SAP has significantly improved the security of its products over the past few years but many of its customers are negligent with their deployments, which exposes them to potential attacks that could cripple their businesses, according to security researchers.

The biggest issue is that companies expose insecure SAP services to the Internet -- not only HTTP services, but also critical administrative interfaces, Alexander Polyakov, chief technology officer at ERPScan, a developer of security monitoring products for SAP systems, said Tuesday.

Between 5 percent and 10 percent of companies that use SAP products expose critical services to the Internet that shouldn't be publicly accessible, Polyakov said. This happens because they want to enable remote management or because of improper configurations, he said.

Most of the services have vulnerabilities that can be easily attacked, Polyakov said.

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Technology has changed everything we know about the office. Now it is threatening to get rid of the office as we know it.

A series of surveys undertaken by Intelligent Office, a virtual office space provider, show just how profound this shift in attitudes toward traditional working environments has become. Chief Operating Officer Tom Camplese sums up the results simply, saying "We believe there is a paradigm shift happening in our culture as it relates to work style. The work culture of today is very different than it was even 10 years ago, and individuals are now aspiring to work differently and create not only their own work style, but their own work rules.”

Intelligent Office

Three thousand people, Americans and Canadians aged 18 and up, were surveyed over an 18-month period that ended this April. The results paint an interesting picture of a rapidly evolving modern work force.

The desire for unprecedented work flexibility is the key touchstone of the surveys. That flexibility is manifest in just about every facet of the work environment. Workers want to decide where they work (home, office, coffee shop), when they work ("9 to 5" is all but dead), and how they work (preferring to use their own equipment over corporate-issued machines). Already, 70 percent of workers say they work from an alternative location than the office on a regular basis, and 66 percent said they use or want to use a laptop or tablet to allow this kind of flexibility.

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A telephone records surveillance program run by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and National Security Agency raises serious privacy concerns and should be reined in, some U.S. senators said Wednesday.

Some members of the Senate Judiciary Committee pushed for changes to the surveillance program that allows the two agencies to broadly collect telephone call records from U.S. carriers, with some lawmakers calling for the records to remain with carriers until the agencies have a suspicion of a telephone number's ties to terrorist activity.

"I remain concerned that, as a country, we've yet to strike the right balance between intelligence gathering into the FBI and the civil liberties and privacy rights of Americans," said Senator Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, during a hearing on oversight of the FBI. "The American people deserve to know how broad investigative laws ... are being interpreted and used to conduct electronic surveillance."

FBI Director Robert Mueller defended the recently exposed phone records collection program, saying it was a critical piece of antiterrorism investigations. The phone records collection program authorized by the Patriot Act has been a key tool in disrupting 10 to 12 terrorist plots since Sept. 11, 2001, he told lawmakers. NSA officials said Tuesday that the two surveillance programs have helped disrupt more than 50 terrorist plots since then.

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Demand for mainframe and high-performance Unix servers is falling, but a new wave of SPARC and IBM Power chips for the servers will be unwrapped at the Hot Chips conference in late August.

IBM, Oracle and Fujitsu—the main suppliers of Unix server chips—will talk about their next-generation RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) chips at the conference, which will be held Stanford University from Aug. 25 to 28. The chips typically go into high-availability servers, which are falling out of favor to the inexpensive and flexible x86 servers.

IBM will talk about the "next-generation Power microprocessor," according to the conference agenda. The next set of SPARC processors will also be detailed: Oracle will talk about SPARC M6, described in the agenda as the company's "next generation processor for massively scalable symmetric multiprocessor data center servers," and Fujitsu will talk about SPARC64 X+, successor to the current 16-core SPARC64 X.

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Microsoft will pay security researchers for finding and reporting vulnerabilities in the preview version of its Internet Explorer 11 (IE 11) browser, for finding novel techniques to bypass exploit mitigations present in Windows 8.1 or later versions, and for coming up with new ideas to defend against exploits.

The monetary rewards will be paid through three bounty programs the company launched Wednesday.

The payouts will range between $500 and $11,000 for vulnerabilities found in IE 11 Preview, depending on the type of vulnerability and quality of the report, and up to $100,000 for mitigation bypasses in Windows 8.1 and later versions.

There is also a defense bonus of up to $50,000, the BlueHat Bonus for Defense. Participants must submit a technical paper that describes an idea that could be used to block an exploitation technique that bypasses the latest Windows platform mitigations. The reward will depend on the quality and uniqueness of the idea, Microsoft said in the program’s guidelines.

