Security News

Perhaps you’re an office manager tasked with setting up a new email system for your nonprofit, or maybe you’re a legal secretary for a small firm and you’ve been asked to choose an app for scanning sensitive documents: you might be wondering how you can even begin to assess a tool as “safe enough to use.” This post will help you think about how to approach the problem and select the right vendor.

As every organization has unique circumstances and needs, we can’t provide definitive...

Step onto any city street and you may find yourself subject to numerous forms of police surveillance—many imperceptible to the human eye.

A cruiser equipped with automated license plate readers (also known as ALPRs) may have just logged where you parked your car. A cell-site simulator may be capturing your cell-phone data incidentally while detectives track a suspect nearby. That speck in the sky may be a drone capturing video of your commute. Police might use face recognition...

Today we are releasing the implementation guide for EFF’s Do Not Track (DNT) policy. For years users have been able to set a Do Not Track signal in their browser, but there has been little guidance for websites as to how to honor that request. EFF’s DNT policy sets out a meaningful response for servers to follow, and this guide provides details about how to apply it in practice.

At its core, DNT protects user privacy by excluding the use of unique identifiers for cross-site...

Keeping Your Site Alive, our guide for keeping your site online amidst a DoS (denial of service) or DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack, now  has a new look and new advice. The guide, originally created and updated in conjunction with the Tactical Technology Collective, is aimed at human rights defenders, independent publications, and other administrators of small websites.

DDoS attacks are a common phenomena, used by a variety of actors, designed to temporarily or...

Two-factor authentication (or 2FA) is one of the biggest-bang-for-your-buck ways to improve the security of your online accounts. Luckily, it's becoming much more common across the web. With often just a few clicks in a given account's settings, 2FA adds an extra layer of security to your online accounts on top of your password.

In addition to requesting something you know to log in (in this case, your password), an account protected with 2FA will also request information...

Many people crossing the U.S. border are concerned about the amount of power that the government has asserted to search and examine travelers’ possessions, including searching through or copying contents of digital devices, like photos, emails, and browsing history. The frequency of these intrusive practices has been increasing over time.

Some travelers might choose to delete everything on a particular device or disk to ensure that border agents...

Several journalists and experts have recently focused on the fact that a scanned document published by The Intercept contained tiny yellow dots produced by a Xerox DocuColor printer. Those dots allow the document's origin and date of printing to be ascertained, which could have played a role in the arrest of Reality Leigh Winner, accused of leaking the document. EFF has previously researched this tracking technology at some length; our work on it has helped bring it to public...