President Barack Obama has said he’d like NSA to stop collecting bulk telephone records and instead have telecoms store those records for the agency to review when warranted. There are some hopeful signs for cyber, though. Pressure will be especially intense in the Senate, which has yet to pass either the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act or the USA Freedom Act, which reforms NSA bulk data collection and which many see as the keystone that will make other cyber legislation possible. With partisan politics at a high crest and foreign crises in Ukraine, Iraq and Gaza, there will be very little energy or bandwidth left on Capitol Hill for major cybersecurity legislation.
The story: ĬONGRESS RETURNS FOR A FOREIGN POLICY FALL - Lawmakers return to Washington for a September sprint today before heading back home to campaign until the midterms. It’s not yet known how many accounts were compromised in the Home Depot hack, but there’s been speculation it could be bigger than Target. This news suggests some of the same people may be behind both hacks, Krebs writes. A version of BlackPOS was also used in the Target breach, which compromised credit and debit card data from roughly 40 million customers. Krebs cited sources close to the investigation who told him a new variant of the bug BlackPOS had been spotted on at least some infected Home Depot point of sale systems. HOME DEPOT HACK USED TARGET MALWARE - The point of sale malware that infected up to 90 percent of Home Depot stores nationwide was a variant of the malware that hit Target last year, according to a late Sunday post from cyberjournalist Brian Krebs who broke both stories. With help from David Perera, Tal Kopan, Shaun Waterman, Erin Mershon, Alex Byers and Ashley Gold