WhatsApp And AT&T Fail To Keep Our Data Safe, New Study Finds

Concerned about NSA snooping? Better get rid of WhatsApp and AT&T. That, at least, is one takeaway from the Electronic Frontier Foundation's annual "Who Has Your Back?" scorecard, which tells us which tech companies are doing a reasonabl job protecting user data, and which are failing abysmally.

As Americans have become increasingly aware of (and peeved by) government spying, we've started judging our tech services and gadgets not only on their quality, but on whether they can safeguard our data. The EFF, a nonprofit focused on digital rights, rates companies based on transparency to consumers about government data demands and content removal requests, data retention practices, and public positions on electronic backdoors.

In addition to WhatsApp and AT&T receiving piss poor grades, Google slipped up for the first time, earning only three stars compared with a perfect five in 2014. The tech giant was penalized on two major counts: The fact that it no longer discloses the full extent of its data retention, and diminished transparency regarding government data requests.

Still, the latest report wasn't all doom and gloom. Apple, Adobe, Yahoo, Dropbox, and Sonic.net each received high marks, and overall, scores were way up compared with the first such study conducted in 2011. On the whole, tech companies seem to be shifting their data privacy stances in the right direction-but they've got a long road ahead before Americans begin trusting them again.

[SFGate]

Google fixes 7 Chrome security holes just before CanSecWest

The day before two annual Google-sponsored hacking contests kick off at a security conference in Vancouver, Google tidies up some of Chrome's loose ends.

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Ask A VC: YL Ventures’ Yoav Leitersdorf On The Cyber Security Opportunity

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The New Age Of The Security Startup

Last month Apple disclosed and fixed a massive bug in its operating system that left users’ information exposed to theft; faith in the cryptocurrency Bitcoin is eroding; and revenues at the retailing giant Target fell 46% on a quarterly basis over the Christmas season last year, all because of security breaches.

There is no doubt that the profusion of technology designed to make personal and professional lives easier has left people around the world personally and professionally more exposed to potential threats like identity theft, unwanted surveillance, and corporate espionage.

To combat these growing threats the entrepreneurs and investors that helped to seed this technology revolution are going back to the well to finance a new generation of security startup.

Since 2009 investors have spent at least $2.9 billion on security technologies, according to data from CrunchBase. And so far this year investors have spent at least $150 million in 26 new investments in security technology companies.

Investors are also valuing these companies more highly now. In the first quarter of 2013 investors made 44 investments with roughly the same amount of capital, the CrunchBase data shows.

The need for new security technology is also driving up company valuations at the earliest stages of their development, the CrunchBase data shows. In the first quarter of 2013 16 seed stage companies raised $4.9 million. For 2014, less than half the number of companies raised roughly the same amount.

“This has always been an interesting area and there have been hundreds of security companies being funded,” said John Walecka, a founding partner at Redpoint Ventures. What’s new now, according to Walecka, is the fundamental change in the nature of security threats.

“In the past there were really only a couple of entry points that you needed to guard,” Walecka said. “But the current enterprise has thousands of applications that they’re running that are connected up to the Internet.”

Investors group the types of security challenges companies and individuals face in three main categories: securing data, securing the software applications that businesses use to manipulate, store, and manage that data, and finally securing the perimeter, or the networks through which all of this information flows.

Companies like CloudPassage, which raised $25.5 million in a Series C round of funding in February, tackle the network problem from a cloud computing perspective, according to company co-founder and chief executive, Carson Sweet.

As more businesses move to providing their software as a hosted service, a lot of the technology tools corporations use no longer run on servers behind the company’s firewall.

The idea for companies like CloudPassage or the seed stage Forty Cloud, is to provide corporate IT departments with the ability to manage, monitor and control their hosted networks. Meanwhile, startups like the Redpoint-backed Lastline are developing new ways to detect and prevent malware from entering enterprise networks.

Meanwhile San Francisco-based Bluebox Security, which raised $18 million in financing from Andreessen Horowitz in January and launched its first product earlier in February has its sights set on securing applications.

