cybersecurity

A steady drumbeat of news about sophisticated cyber attacks against our government and leading institutions has attendees at this year's RSA conference in a fever. And that may be bad for security.

On the fifth anniversary of its Safe Browsing initiative, Google has opened up about some of the risks it sees trending and what it's been doing about them. Mainly it warns users, many of whom ignore warnings about legitimate sites that have been compromised by malware.

Former White House cybersecurity advisor Richard Clarke tells Smithsonian magazine that state-sanctioned Chinese hackers are stealing R&D from U.S. companies.

NATO's idea of digital security and the threat posed by Chinese hackers seems to be on about the same level as the Pentagon's several years ago, when the Pentagon had no idea the Chinese spent more time on Pentagon servers than it did.

When the president ordered DHS to provide cybersecurity guidance to seven industries that make up the critical infrastructure,' it responded, according to a GAO report, with a ton of data and advice that didn't take into account regulations and standards that make advice that is basic for one irrelevant to the others.

Iran refuses to return the high-tech spy drone that crashed after what U.S. officials said was a malfunction. Though the downed drone was too smart for its mission in Afghanistan, the U.S sent an even smarter replacement, and crashed an older drone that had been chasing pirates.

DARPA held a conference this week explicitly asking hackers to show up and share ideas of how to secure .gov and .mil systems. It may not have gotten many ideas, but did plant a few seeds with more than just hackers.

The National Security Agency -- a real-life Men in Black agency, if the MiB only eavesdropped on aliens instead of capturing them -- is lending its expertise to Wall Street as a way to stave off economic disasters that might follow widespread hacks and loss of confidence in banks.

After six months of investigation and what it says is plenty of evidence of who is to blame for the data breach that undermined 40 million SecureID token users, RSA announced only that it can say only that the culprit was a hacker and a "nation state." Why so coy, RSA?

Think tank report on security in the U.S. since the 9/11 attacks warns the potential for cyber-terrorism is "not science fiction," but that plans to deal with it apparently were.

Most people assume victims of spear-phishing attacks and Nigerian currency scams come from low end of the IQ spectrum. They don't; unfortunately, neither do the spear-phishers.

A federal program outlining how to store identity data securely and regulating the private companies that will do it may be the best option to add some protection online.