Loss of Privacy

The vision of electric cars call for charge stations to perform smart charging as part of a global smart grid. As a result, a charge station is a sophisticated computer that communicates with the electric grid on one side and the car on the other. To make matters worse, it’s installed outside on street corners and in parking lots.

Electric vehicle charging stations bring with them new security challenges that show similar issues as found in SCADA systems, even if they use different technologies.

In this video recorded at Hack In The Box 2013 Amsterdam, Ofer Shezaf, founder of OWASP Israel, talks about what charge stations really are, why they have to be ‘smart’ and the potential risks created to the grid, to the car and most importantly to its owner’s privacy and safety.

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Bob Sullivan, NBCNews.com technology reporter, explains why Americans are vulnerable to hackers and how to minimize security risks.

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Avi Rubin is Professor of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University and Technical Director of the JHU Information Security Institute. Avi’s primary research area is Computer Security, and his latest research focuses on security for electronic medical records. Avi is credited for bringing to light vulnerabilities in electronic voting machines. In 2006 he published a book on his experiences since this event.

The Wall Street Journal has obtained over 200 documents that details how the US government obtains its surveillance tools.

The techniques described in the trove of 200-plus marketing documents, spanning 36 companies, include hacking tools that enable governments to break into people’s computers and cellphones, and “massive intercept” gear that can gather all Internet communications in a country. The papers were obtained from attendees of a secretive surveillance conference held near Washington, D.C., last month.

The catalog is absolutely incredible and searchable at the Wall Street Journal.

There’s more information in the world than ever — but who’s in control?

At the centre sits the Establishment: governments, corporations and powerful individuals who have more knowledge about us, and more power, than ever before. Circling them is a new generation of hackers, pro-democracy campaigners and internet activists who no longer accept that the Establishment should run the show.

In her gripping, revelatory new book, award-winning journalist and campaigner Heather Brooke takes us inside the Information War, from the hackerspaces of Boston and Berlin to the UK’s journalism hub and Iceland’s free speech revolution; from the headquarters of Google and Facebook to Collateral Murder, Cablegate and the murky word of Julian Assange and Wikileaks.

You can find out more about it here.