security News of 11/23/19

Startups Face The Same Phishing Risks As Big Corporations

This week, we reported on TechCrunch how thousands of remote employees with health and workplace benefits through human resources giant TriNet received emails that looked like a near-perfect phishing attempt. One recipient was so skeptical, they ...

Another US Court Says Police Cannot Force Suspects To Turn Over Their Passwords

The highest court in Pennsylvania has ruled that the state’s law enforcement cannot force suspects to turn over their passwords that would unlock their devices. The state’s Supreme Court said compelling a password from a suspect is a ...

Congress Extends NSA Call Records Collection Powers To March

In passing a short-term funding bill to avoid a U.S. government shutdown, Congress has also extended the government’s legal powers allowing it to collect daily millions of Americans’ call records. Buried in a funding bill passed by the ...

Jeanette Manfra, Senior DHS Cybersecurity Official, To Leave Government

Jeanette Manfra, one of the most senior and experienced U.S. cybersecurity officials, is leaving government after more than a decade in the public sector. Manfra, who served as assistant director for cybersecurity at the Cybersecurity and ...

Uber Reports A Sharp Rise In Government Demands For User Data

Uber says the number of legal demands for riders’ data made by U.S. and Canadian authorities has risen sharply in the past year. The ride-hailing company said the number of law enforcement demands for user data during 2018 are up 27% on the ...

Invasive Scheme Spotted That Foxes Tracker Blockers

Online privacy is facing a new challenge: A first-party tracker that appears to be unblockable with standard privacy tools such as adblockers. The tracker in question was spotted being deployed by French national newspaper, Liberation, which in ...

ISIS Fighters Are Gaining Strength After Trump’S Syria Pullout, U.S. Spies Say

The Defense Intelligence Agency says ISIS is resurgent inside Syria and has a greater ability to mount terrorist attacks against the West as a result of President Donald Trump’s decision to hastily withdraw American troops from the war-torn ...

Macy’S Said Hackers Stole Customer Credit Cards — Again

For the second time in as many years, Macy’s customers have been hit by a data breach involving countless numbers of credit cards. In a filing with the California attorney general, the retail giant said hackers siphoned off customers’ ...

Sweden Drops Rape Investigation Into Wikileaks Founder, Julian Assange

Sweden has dropped an investigation into Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange, on allegations of suspected rape. In a statement today the country’s prosecution authority said the evidence has “weakened considerably” in the almost ...

Cybersecurity Startup CyCognito Raises $23m In Series A Funding

CyCognito, a cybersecurity platform that aims to give visibility into a company’s security weak spots, has raised $23 million in its Series A round of funding. Lightspeed Partners led the fundraise, putting in $18 million, which included a ...

A 10-Point Plan To Reboot The Data Industrial Complex For The Common Good

A posthumous manifesto by Giovanni Buttarelli, who until his death this summer was Europe’s chief data protection regulator, seeks to join the dots of surveillance capitalism’s rapacious colonization of human spaces, via increasingly ...

Cybersecurity Firm Sonatype Acquired By Vista Equity

Private equity firm Vista Equity Partners has acquired Sonatype, a cybersecurity-focused open source automation company. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Sonatype said the acquisition will help to build out its Nexus platform, an ...

TriNet Sent Remote Workers An Email That Some Thought Was A Phishing Attack

It was the one of the best phishing emails we’ve seen… that wasn’t. Phishing remains one of the most popular attack choices for scammers. Phishing emails are designed to impersonate companies or executives to trick users into ...

‘Magic: The Gathering’ Game Maker Exposed 452,000 Players’ Account Data

The maker of Magic: The Gathering has confirmed that a security lapse exposed the data on hundreds of thousands of game players. The game’s developer, the Washington-based Wizards of the Coast, left a database backup file in a public Amazon ...

Those Crappy Pre-Installed Android Apps Can Be Full Of Security Holes

If you’ve ever bought an Android phone, there’s a good chance you booted it up to find it pre-loaded with junk you definitely didn’t ask for. These pre-installed apps can be clunky, annoying to remove, rarely updated… and, ...

LA Warns Of ‘Juice-Jacking’ Malware, But Admits It Has No Cases

Los Angeles’ district attorney is warning travelers to avoid public USB charging points because “they may contain dangerous malware.” Reading the advisory , you might be forgiven for thinking that every USB outlet you see is just ...

Despite Bans, Giphy Still Hosts Self-Harm, Hate Speech, And Child Sex Abuse Content

Image search engine Giphy bills itself as providing “fun and safe way” to search and create animated GIFs. But despite its ban on illicit content, the site is littered with self-harm and child sex abuse imagery, TechCrunch has ...

Cybersecurity Expert Alex Stamos On What Scares Him Most About The Upcoming U.S. Presidential Election

Alex Stamos rose to fame as the former chief security officer for Yahoo and then Facebook. But today he’s the director of Stanford’s Internet Observatory, where he’s immersed in teaching and research safe tech — and understands ...

California’S New Data Privacy Law Brings U.S. Closer To GDPR

Dimitri Sirota Contributor Share on Twitter Dimitri Sirota is CEO and cofounder of data protection and privacy software company BigID . Sirota is an established serial entrepreneur, investor, mentor, ...

Fourteen Years After Launching 1password Takes A $200m Series A

1Password has been around for 14 years, and the founders grew the company the old-fashioned way without a dime of venture capital. But when it decided to take venture help, it went all in. Today, the company announced a $200 million Series A from ...