A U.S. district court judge has confirmed what has probably been the worst-kept secret in security, that Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute was indeed contracted by the Department of Defense to study how to break Tor anonymity. A motion to compel discovery filed by Brian Farrell, a defendant charged with conspiracy to distribute drugs...

Apple CEO Tim Cook’s major argument in objecting to the FBI’s request to assist in unlocking San Bernardino shooter Syed Farook’s iPhone 5c is the precedent it would set in doing so. As it turns out, Cook had a leg to stand on when he defiantly objected to a federal magistrate’s order last week. Apple...

A researcher at IOActive believes the U.S. intelligence community has the capability to carry out a delicate hardware hack that could unlock the iPhone 5c at the center of the current FBiOS debate. The attack requires considerable financial resources and acumen with an intrusive attack against the device’s chip in order to extract enough data...

Now that the Apple-FBI story has gone mainstream with rallies supporting CEO Tim Cook scheduled for Apple stores nationwide, presidential candidates weighing in, and a cute hashtag (#FBiOS) affixed, it appears that Apple can technically comply with the judge’s order if must. Security company Trail of Bits founder Dan Guido wrote a detailed explanation of...

Apple CEO Tim Cook late Tuesday defiantly challenged a U.S federal magistrate judge’s order that it help the FBI break into an iPhone 5c belonging to one of the shooters involved in last December’s attack in San Bernardino, Calif. Cook released a letter last night expressing his opposition to the court order and called for...

Threatpost editor Mike Mimoso talks to HackerOne chief policy officer Katie Moussouris about the U.S. implementation of the Wassenaar Arrangement rules and where things stand close to seven months after the initial draft was pulled off the table for a rewrite. [embedded content]

TENERIFE, Spain –The rhetoric around hacking the power grid would have you believe it’s a relatively mundane practice. Policymakers, intelligence agencies and vendors, for example, spread the word gleefully, leaning on scenarios such as state-sponsored hackers shutting off the lights in the dead of winter as a scare tactic to glean budget and influence. One...

TENERIFE, Spain – Intelligence services may be the security industry’s boogeyman right now, but for a long time, IT security has done a good job of following the government’s lead when it comes to developing new approaches and strategies. At the Kaspersky Lab Security Analyst Summit, Inbar Raz of PerimeterX illustrated how security has been in lockstep...

It’s been months since the U.S. Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security pulled the U.S. implementation of the Wassenaar Arrangement off the table for an unusual rewrite of the rules governing so-called intrusion software. The overly broad rule drew the ire of security and privacy experts because its vague language would put a serious...

Since technology companies such as Google and Apple turned on end-to-end encryption by default and tied encryption keys to device passwords, the government’s inability to compel providers via warrants to turn over data has caused considerable angst. Going Dark is the government’s catch-all phrase for the current state of affairs, and high-ranking officials such as...