Feds Pose as Cryptocurrency Money Launderer to Bust Alleged Dark Web Dealers
June 27, 2018 | Joseph Cox, Motherboard
Press
“Posing as a money launderer for Bitcoin seems like a great mechanism to find the dealers: There are so many paths for the dark net dealers to get drugs. There are much fewer paths for them to get cash,” Nicholas Weaver, a senior researcher at the International Computer Science Institute at UC Berkeley, told Motherboard in an online chat.
Here's how Apple's browsing privacy features will work in Safari
June 8, 2018 | Laura Hautala, Cnet
"Most people have no idea that this is happening," said Serge Egelman, director of usable security and privacy research at the International Computer Science Institute. Apple's new effort, he said, "gives users more control over how these companies collect information from them."
FBI Slaps New Charges Against Researcher Who Stopped WannaCry
June 7, 2018 | Jai Vijayan
"A lot of security people have flecks of dirt accumulated over the years," says Nicholas Weaver, senior researcher networking and security at the University of California, Berkeley's International Computer Science Institute.
Latest Privacy Fracas Drops Facebook In The Middle Of Anti-Huawei Hysteria
June 7, 2018 | Karl Bode, Techdirt
"You might think that Facebook or the device manufacturer is trustworthy,” said Serge Egelman, a privacy researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies the security of mobile apps. “But the problem is that as more and more data is collected on the device — and if it can be accessed by apps on the device — it creates serious privacy and security risks."
Facebook let phone makers get data trove on users and friends
June 3, 2018 | Gabriel J.X. Dance, Nicholas Confessore, and Michael LaForgia, New York Times
“You might think that Facebook or the device manufacturer is trustworthy,” said Serge Egelman, a privacy researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies the security of mobile apps. “But the problem is that as more and more data is collected on the device — and if it can be accessed by apps on the device — it creates serious privacy and security risks.”
Why secure email may be an illusion
May 22, 2018 | Steven Nelson, Washington Examiner
It's a wake-up call that some experts believe is overdue. “If you want confidential communications, you can't use email period,” said Nicholas Weaver, a computer science professor at the University of California at Berkeley, though he believes few people can exploit the vulnerabilities.
Bitcoin Could Be a Problem for U.S. Security Clearances
May 22, 2018 | Daniel Flatley, Bloomberg
But Nicholas Weaver, a researcher at the International Computer Science Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, said the Pentagon is right to scrutinize clearance applicants who own cryptocurrencies, even those who are buying and holding them as investments, known as "HODL’ers."
Ad Software Dev Doesn't Like Being Called Out For Privacy Violations; Sends Threatening Letter To Researchers Who Exposed It
May 16, 2018 | Tim Cushing, Techdirt
Serge Egelman, one of the paper's co-authors, notes that thousands of apps are violating this law every day. In just one example, an advertising SDK (software development kit) made by ironSource is harvesting personal data from 466 child-directed apps.
Suspect Identified in C.I.A. Leak Was Charged, but Not for the Breach
May 15, 2018 | Scott Shane and Adam Goldman, New York Times
Despite the scale of the breach, Nicholas Weaver, a researcher at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, Calif., said WikiLeaks had exaggerated the danger to civil liberties from the C.I.A. hacking tools, which he said were actually designed to target small numbers of high-priority targets.
How worried should parents be about apps and websites collecting children’s data?
May 14, 2018 | Wency Leung, The Globe and Mail
Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez, one of the authors of the recent Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies study, says he and his team did not know why the apps they examined were collecting personal data from children – whether they were doing it intentionally or by mistake, and whether that data was used for commercial purposes or internal purposes.