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Java continues to be Public Enemy No. 1 when it comes to computer and network security. Oracle released a huge update for the virtually ubiquitous software, but attackers aren’t done exploiting Java as the weakest link in the security chain, and Oracle isn’t securing it fast enough.

The update released by Oracle yesterday addresses 40 vulnerabilities in Java. It also enables online certificate revocation in Java by default, to allow Java to verify in real time whether certificates used to sign Java code have been revoked to prevent execution of malware.

The update is impressive in scope and scale, and it’s important for IT admins and users to apply it as soon as possible. Amol Sarwate, director of Qualys Vulnerability Labs, notes in a blog post, “All vulnerabilities except three can be exploited remotely by an attacker, and in most cases, the attacker can take complete control of the system.”

Lamar Bailey, director of security research and development for Tripwire, has dubbed 2013 “the year of the Java vulnerability.” Bailey points out that Java is widely used across multiple platforms, and that alone makes it a juicy target for attackers. “Java is squarely in the crosshairs of many hackers and security researchers and that’s not going to change in the short term.”

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It looks like we aren’t the only ones impressed by the potential in Qualcomm’s powerful new Snapdragon 800 chip.

On the very same night that the company let us run a bevy of benchmark tests on that very processor, Bloomberg says that the speedy system-on-a-chip will power “some new versions” of Microsoft’s Surface RT tablet.

While the report seems innocuous enough at first glance, the one-line rumor actually intrigues on multiple levels—not the least of which is the allure of the first potential cellular-enabled Surface slate. Even so, beefed-up processors alone won’t cure what ails Windows RT.

“Some new versions”?

Before we get into that, though, the “some new versions” line—if accurate—suggests that Microsoft may release several different models of the Surface RT in the coming months.

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Google acquiring Waze almost seems redundant. Google is already a recognized leader in mapping services, so why does it need to buy a mapping company? The answer is that maps aren’t just maps anymore, and Waze will help Google move from mapping to social mapping.

It might look at first glance like the Waze purchase is a predatory move. Google has deep pockets and it can afford to spend money to buy Waze simply to prevent rivals from doing so. It may not actually use or incorporate Waze, because the goal of buying Waze is purely a strategic move to keep competitors in the rearview mirror.

That’s not the case, though. Maps aren’t just maps any more. Maps are a search engine in and of themselves—a trove of information that helps people get from Point A to Point B as efficiently as possible, and that helps them make smart choices about where to go and what to do once they arrive.

I’m dating myself, but once upon a time we relied on printed maps from AAA called TripTiks to navigate road trips. Then Mapquest came along, and we could just research our own routes and print our own maps. The advent of smartphones, and the rapid advances in mapping, and location-tracking services, however, combined with relevant, real-world information from social networks, has brought the concept of mapping to a whole new level.

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It seems you cannot go a day without hearing about someone or some group hacking a website or stealing credit card and other sensitive data from e-commerce sites.

So how do you protect your e-commerce site from being hacked and sensitive customer data from being stolen? CIO.com asked dozens of e-commerce and security experts to find out. Following are their top 15 tips for protecting your e-commerce site from hacking and fraud.

Choose a secure e-commerce platform

“Put your e-commerce site on a platform that uses a sophisticated object-orientated programming language,” says Shawn Hess, software development manager, VoIP Supply.

“We’ve used plenty of different open-source e-commerce platforms in the past, and the one we’re using now is by far the most secure,” Hess says. “Our administration panel is inaccessible to attackers because it’s only available on our internal network and completely removed from our public facing servers. Additionally, it has a secondary authentication that authenticates users with our internal Windows network.”

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Start-up Cumulus Networks this week has emerged with a Linux network operating system designed for programmable data centers like the ones Google and Facebook are building.

The company's Cumulus Linux OS operating system includes IPv4 and IPv6 routing, plus data center and network orchestration hooks. Much like OpenFlow for independent, software-defined control of network forwarding, Cumulus Linux is intended to run on commodity network hardware and bring open source extensibility to high capacity data centers.

Linux did the same for data center servers 15 years ago, Cumulus officials state, and ushered in widely-used innovations like virtualization. But networking has lagged the trend -- advancements like software-defined networking (SDN) and programmability are very recent, and strategies from the major vendors are typically tied tightly to their own OSes and hardware.

The Cisco ONE plan, for example, is tied to Cisco IOS, IOS-XR and NX-OS.

