A researcher with AdGuard discovered five fake ad-blocking extensions in the Chrome Web Store that used hidden scripts to manipulate users’ browsers. The good news is, after AdGuard published the report, the Chrome team removed all five of the extensions from its store.

Unfortunately, AdGuard’s Andrey Meshkov reports that the extensions he discovered had more than 20 million users. Posing as ad blockers, the malicious extensions simply copied code from real ad blockers and then added to them. “All the extensions I’ve highlighted are simple rip-offs with a few lines of code and some analytics code added by the ‘authors,’” Meshkov wrote. 

A little-known data firm was able to build 48 million personal profiles, combining data from sites and social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Zillow, among others -- without the users' knowledge or consent.

Localblox, a Bellevue, Wash.-based firm, says it "automatically crawls, discovers, extracts, indexes, maps and augments data in a variety of formats from the web and from exchange networks." Since its founding in 2010, the company has focused its collection on publicly accessible data sources, like social networks Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and real estate site Zillow to name a few, to produce profiles. 

If you have installed a network-attached storage device manufactured by LG Electronics, you should take it down immediately, read this article carefully and then take appropriate action to protect your sensitive data.

A security researcher has revealed complete technical details of an unpatched critical remote command execution vulnerability in various LG NAS device models that could let attackers compromise vulnerable devices and steal data stored on them. LG's Network Attached Storage (NAS) device is a dedicated file storage unit connected to a network that allows users to store and share data with multiple computers. 

Apple Inc. plans to integrate recently acquired magazine app Texture into Apple News and debut its own premium subscription offering, according to people familiar with the matter. The move is part of a broader push by the iPhone maker to generate more revenue from online content and services.

The Cupertino, California company agreed last month to buy Texture, which lets users subscribe to more than 200 magazines for $9.99 a month. Apple cut about 20 Texture staff soon after, according to one of the people. The world’s largest technology company is integrating Texture technology and the remaining employees into its Apple News team. 

Blockchain boosters rejoice: A major bank is using the distributed-ledger technology that makes bitcoin possible for international payments of fiat currency.

Santander, which had been testing it internally among its staff, launched the service today, making the Spanish banking giant among the few major financial institutions to go live with the extraordinarily hyped technology. The service is supposed to be cheaper and faster than existing systems, and will provide more certainty about when the money will arrive, according to a statement. Right now, it’s available for retail customers in Spain, UK, Brazil, and Poland and will roll out in other countries in coming months. 

Google has long struggled with how best to get dozens of Android smartphone manufacturers—and hundreds of carriers—to regularly push out security-focused software updates.

But when one German security firm looked under the hood of hundreds of Android phones, it found a troubling new wrinkle: Not only do many Android phone vendors fail to make patches available to their users, or delay their release for months; they sometimes also tell users their phone's firmware is fully up to date, even while they've secretly skipped patches. 

Google is working on a brand new design for the web version of Gmail. Yesterday, I published screenshots of the new design. TechCrunch’s tipster Chaim also discovered an interesting new feature in the new Gmail. You’ll soon be able to send expiring emails.

Working on an email service is hard as you have to be compatible with all sorts of email providers and email clients. But it doesn’t seem to be stopping Google as the company is now evolving beyond the simple POP3/IMAP/SMTP protocols. Based on those screenshots, expiring emails work pretty much like expiring emails in ProtonMail. After some time, the email becomes unreadable.

Apple Inc. warned employees to stop leaking internal information on future plans and raised the specter of potential legal action and criminal charges, one of the most-aggressive moves by the world’s largest technology company to control information about its activities.

The Cupertino, California-based company said in a lengthy memo posted to its internal blog that it "caught 29 leakers," last year and noted that 12 of those were arrested. "These people not only lose their jobs, they can face extreme difficulty finding employment elsewhere," Apple added. The company declined to comment on Friday. 

Kryptos Logic, the cyber-security firm running the main WannaCry sinkhole, announced today plans to allow organizations access to some of the WannaCry sinkhole data.

The security firm cites recurring WannaCry ransomware infections that are still taking place at various companies, even eleven months after the first WannaCry outbreak in May 2017. For example, Boeing,  Connecticut state agencies, Honda, and Victoria state police suffered WannaCry infections long after Kryptos Logic researcher Marcus "MalwareTech" Hutchins registered the WannaCry killswitch domain, effectively stopping the global outbreak on May 12, last year.

VirnetX Holding Corp. won $502.6 million against Apple Inc. after a federal jury in Texas said the maker of iPhones was infringing patents for secure communications, the latest twist in a dispute now in its eighth year.

VirnetX’s stock rose as much as 44 percent on the news in after hours trading. The company closed at $4.10 per share on Tuesday. Apple’s stock has seen little change on the news given that the $502.6 million award is minuscule compared to the company’s profits. The company generated $20 billion profit in the first quarter, the company said in February.