Orin Kerr writes: The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has handed down a groundbreaking decision today on the federal computer hacking law, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). In HiQ Labs v. LinkedIn, the court held that scraping a public website is likely not a CFAA violation. Under the new decision, violating the CFAA…
Category: Of Note
DoD Releases Public Draft of Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification and Seeks Industry Input
Susan B. Cassidy, Samantha Clark, Ryan Burnette and Ian Brekke of Covington & Burling write: On September 4, the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Acquisition released Version 0.4 of its draft Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) for public comment. The CMMC was created in response to growing concerns by Congress and within…
LinkedIn Can’t Block Analytics Company From Scraping Profiles
Wendy Davis reports: LinkedIn can’t rely on a 33-year-old anti-hacking law to prevent prevent the analytics firm HiQ Labs from mining data, a federal appellate court ruled Monday. The ruling, issued by a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, leaves in place an injunction that requires LinkedIn to allow publicly available data…
Ca: Potential health data breach exposing names, medical conditions discovered by privacy researcher
Francesca Fionda reports: Up on the roof of the Vancouver Public Library, privacy researcher Sarah Jamie Lewis connects a small antenna to her laptop to listen in on what appears to be a major ongoing breach of sensitive health data of patients in the Vancouver area. For months, she says, personal information has been sent…
Money for Nothing: Ransomware Plagues Local Governments
Dennis Fisher writes: The string of ransomware attacks against state and local government agencies that began to ramp up a couple years ago is continuing unabated, and the attackers in some incidents are becoming quite aggressive with their ransom demands. […] Data collected by security firm Barracuda on ransomware attacks shows that there were 55…
Belarusian police shut down notorious hacking forum
Catalin Cimpanu reports: Belarusian authorities have seized the servers of a notorious hacking forum that served as a meeting place for malware authors, hackers, spammers, botnet operators, and other cyber-criminals, the Belarusian Ministry of Internal Affairs said in a press release. Named XakFor, the forum launched in 2012 and targeted the Russian-speaking cybercrime scene. It…