hackers
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HealthCare.gov Security Gaps Identified In Contractor Documents
A congressional watchdog investigating the troubled launch of the Obama administration’s online health insurance marketplace HealthCare.gov released a handful of contractors’ statements on Tuesday showing they were concerned about security vulnerabilities before and soon after the site launched. Read More »
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How Aaron Swartz's Cause Wins In The End
[... The] facts no longer matter: By becoming a martyr to open access, Swartz has, for better or worse, dealt a blow to government efforts to delegitimize hackers and their values. Read More »
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How The NSA Undermines Cybersecurity
...Officials have warned for years that a sophisticated cyberattack could cripple critical infrastructure or allow thieves to make off with the financial information of millions of Americans. President Obama pushed Congress to enact cybersecurity legislation, and when it didn’t, he issued his own executive order in 2013...
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How Zombie Phones Could Create A Gigantic, Mobile Botnet
[...] For the past decade, botnets have mostly been a problem for the PC world. But, according to a new report on mobile malware, it may not be long before we start seeing botnets built out of an increasingly sophisticated type of device: cell phones. Read More »
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Internet Of Thingbots: The New Security Worry
Phishing and spam attacks involving Internet of Things devices are coming -- and app developers and device makers must be ready, says a CA Technologies exec.
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Is There Any Part of Government That Hasn't Been Hacked Yet?
Cybersecurity has been touted by the Obama administration as one of its top technology priorities over the past several years, but heightened visibility alone has done little to deter adversaries that include state-sponsored hackers, hackers for hire, cyber syndicates and terrorists...
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It's Time To Pay The Maintainers
Earlier this year, Tidelift conducted a survey of over 1,200 professional software developers and open source maintainers. We found that 83% of professional software development teams would be willing to pay for better maintenance, security, and licensing assurances around the open source projects they use. Meanwhile, the same survey found that the majority of open source maintainers receive no external funding for their work, and thus struggle to find the time to maintain their open source projects. So, to put what we learned succinctly...It's time to pay the maintainers. Not just because they deserve to be compensated for their amazing work creating the software infrastructure our society relies on (they do!). But also because there is a ready-made market of professional developers willing to pay for assurances they are in the best position to provide. Here's an idea for how to do it...
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MIT Hackathon Tackles HIV, CHF, Parkinson’s With Open-Source Technology
It seems counterintuitive for those who proudly wear the “hacker” label to seek ways to work with established industry players rather than being disruptive in a healthcare sector badly in need of radical change, but that was what happened at Health and Wellness Innovation 2013, the recently concluded 11-day event better known as MIT Media Lab’s Health and Wellness Hackathon. Read More »
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Oakland Pulls Ahead Of SF In The Bay Bridge Open Government Series
It hasn’t garnered the accolades San Francisco historically has, but it appears Oakland is starting to pull ahead in the Bay Bridge Open Government Series. Read More »
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On the Lack of Cyber Security of Medical Devices
Two weeks ago the U.S. Food and Drug Administration advised hospitals not to use Hospira's Symbiq infusion system, concluding that a security vulnerability enables hackers to take remote control of the system. The agency issued the advisory some 10 days after the U.S. Department of Homeland Security warned of the vulnerability in the pump. My view is that this will be the first of many advisories. For years, manufacturers of medical devices depended on the “kindness of strangers” assuming that devices would never be targeted by bad actors. EKG machines, IV pumps, and radiology workstations are all computers, often running un-patched old operating systems, ancient Java virtual machines, and old web servers that no one should currently have deployed in production.
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Over 90% Of Cloud Services Used In Healthcare Pose Medium To High Security Risk
According to cloud security vendor Skyhigh Networks, more than 13% of cloud services used in healthcare are high‒risk and 77% are medium risk ‒ as measured across 54 different security attributes (like data encryption and “two factor” authentication)...
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Police Around The Country Are Distributing Software That Makes It Easier To Hack Your Computer
ComputerCOP's makers have long promised their program will protect children from online predators, and that promise has been enough to persuade local police forces nationwide to hand it out free to concerned parents. But according to a new report from an Internet freedom group, the police have been had—and the parents using the program are actually putting their families' privacy at risk...
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Raymond's "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" Continues to Impact the Open Source Movement
Nineteen years ago this week, at an annual meeting of Linux-Kongress in Bavaria, an American programmer named Eric Raymond delivered the first version of a working paper he called "The Cathedral and the Bazaar." According to Raymond, the exploratory and largely speculative account of some curious new programming practices contained "no really fundamental discovery." But it brought the house down. "The fact that it was received with rapt attention and thunderous applause by an audience in which there were very few native speakers of English seemed to confirm that I was onto something," Raymond wrote a year later, as his treatise blossomed into a book...
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Should U.S. Hackers Fix Cybersecurity Holes Or Exploit Them?
Maybe someday we'll patch vulnerabilities faster than the enemy can use them in an attack, but we're not there yet. There’s a debate going on about whether the U.S. government—specifically, the NSA and United States Cyber Command—should stockpile Internet vulnerabilities or disclose and fix them...
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Social Media Is “Worst Menace To Society” Says Turkey PM, 25 Twitter Users Arrested
Turkish authorities have arrested 25 protesters for the high crime of using Twitter. Amid widespread violent clashes, police rounded up netizens on Tuesday night for “spreading untrue information.” Read More »
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