encryption

Remember all the idiotically simple hacks that got Sony in trouble, and the intrusive data collected by Android and iOS that got users mad because it was stored in accessible plain text? Open-access WiFi network FON shows not everyone learned a lesson from all that agita.

The PCI Security Standards Council today is expected to issue guidelines on use of point-to-point encryption in protecting sensitive payment card data, but the narrow approach — which is focused on hardware — is raising questions.

As at other breached sites, Sony customers used short, simple passwords that could be cracked easily; if Sony hadn't stored them as plain text that could be read without even that much effort.

The public key encryption scheme developed by Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman in the mid-1970s - and influenced by the work of Ralph Merkle - has now made them all pretty darn famous some three-plus decades later: All three have been inducted in 2011 into the Computer History Museum Hall of Fellows and the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

Have a mobile phone? Wonder how to secure it? Microsolved, Inc. Security Analyst Phil Grimes offers these security tips for smartphone users.

As more applications employ Secure Sockets Layer encryption, a certain amount of traffic visibility is lost, making it more challenging to vet those bits for viruses, worms, and other malicious payloads.

Unlike other companies that have suffered major data breaches lately, LastPass pulled a server offline at the first hint of trouble and gave customers a detail of its recovery plan.

Have you had an account hacked, or had your personal information stolen? Do you have data that needs to be protected? Fear no more. Researchers from the Max-Planck-Institut f?

Google is trying to make Android more appealing to businesses by adding IT administration tools to Google Apps that can encrypt Android tablets or remotely locate a lost Android phone and reset the PIN.

The continuing failure by most enterprises to encrypt sensitive data stored on laptops and other mobile devices is inexcusable, analysts said following BP's disclosure this week of a data compromise involving a lost laptop.

The same day a Facebook exec promised EU subscribers better privacy controls, China misappropriated all the traffic from some customers.