Remember when Marissa Mayer of Yahoo! curtailed the company’s work from home policies?

That notion is long gone in the era of Coronavirus. Large tech companies in the Bay Area and Seattle including Facebook, Amazon, Twitter and Google have sent their employees home to use collaboration tools to connect. We fully expect this trend to continue, especially given the legitimate public health concerns and the (much greater) fear that has set in. Perhaps this is why Zoom’s stock is up over 50% since the start of the crisis.

Meanwhile, Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri announced this week that he’s introducing legislation to ban the popular social networking app TikTok from all government devices. The State Department and DHS have already instituted such bans out of fears of tracking by the Chinese government.

On Section 230, Tony Romm of the Washington Post reports that Democrats and Republicans are banding together to force tech to take more steps to stop content that harms children. The fairly explicit threat — do more or Congress will chip away at the Section 230 protections that hold companies harmless for the content that appears on their online platforms.

Courtesy of Josh Zecher

OMB, We Have A Problem!

The cyber industry’s increased focus on third-party risk management and supply chain security is one that is practical and easy to understand. Organizations are only as strong as their weakest link.

But federal agencies don’t appear to be following this philosophy. The Government Accountability Office warned yesterday that a new narrowed definition of a data center will mean that more than 250 federal data centers no longer need to report security metrics to the Office of Management and Budget.

The risk? Federal IT access points without oversight or accountability will leave back doors open for hackers and other bad actors.

Keep your friends close and your fingers closer

Experts at the RSA Conference warned about the perils of biometrics and lost fingers. No, really. Watch out and beware!