“There are two problems that need to be solved,” said Caleb Sima, Bluebox co-founder and chief executive. “With all the mobile devices data goes everywhere. When it goes on

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Enterprise Mobility: Devices, Security, Design, And Distribution

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah works on product for Swell, is a TechCrunch columnist, and an investor. He blogs at Haywire, and you can follow him on Twitter at 

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Intel kills off McAfee Security brand

Intel takes branding ownership of McAfee's computer security suite and severs founder John McAfee's name from the security software that has borne it for more than 20 years.

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Daily Roundup: Snapchat security exploit, judge okays NSA spying and more!

You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.

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Zimperium Raises $8M For Mobile Security That Turns The Tables On Attackers

Let’s say you’re at the airport, checking your email on your iPhone over the wifi. Well, you’ve already made your first mistake. You’ve trusted the airport network to be secure enough to protect you from hacker attacks.

Zimperium announced today it has raised $8 million from Sierra Ventures to build out its mobile technology designed to protect you from those attacks at the airport or wherever else you might be.

The company also has a tool for IT administrators to monitor all those devices registered to the network. The company now has a super secret project in the works to turn the tables on the hackers. To do that, they are going to hire more hackers, which obviously makes sense. That should not be too difficult, considering Kevin Mitnick, one of the most famous hackers in the world, sits on the company’s board of advisors.

Zimperium has a mobile app called “zAnti” that is meant to give the every day user the ability to test networks to see if they have vulnerabilities such as the danger of “man in the middle,” attacks. These attacks hijack a user’s session and then act as a silent eavesdropper masquerading as a trusted participant.

For example, Frank and Veronica know and trust each other. But their network has gotten hacked and this dude, Lester, has put himself in the middle, pretending to be Veronica. Frank is so happy to check out the link from Veronica, and that’s all it takes. Lester has succeeded in taking over the conversation and gaining access to Veronica’s network of taco truck apps — or whatever the info she has that Lester now seeks to exploit. Lester has convinced Frank to give access to his network as well by sending him a link that he knows Frank will be enticed to open.

The people behind Zimperium are no joke. CEO Itzhak “Zuk” Avraham spent three years with the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). So you can just imagine what he worked on while there.

It’s no surprise then that Avraham would boast that this new top-secret project will be able to stop attacks such as Stuxnet, the computer worm designed to attack nuclear operations.

Mobile — the next frontier — is a gold mine for the security pros. Angel List has 108 companies listed that specialize in mobile security. But Zimperium has already proven it has the chops. Now it has to show it can be a bad-ass business, too.

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NSA Reportedly Paid A Security Firm Millions To Ship Deliberately Flawed Encryption Technology

Today Reuters reported that the NSA paid RSA, a security company and subsidiary of EMC, $10 million to use a flawed random generator technology as the “preferred” option in its BSafe software, increasing its popularity.

In September of this year, the New York Times reported that the NSA was working to, in its own words, “break widely used Internet encryption technologies.” That the NSA wanted to get past encryption was not surprising.

How far along it was, however, came as a shock. An NSA memo was blunt in its assessment of its own progress: “Cryptanalytic capabilities are now coming online. Vast amounts of encrypted Internet data which have up till now been discarded are now exploitable.”

After being implicated in the NSA’s efforts to get around encryption, RSA told its customers that they should stop using the flawed algorithm. As the Wall Street Journal reported at that time, the warning was “one of the first instances of a security company acknowledging the U.S. government may have been involved in propping open a backdoor into a product.”

Reuters’ revelation that the NSA had paid RSA $10 million to use the flawed algorithm changes the discussion. Instead of the NSA being some sort of evil mastermind, bent on making popular security standards obsolete, it was instead buying its way into companies.

And for small sums to boot. Who wants to wager that this is the only time the NSA paid a security company to use flawed code that it prefers so that it can better beat back encryption?

And if it can get a company with as long a history as RSA to bend so far to its quarter for a mere ten million dollars, the NSA could have bought any sort of access and influence that it wanted.

Depressing, but probably true.

Top Image Credit: Flickr

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