Telegram adds ‘delete everywhere’ nuclear option — killing chat history

Telegram has added a feature that lets a user delete messages in one-to-one and/or group private chats, after the fact, and not only from their own inbox. The new ‘nuclear option’ delete feature allows a user to selectively delete their own messages and/or messages sent by any/all others in the chat. They don’t even have […]

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UK’s Police Federation hit by ransomware

The U.K.’s Police Federation has confirmed it’s been hit by a cyberattack. The union-like organization, representing 119,000 police officers across the 43 forces in England and Wales, described the event as ransomware in a statement shared on Twitter. The ransomware attack hit computers at the federation’s Surrey headquarters on March 9, but was only revealed […]

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Law enforcement needs to protect citizens and their data

Robert Anderson Contributor Robert Anderson served for 21 years in the FBI, retiring as executive assistant director of the Criminal, Cyber, Response and Services Branch. He is currently an advisor at The Chertoff Group and the chief executive of Cyber Defense Labs. Over the past several years, the law enforcement community has grown increasingly concerned […]

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Slack hands over control of encryption keys to regulated customers

Slack announced today that it is launching Enterprise Key Management (EKM) for Slack, a new tool that enables customers to control their encryption keys in the enterprise version of the communications app. The keys are managed in the AWS KMS key management tool. Geoff Belknap, chief security officer (CSO) at Slack, says that the new […]

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Gearbest security lapse exposed millions of shopping orders

Gearbest, a Chinese online shopping giant, has exposed millions of user profiles and shopping orders, security researchers have found. Security researcher Noam Rotem found an Elasticsearch server leaking millions of records each week, including customer data, orders, and payment records. The server wasn’t protected with a password, allowing anyone to search the data. Gearbest ranks […]

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Telegram gets 3M new signups during Facebook apps’ outage

Messaging platform Telegram claims to have had a surge in signups during a period of downtime for Facebook’s rival messaging services. In a message sent to his Telegram channel, founder Pavel Durov’s just wrote: “I see 3 million new users signed up for Telegram within the last 24 hours.” It’s probably not a coincidence that […]

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Russia blocks encrypted email provider ProtonMail

Russia has told internet providers to enforce a block against encrypted email provider ProtonMail, the company’s chief has confirmed. The block was ordered by the state Federal Security Service, formerly the KGB, according to a Russian-language blog, which obtained and published the order after the agency accused the company and several other email providers of […]

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Cloudflare expands its government warrant canaries

When the government comes for your data, tech companies can’t always tell you. But thanks to a legal loophole, companies can say if they haven’t had a visit yet That’s opened up an interesting clause that allows companies to silently warn customers when the government turns up to secretly raid its stash of customer data […]

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Why Daimler moved its big data platform to the cloud

Like virtually every big enterprise company, a few years ago, the German auto giant Daimler decided to invest in its own on-premises data centers. And while those aren’t going away anytime soon, the company today announced that it has successfully moved its on-premises big data platform to Microsoft’s Azure cloud. This new platform, which the […]

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Lenovo Watch X was riddled with security bugs, researcher says

Lenovo’s Watch X was widely panned as “absolutely terrible.” As it turns out, so was its security. The low-end $50 smart watch was one of Lenovo’s cheapest smart watches. Available only for the China market, anyone who wants one has to buy one directly from the mainland. Lucky for Erez Yalon, head of security research at […]

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Google makes it easier for cheap phones and smart devices to encrypt your data

Encryption is an important part of the whole securing-your-data package, but it’s easy to underestimate the amount of complexity it adds to any service or device. One part of that is the amount of processing encryption takes — an amount that could be impractical on small or low-end devices. Google wants to change that with a highly efficient new method called Adiantum.

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As threats proliferate, so do new tools for protecting medical devices and hospitals

Six months after an episode of “Homeland” showed hackers exploiting security vulnerabilities in the (fictional) Vice President’s pacemaker, Mike Kijewski, the founder of a new startup security company called Medcrypt, was approached by his (then) employers at Varian Medical Systems with a unique problem.  “A hospital came to the company and said we are treating […]

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