes and Netflix, it said.
The deadline for comments on Riyo's proposed verifiable parental consent method for the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act rule (see 1508040025) was extended to Sept. 14, the FTC said in a news release Monday. The vote to extend the deadline was unanimous.
NTIA announced in Monday's Federal Register the Sept. 29 first meeting of its multistakeholder process to create a set of common principles and best practices for security vulnerability information disclosures. Stakeholders are to meet at the University of California-Berkeley School of Law, NTIA said. It plans to use similar multistakeholder processes in the future for other cybersecurity issues (see 1508280036).
Despite the recent breach into infidelity site Ashley Madison (see 1508280041) and subsequent online posting of users’ sensitive information “hundreds of thousands of new users signed up for the Ashley Madison platform -- including 87,596 women” last week, Ashley Madison parent Avid Life Media said in a news release Monday. As of Aug. 29, the Ashley Madison app is the 14th highest grossing app in the U.S. social networking category in the Apple App store, it said. About 70 percent of the company’s revenue on any given day is from members making repeat purchases, it said. “Recent media reports predicting the imminent demise of Ashley Madison are greatly exaggerated.” In response to claims there are numerous fake female accounts created on the site to lure men into thinking their odds of having an affair are greater, the company said women sent more than 2.8 million messages within the platform last week, and the ratio of men who communicate with women is 1.2 to 1.
A domain masquerading as an official Electronic Frontier Foundation site has been tricking users into a false sense of trust and has been used in a spear phishing attack, or emails that appear to be from a familiar individual or business, wrote EFF Staff Technologist Cooper Quintin in a blog post Thursday. The domain, ElectronicFrontierFoundation.org, was registered Aug. 4, and it’s suspected of the phishing attacks that began that same day, Quintin said. The domain “seems to be part of a larger campaign, known as ‘Pawn Storm’” that began a little more than a month ago and is thought to be associated with the Russian government, Quintin said. The domain has been reported for abuse, but was still active when Quintin wrote his blog. As part of the phishing attack, an attacker "sends the target a spear phishing email containing a link to a unique URL on the malicious domain (in this case electronicfrontierfoundation.org)," Quintin said. When the user visits the URL, they are redirected to another unique URL that contains a "Java applet which exploits a vulnerable version of Java," he said. "Once the URL is used and the Java payload is received, the URL is disabled and will no longer deliver malware (presumably to make life harder for malware analysts)," Quintin said. "The attacker, now able to run any code on the user's machine due to the Java exploit, downloads a second payload, which is a binary program to be executed on the target's computer."
The FTC will host a conference Jan. 14 on research and trends in protecting consumer privacy and security, a news release said Friday. PrivacyCon will bring stakeholders, white hat researchers, academics, industry representatives, federal policymakers and consumer advocates together, the release said. FTC staff is calling for original research on new vulnerabilities and how they might be exploited, plus research in areas like big data, the IoT, and consumer attitudes toward privacy, it said. Proposals for presentations will be accepted until Oct. 9. “We want to increase the FTC’s engagement with the technology community in order to more effectively encourage innovation that is protective of consumer privacy and security,” said FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez of the event. “At PrivacyCon, our goal is to have leading experts in privacy and data security sit at the table with us and other policymakers to discuss their original research findings and the implications for consumer privacy."