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November 19, 2013

Morning roundup: Yahoo to encrypt all user data, Nokia agrees to sell business to Microsoft for £4.5bn and Obamacare website has suspected hacking attack

A brief roundup of today's tech news.

By Kate Heslop


Yahoo to encrypt all user information

Yahoo, the internet provider, has announced that it will encrypt all of its users’ information that moved between its data centres by the end of March 2014.

The move comes after allegations that the US government had secretly accessed users’ data without Yahoo’s knowledge.

It has been reported that the US government had broken into the main communication links that connect Yahoo’s data centres.

Yahoo has unveiled plans to encrypt email communications from the beginning of 2014 after allegations of US government agencies accessing email traffic.

Users will also be given the option to encrypt communications between Yahoo and themselves.


Nokia agrees to sell their business to Microsoft for £4.5bn

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In September, Microsoft agreed to buy the mobile phone business and licence patents from Nokia. The deal is set to go ahead, despite objections from some investors.

Due to fierce competition from competitors, such as Apple and Samsung, Nokia has seen its share of the smartphone market plummet.

When the deal was announced, Nokia also said it would make changes to its management. The president chief executive of Nokia Corporation agreed to step down under the terms of the new deal.


Obamacare website has suspected hacking attack

President Obama’s Affordable Care programme’s website has left its users vulnerable to hacking, according to the Guardian.

A bug on the website has shown hacking attempts through its search box, and showing the code as automatically completed options.

The bug could allow hackers to plant malicious code which can affect users’ computers.

Managers of the website have removed most of the obvious mistakes on the site, but there are still signs of a potential hack.

On the Healthcare.gov website, if you type a semicolon, apostrophe or less-than sign into the search box, a variety of ‘most popular’ terms show up, some of which are used in hacking techniques such as XSS and SQL injection attacks. These types of hack attacks work forming a search term in a certain way that the target interprets it as a command.

The auto-complete terms that appear could be a potential weakness on the website, indicating a previous hack attempt and one that could leave users vulnerable to hacking. It has also been reported that the White House was briefed on problems and glitches with the website in March.

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