More than 5 million people in the UK could be entitled to compensation from Google if a class action against the internet giant for allegedly harvesting personal data is successful.
A group led by the former executive director of consumer body Which?, Richard Lloyd, and advised by City law firm Mischon de Reya claims Google unlawfully collected personal information by bypassing the default privacy settings on the iPhone between June 2011 and February 2012. They have launched a legal action with the aim of securing compensation for those affected. The group says that approximately 5.4 million people in Britain used the iPhone.
Read moreA former Uber security manager says an espionage team inside the ride-hailing service used former CIA agents to help the company spy on its rivals overseas.
The testimony in a San Francisco courtroom Tuesday comes amid revelations that federal prosecutors are investigating allegations that Uber deployed an espionage team to plunder trade secrets from its rivals. That has triggered a delay in a high-profile federal trial over whether the beleaguered ride-hailing service stole self-driving car technology from a Google spinoff. Uber’s manager of global intelligence said that Uber hired several contractors that employed former CIA agents
Read moreThe FBI failed to notify scores of US officials that Russian hackers were trying to break into their personal Gmail accounts despite having evidence for at least a year, an investigation found.
The Associated Press dedicated two months and a small team of reporters to go through a hit list of targets of Fancy Bear, a Russian government-aligned cyberespionage group, that was provided by the cybersecurity firm Secureworks. Previous investigations based on the list had shown how Fancy Bear worked in close alignment with the Kremlin’s interests to steal tens of thousands of emails from the Democratic party.
Read moreResearchers at YALE Privacy Lab and French nonprofit Exodus Privacy have documented the proliferation of tracking software on smartphones, finding that weather, flashlight, rideshare, and dating apps, among others, are infested with dozens of different types of trackers collecting vast amounts of information to better target advertising.
Exodus security researchers identified 44 trackers in more than 300 apps for Google’s Android smartphone operating system. The apps have been downloaded billions of times. Yale Privacy Lab is working to replicate the Exodus findings and has already released reports on 25 of the trackers.
Read moreEven in the 2000s, when you stepped onto a bus or train and looked around, you saw people reading books and newspapers, for the most part. Fast-forward 10 years, and now 9 in 10 are looking at their smartphones or tablets, either chatting in WhatsApp or Telegram, or browsing through Facebook, Instagram, or Snapchat, liking kittens, food shots, selfies on the beach, and whatnot.
You probably use social networks on the go as well. Having a powerful mobile device and always being connected is very handy: It means in addition to using social networks, you can do online banking with a couple of taps, get a taxi, buy a new scarf, and do a lot of other things.
Read moreThis is bad. Google actively receives location data from Android users even when location services have been switched off. Starting from early 2017, Android phones have been gathering addresses of nearby cellular towers and sending this data back to Google. The most troubling part is that this has been going on even when users have disabled location services.
According to the publication, Android handsets collected location data pretty much all the time and subsequently relayed all stored information back to Google once connected to the internet. Quarts claims that all modern Android phones are affected by this vulnerability.
Read moreA German regulator has banned the sale of smartwatches aimed at children, describing them as spying devices. It had previously banned an internet-connected doll called, My Friend Cayla, for similar reasons.
Telecoms regulator the Federal Network Agency urged parents who had such watches to destroy them. One expert said the decision could be a "game-changer" for internet-connected devices. "Poorly secured smart devices often allow for privacy invasion. That is really concerning when it comes to kids' GPS tracking watches - the very watches that are supposed to help keep them safe," said Ken Munro, a security expert at Pen Test Partners.
Read moreThe Terdot banking Trojan packs information-stealing capabilities that could easily turn it into a cyber-espionage tool, Bitdefender says in a new report. Highly customized and sophisticated, Terdot is based on the source code of ZeuS, which leaked online in 2011.
The banking Trojan resurfaced in October last year and Bitdefender has been tracking its whereabouts ever since, the security company notes in a technical paper. Terdot was designed to operate as a proxy to perform man-in-the-middle attacks, as well as to steal browser information such as login credentials or the stored credit card data. Furthermore, the malware is capable of injecting HTML code into visited web pages.
Read moreOnePlus, a major Chinese smartphone manufacturer, has gotten itself into a hell of a lot of security trouble lately, and now the situation is only getting worse.
Mobile security researcher Robert Baptiste, who goes by the pseudonym Elliot Alderson (a nod to the main character in the Mr. Robot series), discovered that OnePlus smartphones have been apparently shipping for years with a hidden backdoor. It makes it easy for a clever hacker with physical access to root a OnePlus phone with just a few lines of code. Alderson found an application on OnePlus devices intended for factory testing, and discovered it could be used to obtain “root access” to the phone.
Read moreDuring a hacking operation in which U.S. authorities broke into thousands of computers around the world to investigate child pornography, the FBI hacked a number of targets in Russia, China, and Iran.
The news signals the bold future of policing on the so-called dark web, where investigators are increasingly deploying malware without first knowing which country their suspect is located in. Experts and commentators say the approach of blindly kicking down digital doors in countries not allied with the U.S. could lead to geopolitical fallout. The case centers around the FBI’s 2015 Operation Pacifier investigation, which delved into a child-pornography site.
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