The owner of a company called LX Labs killed himself this week a day after one of the firm's big customer's in the U.K was hacked. The death appears to have been unrelated to the hacking, but it has added pathos to an already serious incident.

The federal government buys more than $70 billion worth of IT products every year. Should they be using their purchasing clout to force vendors to make products safer?

Security vendors sometimes break into malicious Web sites and systems to gather data for stopping cyber crooks. How justifiable is that practice?

A letter from the chief security officer at the entity responsible for developing and enforcing reliability standards in the U.S. power sector suggests that many owners and operators of power generation and transmission systems may not even realize they own critical cyber assets.

The timing of Heartland Payment Systems' announcement that its networks had been broken into last year by unknown intruders has been attracting quite a bit of skepticism coming as it did on Inauguration Day. But it may have been just coincidence.

Is a recently released report by an Internet security task force correct in saying that online child security and privacy concerns are being overblown? Or does the report create a false sense of security?

The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) being pushed by the major credit card companies has probably done a lot to stave off state and federally mandated controls for protecting customer credit and debit card data up to now. The big question as a new year begins, is for how much longer though?

Britain's Home Office has approved a plan that would expand warrantless searches of home PCs by police and M15 agents. The plan allows law enforcement to basically hack into a PC without a warrant. read more.

Many of the fundamental assumptions regarding the nature of the credit crunch spawned by the current financial crisis are quite simply not supported by or contradict the government's own facts and figures. As a result, the policies being employed by the government to deal with the crisis may also well be the wrong ones, according to a soon-to-be-released report from Celent, an IT research and consulting firm that specializes in the financial services industry.

The report is written by Octavio Marenzi, the company's CEO.

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Now drivers in Indiana have one more excuse for hating their license photos. Effective in November, Indiana residents applying for new driver's licenses or renewing existing ones are being forbidden from smiling for the camera. The reason is new facial recognition software being used by the Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles. The software was installed as part of an effort to cut down on identity fraud and is being used to compare an applicant’s new photo with the ones on file.

There was a story on ABC's Good Morning America on Friday about some car dealers in Oregon installing hidden GPS tracking devices in vehicles sold to individuals with poor or downright bad credit. The rationale apparently is that the devices would help the dealers quickly track down and repossess their vehicles in the event that a customer defaulted on payments. According to the report, the devices are often installed in an undisclosed location in the vehicle because the dealers don't want customers disabling or tampering with them.

Despite some progress, many federal agencies appear unlikely to meet an Oct. 27 deadline for completing the roll-out of new smart-card credentials to all employees and contractors.

The mere act of making music available for sharing on a P2P network does not automatically mean the music is actually being illegally distributed, a District Court in Arizona ruled last week.

Earlier this week, I was an observer at a hands-on cyberattack simulation workshop organized by disaster recovery vendor SunGard at its Wood Dale, Ill., facility just outside of Chicago. Taking part in the exercise were representatives from the local community, including workers or officials from retail, health care and government organizations. Each participant was assigned to one of five teams -- IT, operations, information security, sales and executive management -- within a fictitious $1.2 billion gourmet food manufacturing company.

Yesterday, I read the death certificate of a man who died in April 1994 in Maricopa County, Arizona. He was 43 at the time of his death and had lived in Arizona for 13 years after moving there from Nebraska. He died of cancer of the bowel approximately three years and five months after the initial onset of the disease. An attached copy of a joint tenancy deed informed me that his wife got ownership of their property after his death.