Jaikumar Vijayan

A federal judge in Kentucky this week upheld a lower court's decision to throw out crucial evidence in a drug case because the evidence was gathered with the help of a GPS tracking device that was installed without a warrant on the suspect's vehicle.

In a 19-page ruling Tuesday, Judge Amul Thapar of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky wrote that Robert Lee's constitutional rights were violated when drug enforcement agents illegally tracked his car and then seized 150 pounds of marijuana from it.

Yahoo today launched a new tool for online advertisers designed to take advantage of the company's extensive experience with big data analytics.

The tool, called Genome, is designed to help companies deliver more targeted online advertising and marketing campaigns. Genome is scheduled to become available in July and will let online advertisers sift through and analyze massive amounts of behavioral and advertising-related data gathered from Yahoo's networks as well as those of interclick, a company Yahoo acquired in December.

The U.S. House of Representatives last week passed the controversial Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act despite opposition from privacy advocates, lawmakers and even the White House, which threatened to veto the bill if it lands on the president's desk in its current form.

Here's what you need to know about CISPA.

A recent data breach that exposed the Social Security numbers of more than 280,000 people served as yet another reminder of the well-recognized, but often discounted, risks associated with using weak and default passwords.

In the breach of the Medicaid server at the Utah Department of Health late last month, the hackers -- believed to be from Eastern Europe -- exploited a configuration error at the authentication layer of the server hosting the compromised data, according to Utah IT officials.

Two senior lawmakers this week sent a letter to the Federal Aviation Administration demanding information on how the agency will ensure that privacy rights are protected when it issues drone licenses to government, law enforcement and private organizations.

Under the Federal Aviation Administration Modernization and Reform Act of 2012, signed into law by President Barack Obama in February, the FAA is required to permit the use of unmanned aerial vehicles by a wide range of organizations including private hobbyists.

The Anonymous hacking collective has launched a new site that it claims will allow users to post material without fear of being tracked down.

Anonymous described the new site, dubbed AnonPaste, as a safer site than Pastebin.com, which has been used by hackers to post evidence of their exploits.

The Obama administration's recent call for new codes of conduct for handling private consumer data on the Internet has evoked sharply different, if somewhat predictable, responses from rights groups and industry stakeholders.

In comments filed with the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) over the past few weeks, privacy groups expressed hope that the proposed codes will result in meaningful privacy protections for consumers.

A conference call held Monday by payment processing vendor Global Payments Inc. to explain a computer intrusion that exposed data on at least 1.5 million credit and debit card holders, left unanswered questions about the breach.

The Atlanta-based company, which processes payment card transactions for thousands of merchants, first reported the compromise Friday when it released a brief statement saying that intruders had gained access to a portion of its processing system. It later updated the statement to say that data belonging to about 1.5 million cardholders, had been "exported" from its systems.

Despite rising concern that cyberattacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated, hackers used relatively simple methods in more than 90 percent of data breaches in 2011, according to a report compiled by Verizon.

The annual Verizon report on data breaches, released last week, also found that in a vast majority of attacks (80 percent), hackers hit victims of opportunity rather than companies they sought out.

An in-class project on advanced search techniques led to the discovery of a major data breach at the University of Tampa (UT) in Florida earlier this month.

The breach affected more than 6,800 students who enrolled with the university last fall. It occurred after a file containing their names, Social Security Numbers and dates of birth was inadvertently made available on the Web for about eight months.

Facebook, Apple, Twitter, Yelp and 14 other companies have been hit with a lawsuit accusing them of distributing privacy-invading mobile applications.

The lawsuit was filed by a group of 13 individuals in the United States District Court for the Western District of Texas earlier this week. The suit charges 18 companies with surreptitiously gathering data from the address books of tens of millions of smartphone users.

For the second time this week, hackers associated with the Anonymous hacking collective have taken down a website in retaliation for the arrests of several of their prominent members.

The latest victim is New York Ironworks, a supplier of police equipment and tactical gear based in New York City. The company's main webpage was defaced with a rambling message from AntiSec, a group affiliated with Anonymous, one of whose members was arrested this week.