Israeli security company Dome9 provides a hosted firewall for protecting servers in both private or public clouds. It enables customers to lockdown SSH access or admin panels until they’re specifically opened via the web-based Dome9 console. Today the company released an iPhone app that will provide more convenient access to the console. → Read More
Zscaler, a provider of cloud security services to small businesses, corporates and service providers, has raised a hefty $38 million led by an unnamed investor, with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners.
This is the first outside investment ever taken by Zscaler, which was founded in 2007, and had in the past been funded internally. The company is currently cash-flow positive, but… → Read More
Wikileaks‘ website is up again after over a week of denial of service attacks, though as of this writing I’m still seeing many errors on the site. On its Twitter account Wikileaks credited CloudFlare, a company that provides a web security service, for helping the organization get its site back online.
Earlier this month Wikileaks resumed publishing e-mails acquired (yes, illegally) by the… → Read More
Flash doesn’t get a lot of love these days, but it’s still ubiquitous on the web. To make displaying Flash content safer for its users, Google just announced that it is now putting the Flash Player plug-in it ships with Chrome for Windows (including the aging Windows XP) inside a new and enhanced sandbox “that’s as strong as Chrome’s native sandbox, and dramatically more robust than anything… → Read More
In response to a security breach, Dropbox promised to add an optional new layer of security known as two factor authentication. If you want to add two factor authentication to your own app but don’t know where to start, you’re in luck: Authy is a YCombinator backed startup launching today that makes it easy to add optional two factor authentication to your application. You just add some API calls… → Read More
Earlier this year French entrepreneur Ramine Darabiha called for a cypherpunk revival. Looks like he might be getting his wish.
Cryptosphere is a new darknet now under development. A darknet is a private and/or anonymous network, sometimes using the public internet for connectivity. Silk Road, a marketplace for illegal drugs, is probably the most famous. You can’t use Cryptosphere yet, but… → Read More
Hacking, viruses, megabreaches and other cybercriminal activity are on the increase, and cybersecurity specialists Bit9 has today announced a significant round of funding to help fight it.
Bit9, which works with 30 of the Fortune 100 companies, Raised its biggest round yet, a $34.5 million Series D led by new investor Sequoia Capital, with participation from existing investors Atlas Venture… → Read More
Amid fierce smartphone competition between Samsung and Apple that has spilled into a multinational patent battle, it looks like Apple may have opened yet another front on the M&A side: it is buying mobile security company AuthenTec — which had only just signed a deal with Samsung for Android devices — for $356 million.
AuthenTec, among other things, makes fingerprint sensor chips that are… → Read More
Dropbox says it hasn’t found intrusions into its internal systems or any cases of unauthorized activity in user accounts. Earlier this week, the company appeared to be suffering from what looked like a security breach. Users, mainly those based in Europe, were being sent unsolicited spam emails related to European casino scams. It was unclear how they had been targeted, since many users claimed… → Read More
Over the last few years, we’ve seen an increase in the number of high profile hacks and cyber attacks and, as a result, both government and enterprise finally began making security a priority and addressing it from the top down. AlienVault, a California and Madrid-based startup that provides unified management of critical security systems across networks, like threat detection, vulnerability… → Read More
A while back we wrote about a flaw in Groupon’s email link encryption, which revealed the emails of some Groupon users when “addx” was added into a Google search of Groupon’s site. We’ve been alerted that is still happening, with about 170 emails coming up when we searched (last time around it was less than 80).
When this last happened, Groupon director of engineering Shinji Kuwayama told us… → Read More
Gartner estimates that more than 10 percent of small businesses have been the victim of theft and/or fraud, with losses totaling more than $2 billion. That’s because small businesses are more or less forced to rely on a variety of ad hoc and manual processes, paper checks and online bill pay systems, which mean complexity, higher security risks and less control. MineralTree emerged out of stealth… → Read More
Going mobile may be the mantra for a lot of tech companies these days, but if they’re in the business of targeting teenagers with their services, perhaps they should think twice: over 37 percent of teens use laptops, and a further 30 percent rely on desktop machines to surf online and engage with digital content, but only 13.5 percent use smartphones and only five percent use tablets, according to… → Read More
San Francisco-based enterprise startup Bluebox has raised $9.5 million in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz, which saw participation from SV Angel, Sun co-founder and early Google investor Andy Bechtolsheim, Google board member and early investor Ram Shriram, and former CEO of SPI Dynamics (acquired by HP in 2007) Brian Cohen. Bechtolsheim and Scott Weiss, general partner at Andreessen… → Read More
BoxCryptor, an on-the-fly encryption service that’s optimized for cloud storage services like Dropbox, Box.net and Google Drive, just announced the launch of its native Mac application. This new Mac app joins the company’s previously released Windows, iOS and Android apps. In addition, the Germany-based company is also announcing its new pricing structure, which now for the first time includes a… → Read More
Apparently it’s not unusual for Google to detect that some of its users’ accounts are under attack from “states or groups that are state-sponsored.” The attacks are so prevalent, it seems, that Google has now launched a new program that will warn users when it detects such an attack. Whenever Google now detects such an attack, it will show a warning at the top of the user’s screen, including a… → Read More
CloudFlare, the increasingly popular security and CDN service, suffered a security breach last week that allowed hacktivist group UGNazi to hijack the company’s CEO’s Matthew Prince’s Gmail account and gain access to the account of one of CloudFlare’s customers. CloudFlare won’t say who exactly the hacker targeted with this attack, but rumor has it that 4chan.org was likely on the hacker’s hit… → Read More
Apple has introduced a guide to iOS security, which was posted to Apple.com sometime in late May, but is just now being noticed outside the Apple developer community. The publication is notable because it’s the first time Apple has published a comprehensive guide intended for an I.T. audience. (Apple’s developer-friendly documentation on security matters is easy to spot, however).
