Cybersecurity is a major topic when it comes to modern elections. With Canada probably going to the polls in the fall, discussion is heating up about the potential impact of cybersecurity this election cycle. The good news? Canada's election infrastructure is well protected. The challenge will be with various political parties and their campaigns as well as the influence of social media and the players there.

Security research can be a tricky thing. Depending on where you are and what jurisdiction you fall under, the research you conduct may be illegal. That can give companies who are resistant to outside researchers the ammo they need to strong arm research teams. What's the best way forward?

Cryptocurrencies have dropped in popularity and value but cybercriminals continue undeterred. The latest on cybercrime and cryptocurrency...

Facebook continues to do anything they can to build data profiles on users. This week it was revealed that they shifted their Onavo efforts to a new "research" project where they targeted 13-35 year olds via 3rd party market research companies. Lots of questions and issues here...

GDPR has been in effect for a few months and we're starting to see the first major rulings. Google was just hit with a 50m Euro fine for not being clear enough in their intentions with user data. Is this a turning point? While regulation and legislation is typically followed to the letter, there are a lot of areas of GDPR that have specific intent that might not line up with the language. Cases like this help provide clarity to those areas.

The 10 Year Challenge is sweeping social media right now. It's a harmless way of looking back at yourself—and everyone else—a decade ago...or is it?

Is there something more to this challenge? Something very big brother tied to facial recognition?

Network security is struggling to keep up with the reality of how organizations are build and connect today. From hybrid network (on-premises and in the cloud) to large mobile user bases, traditional network security—push everything through a choke point—is well past it's best before date. What's next?

It's not uncommon for cybercriminals to combine multiple data sets in order to increase their chances of finding valid user credentials. Security researcher Troy Hunt found the mother of all collections, dubbed "Collection #1". This roll up contains 773M sets of credentials from various breaches.

But why does this work for cybercriminals? Is it an effective technique?

Data is extremely valuable. We've seen that with data brokers, social media giants, and almost every company out there. The current attitude is to gather all the data possible, save it forever, and monetize it later on.

That's problematic for a number of reasons.

Three articles this week each touching on smartphone data highlight a much bigger issue. Each of these articles remind us how much data our phones generate and how valuable that data is. Yet we don't treat that data as valuable. It's packaged and resold with no compensation to the owner of that data...if they are even aware that the data exists and is being sold.