Government

A new ransomware exploit dubbed "Petya" struck major companies and infrastructure sites this week, following last month's WannaCry ransomware attack, which wreaked havoc on more than 300,000 computers across the globe. Petya is believed to be linked to the same set of hacking tools as WannaCry. Pety...

A data contractor working on behalf of the Republican National Committee earlier this month allowed the personal data of 198 million voters to be exposed online, marking the largest ever leak of voter data in history, according to the cybersecurity firm that discovered the incident. Deep Root Anal...

Federal and state officials have confirmed that cyberattacks against state voting systems during the 2016 election were more widespread than previously disclosed to the public, but they said the heightened activity did not impact final vote tallies. The confirmations follow Tuesday's Bloomberg repor...

Amazon has introduced a Prime membership priced at $5.99 monthly for people on government assistance who have a valid EBT card. A Prime membership ordinarily costs $10.99 per month, or $99 per year. The EBT card is used to disburse funds for a variety of government assistance programs, including TAN...

The WannaCry ransom attack that quickly circled the globe last week is not yet fully contained. So far, it has impacted more than 300,000 computers in 150 countries. However, one of the remarkable things about it is that only a trifling $100,000 in ransom, give or take, apparently has been paid. Hac...

Competition in telecom price and service packages has been getting a lot of attention lately. However, network providers also have been pursuing other opportunities that consumers might miss if they're exposed only to traditional advertising. AT&T's cooperation with the U.S. government in develo...

Microsoft this weekend unleashed its wrath on the National Security Agency, alleging it was responsible for the ransomware attack that began last week and has spread to thousands of corporate, government and individual computer systems around the world. Microsoft Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith launc...

Comedian John Oliver, incensed over proposed changes to unravel Net neutrality protections for consumers, unleashed a torrent of criticism against the Federal Communications Commission and urged viewers to register their protest online. The response led to a digital meltdown on the agency's site Sun...

President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed a long-anticipated executive order that addresses a campaign promise to begin shifting the country toward the "Buy American, Hire American" strategy that appealed to much of the industrial working class population in the Rust Belt states. The order calls on t...

Federal agencies seeking to deal with huge amounts of information have begun embracing the software-defined data center, a technology tool that has come into vogue for managing and storing data. The SDDC is an offshoot of IT virtualization that uses a software-defined architecture. Agencies have bee...

The Department of Labor has found "systemic compensation disparities" between Google's female employees and their male counterparts, regional director Janette Wipper said at a hearing in San Francisco. The hearing was in connection with the department's lawsuit over Google's failure to hand over det...

Protecting the data in electronic health records did not start with the advent of HIPAA, as many people think. Protecting health records has been a critical requirement in the healthcare space since the computers became a fixture in hospitals. However, HIPAA added public reports of fines issued for ...

Privacy advocates and consumer groups are fighting back against the U.S. Senate's Thursday vote to undo privacy restrictions on Internet service providers. In a 50-48 party line vote, the Senate approved the Congressional Review Act, S.J. Res. 34. If the House of Representatives gives it the green l...

The Justice Department has announced charges against four individuals, including two officers of Russia's FSB, for carrying out a massive cyberbreach that affected about 500 million Yahoo account holders. A federal grand jury in Northern California charged the defendants -- the FSB officials and two...