In Pictures: The biggest Internet security challenges of 2013
From the attack on privacy and Cryptolocker to Eric Snowden and the NSA, it's been a challenging year
The warning from QuintessenceLabs’ CTO John Leisoboer is stark. “When sufficiently powerful quantum computers become generally available,” he says, “it’s guaranteed to break all existing cryptographic systems that we know of.”
Cisco is working to build the confidence of prospective customers in its products, two years after the NSA spying disclosures seeded doubt, particularly in China.
The U.S. National Security Agency will lose access to the bulk telephone records data it has collected at the end of November, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence announced Monday.
The Internet is a pit of epistemological chaos. As Peter Steiner posited -- and millions of chuckles peer-reviewed -- in his famous New Yorker cartoon, there's no way to know if you're swapping packets with a dog or the bank that claims to safeguard your money. To make matters worse, Edward Snowden has revealed that the NSA may be squirreling away a copy of some or all of our packets, and given the ease with which it can be done, other countries and a number of rogue hacker groups may very well be following the NSA's lead.
Just as the industry is becoming more comfortable with SDNs, the NSA says it's using them too.
If there's a poster child for the challenges facing open source security, it may be Werner Koch, the German developer who wrote and for the last 18 years has toiled to maintain Gnu Privacy Guard (GnuPG), a pillar of the open source software ecosystem.
As part of the NSA's program to certify commercial off-the-shelf technology for use inside the agency, mobile devices from Samsung and Boeing have been cleared for use by NSA employees.
A funny thing is happening in the wake of the <a href="http://www.computerworld.com/article/2490179/security0/security0-the-snowden-leaks-a-timeline.html">Edward Snowden NSA revelations</a>, the infamous <a href="http://www.computerworld.com/article/2601905/apple-icloud-take-reputation-hits-after-photo-scandal.html">iCloud hack of celebrity nude photos</a>, and the hit parade of customer data breaches at <a href="http://www.computerworld.com/article/2490637/security0/target-finally-gets-its-first-ciso.html">Target</a>, <a href="http://www.computerworld.com/article/2844491/home-depot-attackers-broke-in-using-a-vendors-stolen-credentials.html">Home Depot</a> and the <a href="http://www.computerworld.com/article/2845621/government/us-postal-service-suffers-breach-of-employee-customer-data.html">U.S. Postal Service</a>. If it's not the government looking at your data, it's bored, lonely teenagers from the Internet or credit card fraudsters.
A report Thursday by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board calling the NSA's bulk phone records collection program illegal and mostly useless puts the Obama Administration in an awkward spot.
The NSA is spending some $80 million in basic research on quantum computing, money that may ultimately help commercialize quantum computing for the private sector.