Author Archives: Patrick O'Neill

Veracode sells to CA Technologies for $614 million

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CA Technologies Inc. announced Monday it had purchased the security firm Veracode for $614 million in cash. The move comes two years after Veracode reportedly came close to an IPO and was valued around $800 million. Veracode launched a decade ago to offer developers automated security analysis of applications. CA Technologies, based in New York City, is a $4.5 billion behemoth focused mostly on business-to-business deals, keeping it largely out of the public eye. Veracode made headlines recently when Cloudflare, fresh off a high-profile data leak, announced the Burlington, Mass.-based company would independently audit its code. Veracode co-founder Chris Wysopal was part the hacker think tank L0pht, which in 1998 told the U.S. Senate about the cybersecurity disasters looming as the internet approached ubiquity. The punkish group of hackers were the first — aside from members of federal witness protection programs — to go before Congress using psuedonyms (Wysopal was “Weld Pond”). The group […]

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New bill would push for cybersecurity improvements at 911 call centers

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Faced with national 911 systems deemed increasingly vulnerable to cyberattack, Sens. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) will introduce a bill within the next few weeks to federally fund and hasten the national transition to next generation 911 (NG911) systems. A recent draft of the legislation seen by CyberScoop shows the new legislation will set an as-yet-undetermined […]

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Health insurer Excellus is latest to argue that hacked data could’ve come from anywhere

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Four years after Excellus BlueCross BlueShield was hacked and more than 10 million members had their data exposed, the insurer remains on the defensive in class action lawsuits claiming it ignored cybersecurity at peril of its own members. Excellus failed last week in an attempt to win dismissal of a suit after arguing unsuccessfully that the data […]

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Internet-connected teddy bear company hacked; 2 million parent-child voice messages held ransom

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A company selling internet-connected stuffed toys used by kids and parents to send voice messages to one another leaked 800,000 user account credentials and 2 million message recordings, according to security researcher Troy Hunt. The data was hacked, locked and held for ransom. Researchers and journalists have been trying to reach the company, Spiral Toys, since late last year […]

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Google engineers keep pushing on email encryption as E2EMail goes open source

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A group of Google engineers is hoping to make progress on a problem that has bedeviled email technology for decades: how to strongly and easily encrypt all of your messages. It’s a community-driven effort — not a bona fide Google product — and it faces a big uphill climb, given that it relies on projects that are only in the […]

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Cloudflare has been massively leaky for months

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The private messages you sent on OKCupid last month or the data collected by your FitBit could be floating around the internet right now. Add to that a load of passwords and private data on some of the web’s most popular sites. Big businesses like Uber, 1Password, OKCupid and FitBit use Cloudflare, a massive content […]

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Bitcoin sets all-time high price at $1,171 and climbing

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The price of bitcoin surged to over $1,171 on Thursday, a surge that puts it above the previous all-time high of $1,165.89 set Nov. 30, 2013. The digital currency’s price has been above $1,000 for nearly two months — its longest ever streak north of that milestone — and Thursday’s surge means the price has risen 175 percent […]

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SHA-1 crypto algorithm is dead by collision attack

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The SHA-1 cryptographic hash function is dead. A 24-year-old security mechanism still in wide use around the internet today, the NSA-developed cryptographic algorithm was finally proven to be broken this week by a team of Dutch cryptographers and Google researchers who published their work at shattered.io. The researchers showed how to “collide” two different files but come out with […]

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Cellebrite can now unlock iPhone 6 and 6+, also extract data from array of popular apps

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Cellebrite, the Israel-based firm that makes millions selling smartphone cracking tools to governments around the world, announced Wednesday that it can unlock and extract the full file system from locked iPhones including the 6 and 6+ with their Advanced Investigative Service (CAIS) product in which their customers send phones they urgently need unlocked. Every version before the […]

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Two years after massive breach, U.S. government still fights to keep security audits of Anthem secret

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Two years after a cyberattack on Anthem, one of America’s largest health insurers, the company and the U.S. government are still locked in court battles over lawsuits that aim to make public a range of critical documents from two security audits conducted both right before and immediately after the massive hack. After some disclosures on the audits in 2016, a federal […]

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