WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

Web merchants routinely leak data about purchases. And that can make it straightforward to link individuals with their Bitcoin purchases, say cybersecurity researchers. You can preserve your privacy as long as the pseudonym is not linked to you. But as soon as somebody makes the link to one of your anonymous books, the ruse is revealed. Your entire writing history under your pseudonym becomes public. Similarly, as soon as your personal details are linked to your Bitcoin address, your purchase history is revealed too.

Anonymity, like security, has many layers. Observers have developed methods of piercing anonymity which involve differing levels of technology.

These are the steps you can take and the tools you'll need to remain anonymous and hidden online. Tor, VPN, burner emails, encryption, bitcoin, etc.

Your mobile phone hosts a rich array of information about you and your behavior. This includes a wide range of unique identifiers and sensitive personal information that enables online tracking, often times for delivering targeted advertisement. It is, however, striking how little insight and control we, as mobile users have into the operation and performance of our devices, into how (or whether) they protect information we entrust to them, and who they share it with. Further, it is not just regular users that are in the dark; much of the operation of mobile devices remains mysterious even to experts.

Using password managers like LastPass and 1Password are essential to your online security — cyber security expert Kevin Mitnick explains why.

On today’s web it’s hard to set a (digital) foot online without it attracting dozens of trackers and log entries, as companies look to learn everything about you and sell that data on to advertisers. To hide you’ve got a few tools at your disposal, many of which we’ve talked about in the past, and all of which add up to a largely anonymous browsing experience. What we can’t do is promise 100 percent that you won’t be tracked—we’re not privy to the inner workings of the FBI or your employer’s IT system—but this is as much as you can do.

With the Supreme Court slated to rule next term on whether cellphone location data requires a search warrant, a new poll shows that a majority of U.S. adults support law enforcement accessing certain personal data for someone under investigation, but only if it's authorized by a warrant. Polling was conducted June 8 through June 12 among 2,200 U.S. adults. Morning Consult is the official polling partner of POLITICO, Vox, Fortune, and Bloomberg News.

Instead of Google, Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn owning your data, imagine a world in which you control the data about yourself and reveal only what is minimally necessary when required. It would be the web equivalent of proving to a bouncer only that you're older than 21, instead of also handing over your birthdate, address and whether you've elected to be an organ donor.

If you collect email information at the point of sale for your loyalty program, you can import store transactions directly into AdWords yourself or through a third-party data partner. And even if your business doesn’t have a large loyalty program, you can still measure store sales by taking advantage of Google’s third-party partnerships, which capture approximately 70% of credit and debit card transactions in the United States. There is no time-consuming setup or costly integrations required on your end. You also don’t need to share any customer information. After you opt in, we can automatically report on your store sales in AdWords.

The short version: I'm loading over 1 billion breached accounts into HIBP. These are from 2 different "combo lists", collections of email addresses and passwords from all sorts of different locations. I've verified their accuracy (including my own record in one of them) and many hundreds of millions of the

The 2017 DBIR reveals what’s really happening in cyber security. This year’s report is based on analysis of over 40,000 incidents, including 1,935 confirmed data breaches. That means you get a detailed insight into the cyber security threats you face.

Read the report and discover:

• The biggest cyber security threats in your sector and what you can do to mitigate them.
• Who’s behind the attacks and how they’re getting in.
• What motivates the cybercriminals.
• How nine incident patterns can help you predict what the cybercriminals will do next.

Many of the world’s largest online and mobile properties offer 2FA to help prevent fraudulent activity and protect your accounts. To see if the sites and apps you use offer 2FA, and to get detailed step-by-step instructions on how to Turn It On, start here.

OVER a couple of days in February, hundreds of thousands of point-of-sale printers in restaurants around the world began behaving strangely. Some churned out bizarre pictures of computers and giant robots signed, “with love from the hacker God himself”. Some informed their owners that, “YOUR PRINTER HAS BEEN PWND’D”.

Alphabet’s artificial intelligence outfit, DeepMind, plans to build a blockchain-style system that will carefully track how every shred of patient data is used. The company, which is rapidly expanding its health-care initiatives, has announced that it will build a tool that it calls Verifiable Data Audit during the course of this year. The idea: allow hospitals, and potentially even patients, to see exactly who is using health-care records, and for what purpose. By logging how every piece of patient data is used, the company hopes to leave behind an indelible audit trail.

100 million rides and runs, 220 billion data points visualizing the best roads and trails worldwide.

The US Department of Homeland Security used software to scan social media accounts of people visiting America, but it didn't work properly.

Under President Obama, the government considered asking people to voluntarily submit social media profiles, but since the election of President Trump the scheme may become mandatory and more invasive.

The new boss of the US Department of Homeland Security, John Kelly, has said that such checks should be mandatory and travelers should also be forced to provide passwords and banking records. This may take weeks or months, he said, but people will just have to wait before visiting this shining city on the hill.

Andy Grove was a Hungarian refugee who escaped communism, studied engineering, and ultimately led the personal computer revolution as the CEO of Intel. He died earlier this year in Silicon Valley after a long fight with Parkinson's disease. When one of the most powerful people in the world encourages us to be paranoid, maybe we should listen.

This survey finds that a majority of Americans have directly experienced some form of data theft or fraud, that a sizeable share of the public thinks that their personal data have become less secure in recent years, and that many lack confidence in various institutions to keep their personal data safe from misuse. In addition, many Americans are failing to follow digital security best practices in their own personal lives, and a substantial majority expects that major cyberattacks will be a fact of life in the future.

The majority of adults in a new survey by the Pew Research Center feel that their privacy is being challenged along such core dimensions as the security of their personal information and their ability to retain confidentiality.

When Americans are asked what comes to mind when they hear the word “privacy,” there are patterns to their answers. When responses are grouped into themes, the largest block of answers ties to concepts of security, safety, and protection. For many others, notions of secrecy and keeping things “hidden” are top of mind when thinking about privacy.

These third party login tools promise more traffic, more subscribers, more members, more customers and more sales — and those promises have come true: as some have noted, up to 80% of web users choose Facebook Connect or another social authentication option when it’s available (as opposed to signing up for a site with their email address), and Facebook itself has claimed that social authentication increases registration by 30-200%. (...) But is that promise worth the price of losing direct access to your customers’ contact information and profiling information — or for that matter, direct access to customers themselves?

Mozilla’s new open source initiative to document and explain what’s happening to the health of the Internet. Combining research from multiple sources, we collect data on five key topics and offer a brief overview of each.