Cyber Week in Review: December 19, 2014

Here is a quick round-up of this week’s technology headlines and related stories you may have missed:

• The hack at Sony Pictures Entertainment continues to confound. Over the past weeks, news reports have stuck to the narrative that North Korea was behind the Sony hack, despite a healthy dose of skepticism from experts. On December 17, the New York Times reported that senior U.S. administration officials confirmed that North Korea was "centrally involved" in the hacking of Sony, and the White House separately called the cyber incident a"serious national security matter" and threatened a "proportional response." Risk Based Security has an excellent timeline of the events to help make sense of everything.
• The United States’ normalization with Cuba is likely to have a positive impact on the rollout of the Internet in the country. As part of the easing of sanctions, the White House announced that it will allow the export of consumer software and hardware, as well as permit U.S. telecommunications firms to deploy infrastructure in the country. While the United States ostensibly aims to allow more information into the country, it remains to be seen how the new agreement will weaken the Cuban government’s notoriously tight control on Internet access in the country.
• Facebook is in hot water in the Netherlands. The Dutch data protection authority opened an investigation into the social network’s proposed changes to its privacy policy scheduled to take effect on January 1, 2015. The regulator will examine whether Facebook’s privacy policy, and in particular its use of user information to sell advertisements, complies with Dutch privacy laws.
• The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) may be using malware to uncover some of its detractors in Syria according to security researchers at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto.