Easily digestible tech news... http://www.techdirt.com/ en-us http://www.techdirt.com/images/td-88x31.gifhttp://www.techdirt.com/ Thu, 31 May 2012 09:34:00 PDT Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120530/10581419128/who-needs-cispa-white-house-unveils-voluntary-data-sharing-plan-to-fight-botnets.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120530/10581419128/who-needs-cispa-white-house-unveils-voluntary-data-sharing-plan-to-fight-botnets.shtml effectively dead in the water), the White House announced a new voluntary program for companies to share info about botnets in order to stop them. This raises the question, yet again, why we need laws like CISPA in the first place. Companies and the government can already share threat information without violating anyone's privacy. All CISPA and similar bills are really doing is making it easier to violate privacy rules when sharing that kind of information.

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]]> plus,-no-privacy-violations! http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20120530/10581419128 Fri, 17 Oct 2008 16:20:58 PDT Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20081017/0242262573.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20081017/0242262573.shtml huge threat that had to be dealt with quickly before they spread around the world. Of course, that hasn't actually happened -- and there are some good reasons why it's unlikely. In fact, it seemed like such stories had been decreasing lately, perhaps in part due to some security firms scolding competitors for mobile virus FUD.

So, we were a bit surprised to see yet another story on the subject, this time suggesting that we're on the verge of (I'm not making this up) a "Cell Phone Zombie Uprising." Some researchers are predicting that mobile phones would be perfect for botnets, though, again it's not clear how that would actually happen, given the limitations of phones. While it is true that phones have become more powerful (and open) over the past few years, there still hasn't been much evidence that viruses and such are a real threat. Most phones are designed well enough to not make it easy for apps to just install themselves -- so consider us skeptical until there's real evidence of a mobile botnet rising.

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