Consumers experienced a wide range of data privacy and security threats in the third quarter of 2014 as hackers successfully conducted large-scale attacks against financial services and retail companies as well as consumers' personal online accounts and identities.
Between July and September of this year, there were a lot of breaches reported worldwide, an increase compared to the same period last year, and millions of customer accounts and data records containing personal or financial information were either stolen or lost. Individuals also felt the data privacy pinch with breaches occurring across three major consumer activities: their banking, shopping, and online identities.
Read moreA senior executive at Uber suggested that the company should consider hiring a team of opposition researchers to dig up dirt on its critics in the media — and specifically to spread details of the personal life of a female journalist who has criticized the company.
After that a senior editor complained of blackmail by the manager of the company as he threatened to use her personal data to track the location of the girl. Top executive outlined the notion of spending “a million dollars” to hire four top opposition researchers and four journalists. Senior editor was repeatedly told that she had been blackmailed by Uber workers.
Read moreFacebook is secretly working on a new website called “Facebook at Work” to get a foothold in the office that will compete directly with Google, Microsoft and LinkedIn. The Silicon Valley company is developing a new product designed to allow users to chat with colleagues, connect with professional contacts and collaborate over documents.
The new site will look very much like Facebook, but will allow users to keep their personal profile with its holiday photos, political rants and silly videos separate from their work identity. Facebook employees have long used the site in their daily work and expanding this to other companies has been discussed internally for some time.
Read moreBadUSB hasn’t gone from bad to worse necessarily, but it sure has reached a new state of confusion for security experts and consumers in the crosshairs. Researcher, who warned the world during Black Hat last summer that the controller chips in most USB devices could be reprogrammed to behave badly, has dug deeper into the problem.
The real kicker, however, is that USB device makers indiscriminately flip-flop between these chips depending on price and availability, meaning that not all USBs are alike — not even those in the same product line. Determining which chips are risky requires physically dismantling and examining the chip in the particular USB device.
Read moreThe USA Freedom Act, blocked by the Senate, would have curbed powers granted under the Patriot Act, including bulk collection of Americans' phone records.
Lawmakers' efforts to overhaul some of the National Security Agency's controversial surveillance programs were dealt a setback Tuesday when a reform bill failed to garner enough votes to proceed in the Senate. The bill had the support of the White House, a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers, and a host of tech companies but was opposed by all but a handful of Republicans, some of whom were divided over the reason for their opposition.
Read moreIt's easy to understand why privacy advocates and policymakers are sounding alarms about online privacy in general – and singling out Google in particular. If you use Google's search engine, Google knows what you searched for as well as your activity on partner Web sites that use its ad services.
The more Google knows about you, the more it can match you to an advertiser who thinks you are an ideal customer. Advertisers are willing to pay more for ads served to ideal potential customers. For instance, airlines want to target people who love to travel. Want to find out all the things Google knows about you? Here are 6 links that will show you some of the data Google has about you.
Read moreResearch suggests that more than 81% of Tor clients can be ‘de-anonymised’ their originating IP addresses revealed – by exploiting the technology that is built into its router protocols, and similar traffic analysis software running by default in the hardware of other manufacturers.
The technique involves introducing disturbances in the highly-regulated environs of Onion Router protocols using a modified public Tor server running on Linux. His work on large-scale traffic analysis attacks in the Tor environment has convinced that a well-resourced organisation could achieve an extremely high capacity to de-anonymise Tor traffic.
Read moreZero day actually refers to two things — a zero-day vulnerability or a zero-day exploit. Zero-day vulnerability refers to a security hole in software — such as browser software or operating system software — that is yet unknown to the software maker or to antivirus vendors.
This means the vulnerability is also not yet publicly known, though it may already be known by attackers who are quietly exploiting it. Because zero day vulnerabilities are unknown to software vendors and to antivirus firms, there is no patch available yet to fix the hole and generally no antivirus signatures to detect the exploit, though sometimes antivirus scanners can still detect a zero day using heuristics.
Read moreA survey of companies in the U.K. more than half are willing to hire a hacker to help deal with a shortfall of cyber-security professionals. The finding comes from a survey of 300 senior IT and HR professionals in organizations with 500 or more staffers.
The increasing awareness of the cyber threat means the majority of U.K. companies are clear on their strategy for dealing with any skills gaps. Rather than relying on hackers to share their secrets, or throwing money at off the shelf programs that quickly become out of date, U.K. companies need to take stock of their cyber defense capabilities and act on the gaps that are specific to their own security needs.
Read moreShellShock, the remote code execution bug affecting GNU Bash, the command interpreter present on many Unix systems and Linux distributions, is still being exploited by attackers.
Experts warn about attackers leveraging a new version of the Bashlite malware, which was initially created as a DDoS bot with brute forcing capabilities and exploits the ShellShock bug. The malware now targets both computers and other devices running on BusyBox, located on the same network. The BusyBox software provides a number of Unix tools in a single executable file, and was specifically developed for embedded operating systems with limited resources.
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