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LeaseWeb, one of Europe’s biggest hosting providers, has wiped 630 servers that contained Megaupload data and countered claims from the company that the file-sharing site wasn’t warned.

“This is the largest data massacre in the history of the Internet,” Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom said Wednesday on Twitter, where he criticized LeaseWeb for deleting the data.

LeaseWeb did not warn Megaupload that it was about to delete the servers, Dotcom claimed, adding that they were informed Wednesday that the servers were deleted on Feb. 1. He maintained that Megaupload’s lawyers repeatedly asked LeaseWeb not to delete Megaupload servers while court proceedings are pending in the U.S, Dotcom said.

LeaseWeb disputes Dotcom’s claims.

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CERN is making the infrastructure that handles the data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) more flexible by upgrading it with OpenStack for virtualization and Puppet for configuration management.

The research organization’s objective is to change how it provides services to scientists working at the LHC, which runs in a 27-kilometer circular tunnel about 100 meters beneath the Swiss and French border at Geneva.

“One of the things we have to contend with is how to scale our infrastructure fairly significantly with a fixed staff and fixed costs. With a fixed budget you can buy more and more equipment, but you can’t provide more and more services with the same number of people,” said Ian Bird, LHC computing grid project leader.

But that may be possible if you change the way things are done. CERN’s goal is to become more efficient by moving in the direction of infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service with a private cloud. The goal is to be able to more dynamically change how the infrastructure is used. Right now the accelerator is shut down so the CERN data center has a different workload from last year when the LHC was running, according to Bird.

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As with all things tech, there are rabidly loyal fans of each of the four major mobile network providers, and strong opinions on all sides about which is the “best.” While Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile each have their pros and cons, it’s virtually impossible to declare one the winner.

Late last month, PCWorld's sister site TechHive published results of its own nationwide study. After bouncing around the country testing the speed and reliability of the mobile networks from city to city, TechHive declared that AT&T takes the crown this year as the fastest mobile network provider. Kudos to AT&T, but the victory has little impact in the real world.

There is obviously something to be said for choosing a mobile provider with fast, reliable 4G/LTE service. The reality, though, is that the most important benefits and pitfalls of a particular provider are subjective, and depend on where you intend to use the service. The fastest network in the nation is less important than the fastest network where you live and work and plan to use the service.

I experienced that reality first hand when I moved a year and a half ago. I had been a devoted, long time AT&T customer. There were a handful of known “dead zones” in the area—small pockets where there was no AT&T signal and calls would drop—but I knew where they were, and how to avoid them. I could live with that.

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A new role that requires traveling takes some getting used to, especially if you rarely leave the office. It suddenly becomes critical to squeeze in that bit of extra work while waiting for an airport transfer, relaxing at the hotel in the evenings, shuffling between meetings, or even when waiting for clients to show up for those meetings.

With this in mind, here are several pointers to help maximize your productivity when traveling.

Internet access: watch connections, battery life

In this age of Web services and access to instant information, the trickiest bit of a business trip is often getting Internet connectivity at unfamiliar or remote locations. While Wi-Fi hotspot access is generally great, it can sometimes be flaky due to congestion or misbehaving wireless access points in public locations.

When faced with an errant Wi-Fi hotspot, a good guideline is to devote no more than 10 minutes and one system restart to resolving the problem. Beyond that, changing venues or switching to a mobile hostpot is a more judicious use of time.

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The shift toward smaller tablets will accelerate in the second half of the year when a slew of tablet makers, including Apple, introduce new models with screens 8 inches or smaller, said Richard Shim, an analyst with DisplaySearch.

Although larger-sized tablets dominated 2012—those 9 inches and larger accounted for 60% of sales last year—the going-small switch has picked up unexpected speed, Shim said.

“In 2013, it is smaller tablet PCs that are expected to make up over 60% of shipments,” he said in a Tuesday blog post. DisplaySearch estimates that for the year, 66% of all tablets sold will sport screens smaller than 9 inches.

8-inch tablets the sweet spot?

Last month, rival research firm IDC said tablets 8 inches and smaller would account for 55% of the total for 2013.

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Oracle addressed 40 security issues in Java and enabled online certificate revocation checking by default in its scheduled critical patch update for Java on Tuesday.

Thirty-four vulnerabilities patched in the newly released Java 7 Update 25 (Java 7u25) version affect only client deployments of Java. Another four affect both client and server deployments, one affects the Java installer and one the Javadoc tool that's used to create HTML documentation files.

