The BND foreign intelligence service has long tapped international data flows through the De-Cix exchange based in the German city of Frankfurt. But the operator argues the agency is breaking the law by also capturing German domestic communications.

"We have grave doubts about the legality of the current practice," said a statement Wednesday on the website of De-Cix Management GmbH, which is owned by European internet industry body the eco association. "We consider ourselves under obligation to our customers to work towards a situation in which strategic surveillance of their telecommunications only takes place in a legal manner." 

The Trump administration issued a fresh warning Tuesday about malicious North Korean cyber activity, as that nation's leader dispatched a top adviser to New York to prepare for a possible summit on its nuclear arsenal.

The technical alert from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security highlighted two pieces of malware said to have been used to target U.S. infrastructure and aerospace, financial and media companies for at least nine years to steal information and remotely manipulate networks. In recent years, the US has accused North Korea of launching a slew of cyberattacks, and it wasn't immediately clear if there was any significance to the timing of the latest warning.

Fido might be man's best friend, but smart devices designed to track pets' movements and activity could be your worst enemy if attackers manage to capitalize on any of the dozen vulnerabilities researchers recently observed in them.

In a May 22 blog post, Kaspersky Lab researchers Roman Unuchek and Roland Sako warn that malicious hackers could exploit flaws found in these IoT products or their corresponding mobile apps to disable the devices' services, cause them to receive and execute commands from an unauthorized party, or perform man-in-middle attacks that intercept transmitted data. 

Google is being sued in the high court for as much as £3.2bn for the alleged “clandestine tracking and collation” of personal information from 4.4 million iPhone users in the UK.

The collective action is being led by former Which? director Richard Lloyd over claims Google bypassed the privacy settings of Apple’s Safari browser on iPhones to divide people into categories for advertisers. Lawyers for Lloyd’s campaign group Google You Owe Us told the court information collected by Google included race, physical and mental heath, political leanings, sexuality, social class, financial, shopping habits and location data. 

It's starting to feel like everyone in charge of our sensitive data might be incompetent. It's only been a day since Securus, the company that helps police track phones, was apparently hacked. Now, according to security site KrebsOnSecurity, tracking firm LocationSmart leaked real-time location data on its own web site.

LocationSmart aggregates real-time data on the location of subscribers' mobile phones. It's all opt-in, but Krebs reported that anyone could access this information for any AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon phones on the company's web site without a password or any other form of authentication. The vulnerability has been taken offline, said Krebs, but man what a mistake.

Four of the largest cell giants in the US are selling your real-time location data to a company that you've probably never heard about before.

In case you missed it, a senator last week sent a letter demanding the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) investigate why Securus, a prison technology company, can track any phone "within seconds" by using data obtained from the country's largest cell giants, including AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint, through an intermediary, LocationSmart. The story blew up because a former police sheriff snooped on phone location data without a warrant. The sheriff has pleaded not guilty to charges of unlawful surveillance.

Google is under investigation in Australia following claims that it collects data from millions of Android smartphone users, who unwittingly pay their telecom service providers for gigabytes consumed by the activity, regulators said on Tuesday.

Responding to the latest privacy concerns surrounding Google, a spokesman for the U.S. based search engine operator said the company has users’ permission to collect data. “Any charges for transmission of data over a cellular connection, including any location-related data, would be governed by a user’s mobile carrier plan,” Google said in a statement. 

Many people have grown accustomed to talking to their smart devices, asking them to read a text, play a song or set an alarm. But someone else might be secretly talking to them, too.

Over the last two years, researchers in China and the United States have begun demonstrating that they can send hidden commands that are undetectable to the human ear to Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant. Inside university labs, the researchers have been able to secretly activate the artificial intelligence systems on smartphones and smart speakers, making them dial phone numbers or open websites. 

An advanced type of malware can spy on nearly every Android smartphone function and steal passwords, photos, video, screenshots and data from WhatsApp, Telegram and other apps. "ZooPark" targets subjects in the Middle East and was likely developed by a state actor, according to Kaspersky Lab, which first spotted and identified it.

ZooPark has evolved over four generations, having started as simple malware that could "only" steal device account details and address book contacts. The last generation, however, can monitor and exfiltrate keylogs, clipboard data, browser data. 

The National Security Agency collected 534 million records of phone calls and text messages of Americans last year, more than triple gathered in 2016.

The sharp increase from 151 million occurred during the second full year of a new surveillance system established at the spy agency after U.S. lawmakers passed a law in 2015 that sought to limit its ability to collect such records in bulk. The spike in collection of call records coincided with an increase reported on Friday across other surveillance methods, raising questions from some privacy advocates who are concerned about potential government overreach and intrusion into the lives of U.S. citizens.