The new guide… → Read More
Seattle-based Mobilisafe, a mobile security startup backed by $1.2 million in funding from Madrona Venture Group, Trilogy Equity Partnership and T-Venture, is exiting its private beta program and launching publicly today. The company’s cloud-based Mobile Risk Management (MRM) solution aims to help companies deal with the ever-increasing number of personal devices on corporate networks, but… → Read More
Some eye-opening stats out today from McAfee, the Intel-owned IT security company: a study of 28 million computers in 24 countries has found that 17 percent of all PCs do not have any form of security at all on them against viruses, worms, spyware and other Internet malware – a transgression that McAfee compares to “walking around naked on the Internet.”
But McAfee notes that while the… → Read More
Google just announced that its Google Apps for Business service has earned ISO 27001 certification. This certifies that Google is following the standard ISO information security management protocols and best practices “for the systems, technology, processes and data centers serving Google Apps for Business.” If you’re a startup or individual user, chances are you don’t care too much about whether… → Read More
Remember address book-gate? Locationgate? I-don’t-know-what-my-apps-are-doing-on-my-phone-gate? (Oh, that last one might not be a real thing.) Regardless, we’re living in age where companies are pushing us to rethink the boundaries between what we consider private, personal information and what should be public. The resulting backlash is an overreaction(-gate) when we discover that some of the… → Read More
This video by Tenable Security is pretty wild. It shows a visualization of an office network. Using different colors and lines users can pin-point problem areas based on traffic and data being sent and received to each machine.
The system lets you call out various aspects of the network using marker shape, color, and network lines. For example, you can change symbol colors depending on… → Read More
As you may have seen over the weekend, someone has discovered a security hole in FileVault, which arose with the OS X Lion security update, version 10.7.3, back in February: FileVault encryption passwords are now visible in plain text outside of a computer’s encrypted area.
The hole was apparently spotted by someone back in February, although it was most publicly first pointed out by security… → Read More
ID and fraud protection service AllClear ID, is launching a new feature today which aims to protect kids’ Social Security Numbers (SSNs) from being stolen and used to secure things like mortgages, loans and other big ticket items. It’s a major problem, the company says, noting in a new study that 10.7% of children have had their ID stolen.
The idea with the new service is to create the… → Read More
This afternoon, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the controversial Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) by a vote of 248 to 168. Unlike SOPA, which focused on copyright violations, CISPA wants to give Internet companies and the U.S. government the tools to protect and defend themselves against cyber attacks by sharing information with each other. Critics, however, argued… → Read More
If, for whatever reason, you need to cover your tracks while you are browsing the web on your desktop, you have plenty of options to keep anonymous. Thanks to Orbot, Android users, too, have the option to use the Tor network to anonymize their web browsing sessions and avoid being monitored. Now, thanks to Onion Browser ($0.99), iPhone and iPad users also finally get an easy option to encrypt and… → Read More
Big corporations have been riddled by security attacks over the past year, and hackers seem to be growing even bolder and more resolute. As a result, market research firm The Radicati Group said that it expects the corporate web security market to grow to $2.5 billion over the next four years. It’s in this climate that a young, stealth startup is trying to put companies back on the offensive, and… → Read More
As Facebook pushes ever closer to one billion users, one of the biggest issues it has faced has been backlash from consumers around the areas of privacy and security. Today, the social network is taking two steps in an effort to improve its image around that area, and potentially positioning itself as a software reseller in the process.
It is partnering with Microsoft, McAfee, TrendMicro… → Read More
Fragmentation isn’t just a problem reserved for mobile operating systems, it’s inherent to our online identities as well. Our digital identities exist in a loose and fragmented consortium of usernames, email addresses, scree names, social media accounts, passwords, and sitekeys. Many have tried to capture the single sign-on holy grail, and most have failed, because as much as we are inconvenienced… → Read More
Austin, TX
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
Boston, MA
Disrupt Europe: Berlin Hackathon
Berlin, Germany