Many of the client-only vulnerabilities received the maximum score on the vulnerability severity scale used by Oracle. These flaws can be exploited by attackers to take control of computers by hosting malicious Java applets—Java Web applications—on remote servers and tricking users to load them in their browsers.

The large number of Web-based attacks that targeted Java users this year by exploiting vulnerabilities in the Java browser plug-in prompted concern about the security worthiness of the Java platform among home users and in enterprise environments, where Java is also frequently used on servers.

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The Wi-Fi Alliance is finally kicking off a certification program for routers, adapters, and other wireless networking gear based on the IEEE 802.11ac draft standard. The organization has a strong track record when it comes to ensuring that networking products will be interoperable even when the standards they’re based on have yet to be finalized, so this is a positive development.

As it did with the 802.11n wireless networking standard, the IEEE is taking its sweet time to ratify the 802.11ac standard. In fact, the responsible working group isn’t expected to finish its work until November, and final ratification isn’t expected until February 2014. That lengthy timeline hasn’t stopped manufacturers from shipping 802.11ac gear, of course; products based on the draft standard have been on store shelves since August 2012. But buyers haven’t had any assurances that those products will work together.

So why is the certification program launching now? “We want to ensure that the standard is substantially mature,” said Wi-Fi Alliance senior marketing manager Kevin Robinson in an embargoed interview last week. “There is work that we have to go through to ensure interoperability, and [we’re] fielding a test bed to certify that.”

The Wi-Fi Alliance launched a similar certification program back in 2007 for networking equipment based on the draft 802.11n standard. Unlike that effort, however, the 802.11ac certification program will not acknowledge the standard’s draft status and is being described as simply “Wi-Fi CERTIFIED™ ac.”

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You adore your laptop. It lets you get down to business wherever you happen to be—airport lounge, coffee shop, your home office. It’s the key to your competitive edge.

That is, until its battery croaks. Just as you’re putting the final details on your PowerPoint presentation. At the airport. Two hours before takeoff. And with no power outlet in sight. At that instant, you begin to wonder why you ever bought the ever-lovin’ boat anchor in the first place.

But love will bloom anew as soon as you recharge. Avoid the heartache, however temporary: Follow these five tips for maximizing your laptop’s run time.

1. Plug in whenever possible

One surefire way to ensure that your laptop is always ready for action is to plug it into an AC outlet whenever possible. Keeping the machine fully charged makes it far more likely that you will always have the juice you need to complete your work. Purchase at least one extra AC adapter, so you’ll always have one in your office and one in your laptop bag for travel. If you work at home frequently, consider buying a third adapter to leave there.

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Hewlett-Packard and Samsung Electronics will now ensure that their PCs in China are installed with licensed Windows and Office software as part of new agreements signed with Microsoft meant to fight piracy.

Microsoft announced the agreements Wednesday as the company brought its latest anti-piracy campaign to the Chinese city of Nanjing. Since December, Microsoft's "Keep it Real" campaign has been educating the Chinese public on security risks of using unlicensed Windows software. In addition, the U.S. software giant has been warning dozens of PC resellers in China to stop dealing in pirated copies of its software products.

Wednesday's agreements call for the two companies to also require their direct channel partners to promote genuine Microsoft software.

In March, Microsoft signed a similar agreement with Lenovo, China's largest PC maker. At the time, Microsoft said the deal would help limit and prevent PCs, moving "downstream" through China's channels, from being installed with pirated versions of Windows.

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Alcatel-Lucent will refocus on IP networking and ultra-broadband access in mobile and fixed-line networks as it seeks to return to profitability by 2015.

Announcing the company's "Shift Plan" in Paris on Wednesday, CEO Michel Combes said the company now recognized that the markets for core networking equipment and access networks are very different, and will in future manage its activities accordingly.

In core IP networking, where an explosion in data traffic and the move to cloud computing is driving purchases, Alcatel-Lucent will pursue a revenue growth strategy, he said. On the other hand, the company will aim to maximize cash and profitability in access networks, where customers are upgrading or replacing existing equipment and sales are flat, he said.

Combes said he aims to sell off €1 billion in assets and to cut annual operating costs by €1 billion. However, he refused to say whether that will result in further job cuts.

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A Dell special committee has rejected a new proposal from a key shareholder Carl C. Icahn, and said it will continue to support the proposal by founder Michael Dell and private-equity firm Silver Lake Partners to take the company private.

