privacy and security - Page 10

Amazon is about to enable a new feature on Alexa and Echo devices on June 8 that will create a wireless mesh service, sharing a slice of users’ internet bandwidth with their nearby neighbors. The steps to disable this intrusive new feature from the Masters of the Universe can be found below.

Recently unredacted documents in a lawsuit against Google reveal that the company’s own executives and employees knew how difficult the tech giant makes it for smartphone users to keep their location data private.

Microsoft says that SolarWinds hackers, who committed one of the worst cyberattacks to have hit the U.S. government, have struck again with a new global attack targeting more than 150 government agencies, think tanks, and other organizations.

Elon Musk’s Tesla has announced that it plans to store all data collected from car owners in China at a new data center within the communist country.

Some of the largest delivery companies in the United States, including Amazon, Uber, and various food delivery firms, reportedly fell victim to a basic “fake driver” scam, according to a recent Justice Department complaint. The scam involved selling driver identities to others, meaning criminals could deliver customer’s food or drive them to the airport.

CNA Financial, one of the largest insurance companies in the United States, reportedly paid $40 million to hackers that hijacked their systems in a ransomware attack that occurred in late March.

The CEO of Colonial Pipeline, Joseph Blount, has attempted to explain why he chose to pay a $4.4 million ransom to hackers that took the pipeline’s system hostage. According to one expert, the Colonial Pipeline payoff will “help keep United States critical infrastructure providers in the crosshairs.”

The recent lawsuit between  Epic Games and Apple has revealed a number of details about a 2015 App Store hack in which malware was loaded into thousands of iPhone apps. The malware impacted about 128 million iPhone users.

A misconfigured database has reportedly exposed what appears to be a major coordinated scheme by Amazon vendors to generate fake reviews for their products. A China-based server exposed a scheme involving at least 200,000 people leaving fake five-star reviews for products on the site.

According to an ongoing analysis of Apple’s new App Tracking Transparency feature, the vast majority of iPhone users are choosing to shut down app tracking cutting off many apps from accessing their personal data. According to user data, only 4 percent of iPhone users in America have enabled app tracking, which Facebook has begged the public to do to keep its platform “free of charge.”

The privacy-focused messaging app Signal recently attempted to run an ad campaign on the Facebook-owned Instagram platform that highlighted the invasive data collection of big tech firms. According to Signal’s CEO, Facebook swiftly shut the campaign down.

Roughly 60 percent of school apps have been sending student data to a variety of potentially high-risk third parties, without the knowledge or consent of students or parents, according to research by the nonprofit organization Me2B Alliance.

A future version of the Apple Watch may give the wearable devices the ability to measure blood pressure, blood glucose, and blood alcohol levels, according to newly-revealed information about one of Apple’s business partners.

Ransomware hackers have reportedly breached the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department’s computer network in a targeted cyberattack and are threatening to release sensitive data including lists of police informants if the ransom is not paid.

A leaked internal Facebook memo reveals how Apple’s long-awaited iOS 14.5 App Tracking Transparency feature may affect advertisers. Facebook reportedly expects ad campaigns will “fluctuate” as iPhone users update their devices.

In a recent article, the New York Times details how Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Apple’s Tim Cook have become enemies and why their differences will begin to escalate this week.

A recently discovered Facebook vulnerability has reportedly exposed the email addresses of millions of users, even those that have their information set to private.

Amazon is reportedly testing its palm-scanning payment technology in Whole Foods, starting with a single store in Amazon’s home city of Seattle. The biometric system identifies not only the customer’s palm print but even the pattern of veins in their hand to identify them for payment processing.

Tech giant Apple has reportedly been targeted in a $50 million ransomware attack following the theft of a collection of engineering and manufacturing schematics of current and future products.

The Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok is facing a major legal challenge from the former children’s commissioner for England, Anne Longfield, over the app’s collection and use of children’s data. TikTok faces potential damages in the billions if the lawsuit is successful.

Tech giant Google could be facing major fines after the Australian Federal Court found that the Masters of the Universe misled Australian smartphone and tablet users about its location data collection.

Recent reports claim that the user data of 1.3 million Clubhouse app users have been posted to hacker forums, but Clubhouse CEO Paul Davidson alleges that the app was not hacked and this information is publicly available.

Apple and Google have blocked an update to the UK government’s coronavirus tracing app as it violated their privacy rules.

Social media giant Facebook has not notified more than 530 million users whose personal details were leaked due to a poorly-coded feature on the platform and recently made public, and has no plans to do so according to a company spokesperson.

Following the latest Facebook data breach which leaked the personal details of over 500 million users, Wired has explained what exactly caused the major data breach. According to the progressive tech outlet, the massive trove of personal data was “created by abusing a flaw in a Facebook address book contacts import feature.”

The most recent Facebook data leak included the personal information of over 533 million Facebook users — including the platform’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Breitbart News recently reported that tech giant Facebook suffered a major data leak of the personal details of hundreds of millions of users. Here is how to check if your personal details have been leaked online.

In a recent interview, Apple CEO Tim Cook discussed the upcoming iOS 14.5 privacy update that will provide users with greater transparency over which apps are tracking them, calling privacy the “top issue of the 21st century.”

Hackers published the phone numbers and personal data of 533 million Facebook users today, according to reports. The leak includes users’ full names, locations, phone numbers, and email addresses.

According to a recent report, federal prosecutors have indicted a Kansas man for allegedly accessing the computer system of the public water system and altering the process for cleaning customers’ drinking water.

Recently an unintelligible tweet was sent from the official U.S. Strategic Command account. According to a recent FOIA request, the tweet was sent when the Stratcom Twitter manager left their computer unattended resulting in a “very young child” tweeting from the account.

New data suggests that hackers behind the recent Microsoft Exchange email server hack have attempted to implicate security researcher Brian Krebs following his initial reporting on the cyberattack. More than 21,000 Microsoft Exchange servers around the world had malware planted on them that includes Kreb’s name and website.

Amazon delivery drivers in the U.S. are reportedly being told that they must sign “biometric consent” forms giving Amazon permission to use AI-powered cameras to track them while they work if they want to keep their jobs.

The state of California has reportedly banned “dark patterns,” which are user interfaces designed to trick and frustrate users in order to take advantage of them. Web sites designed to make it difficult to cancel subscriptions are one example of dark pattern design.

Social media users in Japan were recently fooled by a 50-year-old man who posed as a young female biker online, gaining a large following by changing his appearance using photo filters.

During a recent discussion on the invite-only app Clubhouse, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg once again expressed his displeasure over Apple’s upcoming privacy update that will give users more info about the apps that track them.