ICYMI in Cybersecurity and Data Breach

Google Faces New Privacy Suits For Non-User Email Scanning

Law360 reported this week, “A California law firm said Thursday it has filed the first of what it hopes will be thousands of individual state court damages claims over Google’s allegedly illegal email scanning for advertising purposes, which has already resulted in a $2.2 million federal court.

Weighing Privacy vs Security for the Internet’s Address Book

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the California-based nonprofit that manages the internet's domain name system, won’t be GDPR compliant by May, so they are trying to find a temporary solution. Domain names are stored on whois.com unless you pay for a proxy service to hide that information. Wired reports that, “New European privacy rules may change this—not just in Europe, but around the world. The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation will take effect on May 25. The regulation forbids companies from sharing their European customers' personal data without explicit permission, and gives customers the right to delete their data at any time. As a result, Whois entries may soon contain a lot less information.”

Week ahead: NSA nominee heads before Senate Intelligence Committee

The Hill reports this week that, “Lt. Gen. Paul Nakasone, the Army's current cyber chief, was unanimously approved by the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday to serve in the dual-hat role as NSA director and commander of U.S. Cyber Command. Nakasone is sure to face a flurry of questions about cyber threats to the United States, the U.S. intelligence mission, and the possible separation of NSA and Cyber Command, after Trump formally elevated the latter into its own warfighting unit last year.”

Intel Announces CPU Hardware Protections to Prevent Future Spectre-Like Flaws

As reported this week by BleepingComputer.com, “Intel announced… that upcoming CPU models would include brand new hardware-level protections to prevent any future Meltdown and Spectre-like vulnerabilities… Intel describes the new hardware protection measures as ‘partitions’ or ‘protective walls,’ keeping malicious code in a physically different location from areas of the CPU were speculative execution is taking place, and so preventing the attacker from ever interacting with those types of operations.”