Icahn's proposal in its present state is not a transaction that the committee could endorse and execute as "there is neither financing, nor any commitment from any party to participate, nor any remedy for the company and its shareholders if the transaction is not consummated," the special committee of the board said in a statement Tuesday. The committee was set up in August 2012 after the plans for taking the company private were revealed.

The proposal from Icahn does not adequately address the liquidity issues and other risks that were previously highlighted by the committee, it said.

Michael Dell and Silver Lake Partners made an offer for Dell in February that aims to take the computers and services company private in a US$24.4 billion deal. The proposal offers to pay $13.65 per share in cash.

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An email composed, but never sent, by former Apple CEO Steve Jobs may prove instrumental in the Justice Department's case that Apple, along with the five largest book publishers, colluded to fix prices for electronic books.

In a draft email intended for Apple Senior Vice President Eddy Cue about negotiations with one publisher, Jobs wrote of the potential deal that "I can live with this as long as they move Amazon to the agent model too for new releases for the first year. If they don't, I'm not sure we can be competitive."

For the Justice Department, Jobs' reference to Amazon showed that the company was trying to end retail price competition among electronic book vendors. However, Orin Snyder, an attorney representing Apple in the case, dismissed the significance of the email in court, noting that it was never even sent to Cue.

As the three-week trial has started to wind down, the DOJ has released a copious set of emails and other electronic documentation between Jobs, Cue -- who was in charge of the negotiations with the book publishers -- and a number of publisher executives. Judge Denise Cote for the U.S. Southern District Court of New York is presiding over the non-jury trial.

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Your current smartphone’s processor may be fast, but Qualcomm is hoping to show you a whole new definition of mobile performance. On Tuesday, the company staged a benchmarking exhibition in San Francisco to demonstrate the raw speed of its Snapdragon 800 chip, designated for “premium” smartphone deployment later this year.

Qualcomm already has a footprint in many of the top handsets. The 400 series of chips is included in both the HTC One and the Samsung Galaxy S4, for example. Qualcomm hasn’t announced which phones and tablets will use the 800 series, but, for what it’s worth, the company showed off the new chip using the 700MHz LTE band that’s specific to AT&T—although that means little at this point.

When Qualcomm first announced the Snapdragon 400 and 800 chips at the Consumer Electronics Show this past January, the company said the 800 series will appear in “premium” mobile devices in the second half of the year and provide as much as a 75 percent performance boost over Qualcomm’s current Snapdragon S4 chip.

The 800-series chips include a quad-core CPU, known as the 28-nm Krait 400, with each core running at up to 2.3 GHz. It has a new Adreno 330 GPU, integrates a 4G LTE modem for data rates of up to 150 Mbps, and supports the 802.11ac WiFi standard.

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Internet tools are just starting to be applied to industrial tasks such as maintaining equipment and optimizing operations, but the wealth of data being produced by industrial systems could make this a major focus of development in the coming years.

On Tuesday, General Electric increased its bet on this proposition by introducing a cloud platform for data management and recruiting partners to help it serve industrial customers. At an event in San Francisco, GE and its partners, including Pivotal, Accenture and Amazon Web Services, laid out what they see as the opportunities and challenges.

The cutting edge of innovation in using data has shifted from the financial services sector to the consumer realm, and it’s about to move again to the industrial sector, said Paul Maritz, CEO of Pivotal.

Stephen Lawson

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Microsoft is upping the stakes in the growing market for cloud-based ERP, with its Dynamics GP 2013 and NAV 2013 products now available for deployment on its Azure service.

The launch, announced Tuesday, gives customers another option for cloud-based ERP (enterprise resource planning) services besides NetSuite, SAP Business ByDesign and others. It’s a bit late in coming, as Microsoft originally said availability would be toward the end of last year.

Microsoft was apparently intent on making sure the Dynamics applications ran well on Azure before scaling up the business.

“Over the past several months we’ve been working closely with our first ‘go-live’ customers and partners, as well as with the Windows Azure team, to develop guidance and tooling to ensure a great experience deploying on Azure,” wrote Paul White, senior director of Dynamics, in a blog post. “That work is now complete.”

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Carl Icahn has acquired a larger stake in Dell and called for a better buyout offer than the proposal of $13.65 per share from Michael Dell and Silver Lake Partners.

