President Barack Obama took over the White House Instagram account Monday, posting a photo from Air Force One with the caption “Incredible view as we near Anchorage.”

Former Secret Service special agent Shaun Bridges, 32, pleaded guilty Monday to pocketing $820,000 worth of bitcoins and to obstruction of justice in connection with his theft of digital currency during the federal investigation into the online black market called Silk Road, a Justice Department news release said. Bridges admitted in his plea agreement to impeding a full investigation into Silk Road by blocking access to the site and by providing multiple false and misleading statements to investigators. A sentencing hearing is scheduled for Dec. 7 before U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg in San Francisco.

Individuals staying at Hilton hotels can now schedule Uber rides to the hotel through reservation emails prior to an upcoming trip, Uber said in a news release Tuesday. Uber said the two companies also plan to launch a new "Local Scene" feature in the Hilton HHonors rewards program app in late September that will connect users to restaurants and "local hot spots" frequently visited by Uber riders in 20 U.S. cities.

Despite the recent breach into infidelity site Ashley Madison (see 1508280041) and subsequent online posting of users’ sensitive information “hundreds of thousands of new users signed up for the Ashley Madison platform -- including 87,596 women” last week, Ashley Madison parent Avid Life Media said in a news release Monday. As of Aug. 29, the Ashley Madison app is the 14th highest grossing app in the U.S. social networking category in the Apple App store, it said. About 70 percent of the company’s revenue on any given day is from members making repeat purchases, it said. “Recent media reports predicting the imminent demise of Ashley Madison are greatly exaggerated.” In response to claims there are numerous fake female accounts created on the site to lure men into thinking their odds of having an affair are greater, the company said women sent more than 2.8 million messages within the platform last week, and the ratio of men who communicate with women is 1.2 to 1.

The deadline for comments on Riyo's proposed verifiable parental consent method for the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act rule (see 1508040025) was extended to Sept. 14, the FTC said in a news release Monday. The vote to extend the deadline was unanimous.

NTIA announced in Monday's Federal Register the Sept. 29 first meeting of its multistakeholder process to create a set of common principles and best practices for security vulnerability information disclosures. Stakeholders are to meet at the University of California-Berkeley School of Law, NTIA said. It plans to use similar multistakeholder processes in the future for other cybersecurity issues (see 1508280036).

Content services provider Vubiquity acquired over-the-top encoding and digital delivery service Juice Worldwide, the buyer said in a news release Monday. The acquisition boosts Vubiquity's network of content providers, which includes Amazon, iTunes and Netflix, it said.

NTIA plans to continue to “closely monitor” the ICANN community’s work on an Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) transition plan and a related set of proposed changes to ICANN’s accountability mechanisms, the federal agency said Friday in its Q3 report to Congress. NTIA is required under the FY 2015 Department of Commerce budget to report on the IANA transition process on a quarterly basis. NTIA said it wants to ensure the IANA transition plan “fully meets” the criteria that the agency established, including “that the proposal must support and enhance the multistakeholder model of Internet governance, i.e., it should be developed by the multistakeholder community and have broad community support. We will not accept a transition proposal that replaces the NTIA role with a government-led or intergovernmental organization solution.” NTIA had said it intends to extend its current contract with ICANN to administer the IANA functions until Sept. 30, 2016, to give ICANN additional time to plan the IANA transition and implement requisite accountability changes (see 1508180068). The specifics of NTIA’s planned review of ICANN’s IANA transition plan “will depend in part on the thoroughness of the processes the community uses to develop and review its proposal,” NTIA said. “For example, if the community ‘stress tests’ any new process or structures included in the proposal prior to submission, well-documented results may facilitate NTIA’s review.”

A domain masquerading as an official Electronic Frontier Foundation site has been tricking users into a false sense of trust and has been used in a spear phishing attack, or emails that appear to be from a familiar individual or business, wrote EFF Staff Technologist Cooper Quintin in a blog post Thursday. The domain, ElectronicFrontierFoundation.org, was registered Aug. 4, and it’s suspected of the phishing attacks that began that same day, Quintin said. The domain “seems to be part of a larger campaign, known as ‘Pawn Storm’” that began a little more than a month ago and is thought to be associated with the Russian government, Quintin said. The domain has been reported for abuse, but was still active when Quintin wrote his blog. As part of the phishing attack, an attacker "sends the target a spear phishing email containing a link to a unique URL on the malicious domain (in this case electronicfrontierfoundation.org)," Quintin said. When the user visits the URL, they are redirected to another unique URL that contains a "Java applet which exploits a vulnerable version of Java," he said. "Once the URL is used and the Java payload is received, the URL is disabled and will no longer deliver malware (presumably to make life harder for malware analysts)," Quintin said. "The attacker, now able to run any code on the user's machine due to the Java exploit, downloads a second payload, which is a binary program to be executed on the target's computer."

The FTC will host a conference Jan. 14 on research and trends in protecting consumer privacy and security, a news release said Friday. PrivacyCon will bring stakeholders, white hat researchers, academics, industry representatives, federal policymakers and consumer advocates together, the release said. FTC staff is calling for original research on new vulnerabilities and how they might be exploited, plus research in areas like big data, the IoT, and consumer attitudes toward privacy, it said. Proposals for presentations will be accepted until Oct. 9. “We want to increase the FTC’s engagement with the technology community in order to more effectively encourage innovation that is protective of consumer privacy and security,” said FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez of the event. “At PrivacyCon, our goal is to have leading experts in privacy and data security sit at the table with us and other policymakers to discuss their original research findings and the implications for consumer privacy."