FBI director Christopher Wray says that the Feds are still unable to access the encrypted data on an iPhone belonging to the shooter responsible for killing three Americans at a Pensacola, Florida naval base in late 2019.
The FBI says that it has reconstructed the phone after it was damaged. But it still can’t access the information on the handset itself.
President Donald Trump is no fan of Apple’s refusal to unlock iPhones for authorities in encryption-stymied criminal cases. In an interview with CNBC, Trump said, “Apple has to help us. And I’m very strong on it. They have the keys to so many criminals and criminal minds, and we can do things.”
Trump is currently in Davos, Switzerland, attending the World Economic Forum. This morning, he met with Tim Cook for a working breakfast.
Apple ditched plans to let users fully encrypt backups of their devices using iCloud, a new report by Reuters claims. Apple reportedly made the decision after the FBI complained that this would make it harder to carry out future investigations.
The report mentions no names. But the news outlet reportedly spoke with “six sources familiar with the matter.”
Steve Bannon, the ex-Breitbart chairman and former chief strategist for Donald Trump, warns that the president will “drop the hammer” on Apple if it doesn’t work with authorities.
Bannon is referring to the current standoff regarding whether Apple should unlock iPhones used by the shooter who killed three people at the Pensacola Naval Air Station in December.
This VPN post is presented by PureVPN.
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U.S. Senators grilled Apple and Facebook execs over encryption practices today, threatening to regulate the technology if the companies don’t take action on their own.
Republicans and Democrats appeared unified in their disdain for end-to-end encryption. The technology, which Apple uses for iCloud and other services, sometimes thwarts law enforcement officials’ investigations into child abuse and mass shootings. Sen. Lindsey Graham, one of the harshest critics, demanded that the companies add backdoors to their encryption keys.
One of tech’s biggest opponents in Washington D.C. proposed a new bill this week that could have huge implications on Apple and TikTok’s business operations if put into law.
GOP senator Josh Hawley from Missouri introduced legislation today that would prevent the Chinese company that owns TikTok from collecting information on American users and sharing it with the Communist Party of China. The bill would also stop American companies like Apple from storing user data in China.
Apple failed to kill a bug in the Mail app for macOS for months despite its potential to expose private details in emails that the user thought was encrypted.
Security researcher Bob Gendler first discovered the flaw in July and notified Apple of it. Despite releasing four updates for macOS since that time, the privacy flaw still hasn’t been fixed. Apple says it’s working to resolve the issue soon though.
This password sharing post is presented by Dashlane.
Let’s say you just got Netflix (again) and you want to share the password with your partner and kids so they can watch whatever it is they watch. Folks share like that every day with streaming apps, news sites and other online services. But how it’s done matters. Every time you text or email information like that, it can be visible as plain text to others somewhere. But sharing via a password manager like Dashlane keeps sensitive information safe. The Dashlane Sharing Center is easy to use and encrypts data before it goes to another user.
In the olden days, when you wanted to replace your hard drive with a bigger one, you’d run a “secure erase” on it to completely remove any personal data. This would write zeros to the entire disk, overwriting anything already there.
But now, thanks to advances in storage tech, this no longer does the trick. (Not that you can change your own Mac SSDs now anyway.) The new secure-erase, says Apple, is to just encrypt your disk.
Attorney general William Barr has a warning for tech companies using strong encryption: You need to be willing to break it.
In a keynote at the International Conference on Cyber Security in New York, Barr stressed that it is important that law enforcement can crack encrypted messages when they need to do so. The comments are likely to win Barr no friends in Cupertino, given Apple’s stance on privacy.
Apple has banged heads with the Trump administration before, but its biggest clash could be yet to come.
According to a new report, senior White House officials met this week to discuss banning end-to-end encryption. This would affect a number of tech companies — including Apple, which has long touted its focus on user privacy.
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Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 App blocks your wireless carrier from knowing the sites you visit on your iPhone. An update adds encryption to all connections, while also promising faster access for all apps.
1.1.1.1 App with Warp will remain free, but Cloudflare is launching an even quicker version for a monthly fee.
If you’re concerned about security and privacy online, browsing with a VPN is the only way to go. But if you need high speed connections for things like streaming or torrenting, details matter. So this deal on a year of Surfshark is a great opportunity for the performance-minded VPN users.
Michael Cohen’s Apple devices were treated as evidence by federal investigators, who obtained warrants to compel President’s Trump one-time fixer to use Touch ID and Face ID to unlock them.
The warrants were used during an FBI raid on Cohen’s home and office last year. Court documents with warrant details were made public this week.
Apple wants to use encryptions to make “stingray” phone spying tools obsolete. The move is likely to be controversial because while these are used by criminals they are also employed by police.
In a campaign called “Fix it Already!,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is urging tech giants to remedy nine security and privacy problems in their products.
In Apple’s case, it wants the iPhone maker to encrypt iCloud backups so that only users can access them.
The Cellebrite hacking tool used by law enforcers for pulling data off locked iPhones costs $6,000 new. However, used units now show up on eBay for as little as $100.
That’s a big discount from the full price. And it seems that Cellebrite, a security firm based in Israel, isn’t too happy about the situation — with very good reason.
Australia recently passed a law forcing tech companies to give law enforcement greater access to encrypted messages from users. The U.K. already has a similar law, and India is considering one.
There’s no new legislation in the U.S., but the FBI and other police agencies still want easy access to iPhones and other computers, as well as private conversations.
Your WhatsApp conversations can now be protected by Face ID or Touch ID on iPhone.
The latest update to the world’s most popular messaging app lets users take advantage of the iPhone’s biometric security features for an extra layer of protection. Here’s how it works.
The U.K. government has an idea for getting around the thorny issue of tech companies creating a backdoor for encrypted services: just let government agents be able to listen in on encrypted communications.
That’s the so-called “ghost proposal” being put forward by officials from Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), a close surveillance partner of the U.S. National Security Agency. The proposal would make it possible to inject hidden participants into secure messaging services.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has confirmed plans to merge WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger — but says it probably won’t happen until 2020 at the earliest.
In a fourth-quarter earnings call this week, Zuckerberg also explained the reasons behind the plan, such as increased security with end-to-end encryption. Many questions still remain unanswered, however.
Everybody knows web security is of primary importance at all times. So would it surprise you to learn that one of every 10 digital files is entirely unprotected? It should surprise you — especially because the real number is more than twice that. Yep, 21 percent of the world’s files have no security coverage at all.