Student claims school spied on him via
computer webcam

A Lower Merion family has set off a furor among students, parents, and civil liberties groups by alleging that Harriton High School officials used a webcam on a school-issued laptop to spy on their 15-year-old son at home.

In a lawsuit filed Tuesday in federal court, the family said the school's assistant principal had confronted their son, told him he had "engaged in improper behavior in [his] home, and cited as evidence a photograph from the webcam embedded in [his] personal laptop issued by the school district."

The suit contends the Lower Merion School District, one of the most prosperous and highest-achieving in the state, had the ability to turn on students' webcams and illegally invade their privacy.

2010 State of Enterprise Security Report

The 2010 State of Enterprise Security report is based on input from 2100 enterprises around the world. The report finds that security it IT’s top concern as organizations experience frequent and increasingly effective cyber attacks. The costs of these attacks is high, and enterprise security is becoming more difficult. Symantec provides key security strategies to help security IT cope with this challenging landscape.

The study found that a full 100 percent of the enterprises surveyed had experienced cyber losses in 2009. The most common losses were:

- Theft of persoanlly-identifuable information
- Downtime of environment
- Theft of intellectual property
- Theft of customer credit card information

Congressional hearings regarding impending privacy legislation typically have focused on behavioral ad targeting, but location-based mobile targeting could be regulated, too. Two congressional subcommittees met this morning to discuss location-based technologies and their impact on consumer privacy and safety.

The relatively brief joint hearing served as a preliminary discussion about location-based data and its usage for targeting information and advertising to users of mobile devices. While nothing concrete emerged from the discussion, the potential is clear: impending comprehensive privacy legislation could regulate commercial use of location-based mobile data.

A report about the state of the Web by Zscaler indicates that cyber criminals have transferred the focus of their attacks from web and email servers to end user systems. Their goal is to compromise the system and enter it there where the security chain presents its weakest link - the end user. The end user is simply more vulnerable to technical vulnerabilities, social engineering and web-based attacks.

An American teenager has been sentenced to 15 years in jail after posing as a girl on Facebook to blackmail seven classmates into sex.

Anthony Stancl, 19, of Wisconsin, was accused of tricking more than 30 male classmates into sending him naked photos of themselves.

He then used the photos as blackmail, threatening to post them online unless the students had sex with him.

He forced at least seven of them into some sort of sexual activity with him in encounters that he documented with a mobile phone.

Up to 300 photographs of underage males, some as young as 15, were found on Stancl's computer, police said.