Icahn has proposed that Dell commence a tender offer for around 1.1 billion shares at $14 per share, with a maximum value of $16 billion.

“Our proposal allows those who believe, like us, that the $13.65 price being offered in the Michael Dell/Silver Lake going private transaction significantly undervalues Dell, to continue to hold Dell shares,” wrote Icahn in an open letter to Dell.

Dell announced in February that Michael Dell and investment firm Silver Lake had offered $24.4 billion, or $13.65 per share, to buy out the company. Icahn, along with Southeastern Asset Management, made several counteroffers, with the most recent involving a payout of $12 a share in cash or stock to shareholders, and $5.2 billion in debt financing. Dell’s board of directors has recommended shareholders vote for the Michael Dell-Silver Lake offer.

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Google has asked the court overseeing terrorism-related surveillance programs at the National Security Agency to allow the company to publish information on the number of surveillance requests it receives.

The Internet company, in a Tuesday filing with the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court , asked the court to allow it to publish the number of surveillance requests it gets from the NSA and other federal agencies and the number of users or accounts affected by those requests. The U.S. Department of Justice contends that publishing the information would be illegal.

Google’s lawyers argued the company has the right, under free speech guarantees in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, to publish aggregate data about surveillance requests.

Google’s request comes in the wake of allegations by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that Google and eight other Internet companies have given the NSA direct access to their servers, allowing the spy agency to read email and other Internet communications.

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The attorneys general of several states are turning up the heat on Google, concerned that the search engine giant makes it easier for criminals to sell illegal drugs online, engage in human trafficking and peddle pirated intellectual property.

At the summer meeting of the National Association of Attorneys General in Boston Tuesday, Mississippi’s Attorney General Jim Hood said that he is ramping up the pressure on the Internet behemoth, to which he had earlier this month sent litigation hold letters that should compel the company to preserve emails and other possible evidence in case of a lawsuit.

Hood is now sending a civil investigative demand, or subpoena, for records relevant to how the company’s search business may facilitate the sale of pharmaceuticals without prescriptions. He said Google had “lawyered up” after failing to respond to a number of written queries.

At the same time, Hood said, he does not want a legal battle with Google. “I don’t want to have a fight, we want to work together,” he said.

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A year ago, Google constructed a “neural network” of servers that eventually learned how to recognize cats. On Tuesday, Nvidia said that a team of Stanford researchers had used its own graphics cores to create another approximately 6.5 times more powerful, using just 16 servers.

The Stanford and Nvidia researchers showed off their work at the International Supercomputing Conference this week in Leipzig, Germany, where the list of the top 500 most powerful supercomputers was unveiled.

Neural networks attempt to re-create the brain’s structure by approximating not only the millions of neurons within it, but also how the brain itself learns. The overarching principle is to create a framework by which the network can teach itself. That process can lead in unexpected directions, such as the Google network teaching itself to identify images of a cat inside a number of YouTube videos that Google exposed it to. Japanese researchers also developed a neural network that taught a robot how to pour a glass of water.

While Google’s efforts to create a neural network most likely attracted attention because of its whimsical results, neural networks are a serious endeavor. In March, Google acquired DNNresearch for its work on layered, “deep neural networks,” which it will apply to a variety of services. Although Google did not say to what purpose it would put DNNresearch, it’s likely that its intelligence could be applied to everything from translation to Google Now, the service that Google uses to parse a user’s data and to show him or her relevant information, such as the time to leave to arrive in time for the next appointment.

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U.S. law enforcement agencies have disrupted more than 50 terrorist plots in the United States and other countries with the help of controversial surveillance efforts at the U.S. National Security Agency, government officials said Tuesday.

NSA surveillance programs recently exposed by NSA contractor Edward Snowden have played a key role in disrupting terrorist activity in more than 20 countries, including 10 terrorist plots in the U.S., since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the U.S., NSA director General Keith Alexander told U.S. lawmakers.

“In the 12 years since the attacks on Sept. 11, we have lived in relative safety and security as a nation,” Alexander told the U.S. House of Representatives Intelligence Committee. “That security is a direct result of the intelligence community’s quiet efforts to better connect the dots and learn from the mistakes that permitted those attacks to occur on 9/11.”

Officials with the NSA and the U.S. Department of Justice defended the surveillance programs during Tuesday’s hearing, saying the programs are subject of rigorous oversight by the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and Congress. Officials contradicted allegations by Snowden, who has said the few controls at the NSA are easily circumvented by NSA analysts.

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