Federal prosecutors have charged two men with allegedly taking part in a spree of swatting attacks against over a dozen owners of compromised Amazon Ring home security cameras. The hackers made fake emergency calls, then used the compromised Amazon doorbells to taunt responding police.
A hacker group reportedly accessed the computer systems of Knox College and gained access to student data, threatening students with the release of their private information. This is a major shift in ransomware attacks, which typically are aimed at institutions, not individual Americans.
A lawyer that is the mother of a Girl Scout was recently targeted by facial recognition tech and removed from an event at Radio City Music Hall due to Madison Square Garden Entertainment’s ongoing legal issues with her law firm — even though she personally has nothing to do with the litigation. One lawyer commented, “The fact they’re using facial recognition to do this is frightening. It’s un-American to do this.”
The FTC has reportedly fined Epic Games, the developers behind the megapopular Fortnite video game, $520 million over children’s privacy violations and item shop charges. All parents of Fortnite gamers are familiar with the incessant request of gamers to buy more “V-bucks,” the currency used to make in-game purchases.
An inquiry into TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance found that employees of the company obtained the private user data of two U.S. journalists. The startling admission is part of larger revelations on how the Chinese company spies on Americans.
Indiana’s attorney general is suing China-owned TikTok, alleging the app misleads its users — children in particular — about the level of inappropriate content and the security of consumer information.
Negotiations between the U.S. government and China-owned TikTok have been delayed due to national security concerns involving ByteDance, the app’s Chinese parent company, and its access to the private user data of Americans.
Apple is reportedly being sued by two women who claim that the company’s AirTag tracking devices have made it easy for stalkers to track and harass victims.
The Secret Service recently disclosed that hackers linked to the Chinese Communist Party stole at least $20 million in coronavirus relief benefits.
Earlier this year Twitter revealed that the private data of 5.4 million users was stolen due to an API vulnerability — now the data leaked before Elon Musk took the company private has been exposed on a hacker forum, according to a recent report.
According to new research shared exclusively with Gizmodo, there are thousands of bots pretending to be Apple users browsing the web and looking at advertisements. The bots cost advertisers $65 million in wasted ads that never reach human users.
Google is set to pay $391 million in a privacy settlement after 40 states accused the tech giant of tracking the location of users who opted out of the location services on their devices.
The New York Post claims that it was hacked on Thursday after multiple offensive articles and tweets were posted to the publication’s website and Twitter account, which the newspaper called “vile and reprehensible.” The outlet moved quickly to delete the offending content and is investigating the hack.
TikTok’s Chinese parent ByteDance planned to use the social media app to monitor the physical location of specific American citizens, according to documents obtained by Forbes.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced that the Lone Star State will bring a case against Google over the unauthorized collection of biometric data from users without their informed consent, in the latest of a long string of legal cases brought by the Texas AG against the tech giant.
Almost 100 victims of crypto scams are trying to hold trading platform Coinbase responsible for their losses over the past year, which reportedly involve thousands of people losing tens — if not hundreds — of millions of dollars in cryptocurrency. Scammers allegedly took money out of people’s accounts, which are managed by the Coinbase app.
Cyber attacks were reported on Monday at some of the largest airports in the United States, officials allege. The attacks jammed the websites of airports including Los Angeles International Airport and O’Hare International Airport, causing inconvenience for travelers seeking information. According to an LAX spokesperson, “No internal airport systems were compromised and there were no operational disruptions.”
Consumer Reports recently found that the Chinese-owned video app TikTok uses the same techniques as Google and Facebook to track users across the web — even if they don’t use the TikTok app.
Uber’s former head of security, Joe Sullivan, has been found guilty on charges that he did not disclose a breach of customer and driver records to government regulators.
Last year, Breitbart News reported that a number of high-level eBay executives and contractors had been charged with a cyberstalking terror campaign against critics of the company by federal authorities. Now two former eBay executives have been sentenced to prison time.
The Chinese-owned social media app TikTok could reportedly face a $29 million slap on the wrist after the Information Commissioner’s Office said that it has provisionally found that TikTok breached the UK data protection law between May 2018 and July 2020 by failing to handle the personal data of minor children.
Users of Google Photos, the tech giant’s service to back up and share pictures, are reporting that older images have been corrupted, with discoloration, lines, and other artefacts appearing on old photos.
Hackers gained access to business publication Fast Company’s Apple News feed and sent obscene push notifications to iOS devices including iPhones and iPads. The publication suspended its Apple News feed and even shut down its homepage until it is “certain the situation has been resolved.”
Ridesharing giant Uber recently announced that its systems had been infiltrated by a hacker, now the company is claiming that the hacker is affiliated with the Lapsus$ hacking group that made headlines last year after hacking companies including Microsoft and Nvidia.
Footage of the upcoming video game Grand Theft Auto VI has been leaked by an individual claiming to be the same hacker behind the recent Uber infiltration.
Ridesharing giant Uber says that is investigating a “cybersecurity incident” after a hacker claiming to be just 18 years old stated that they have administrator access to company tools.
Content subscription platform Patreon has reportedly laid off its security team sparking cybersecurity concerns among users, many of which threatened to leave the platform.
Apple is reportedly gaining ground in the online advertising space that has been held in a stranglehold duopoly by Facebook and Google as the two ad giants face massive headwinds caused in part by Apple’s iOS ad tracking transparency feature that improves consumer privacy.
The IRS has stated that it inadvertently posted the confidential information of 120,000 individuals to a public website before discovering the error.
A recently leaked internal Twitter memo claims that shopping features on Twitter pose content moderation risks and could be used “in a way that leads to individual or societal harm.”
Hackers are reportedly gaining access to unsuspecting users’ Cash App accounts and draining their cash balances, according to Vice News. The Cash App is a popular mobile payment service developed by Block (formerly Square), run by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.
University of Maryland (UMD) professor Dinesh Manocha, a decorated scholar in AI and robotics, created machine-learning software “useful for surveillance” that can read people’s personalities and “predict their behavior” for Chinese tech giant Alibaba.
In a recent article, the New York Times tells the story of a father who attempted to seek telemedicine treatment for his son amidst the coronavirus pandemic, sending photos of his son to the doctor for inspection at the request of the medical office. Google tagged the images as child abuse material, disabled his account, and reported him to the police.
A new web-based tool found at InAppBrowser.com allows users to see the detailed information that apps like TikTok and Instagram track when using their in-app browsers.
A software researcher recently claimed that China-owned TikTok’s in-app browser is capable of monitoring and recording user keystrokes, which the company has since confirmed. Of course, the Chinese company is quick to state that the code in its app is only used for “debugging,” but this may be another lie from the company known for its mistruths.
Apple is urging users of iPhones, iPads, and Mac computers to update their devices immediately after discovering a security flaw that could allow hackers to take control of devices. The security bug has been “actively exploited” according to the Silicon Valley giant.
The Wall Street Journal claims that Apple argued that it deserved a cut of some of Facebook’s ad revenue and attempted to broker a deal with Facebook that didn’t work out. Since then, Apple has introduced its App Tracking Transparency feature which has negatively affected Facebook’s advertising revenue, setting off a privacy war between the Masters of the Universe.
Facebook (now known as Meta) has reportedly been rewriting websites that its users visit, allowing the company to track them across the web after they click links in its app by “injecting” tracking code. The security researcher that sounded the alarm say that the tracking code allows Mark Zuckerberg to “monitor all user interactions, like every button and link tapped, text selections, screenshots, as well as any form inputs, like passwords, addresses and credit card numbers.”
A former employee of left-wing social media giant Twitter has been found guilty of using his position within the company to spy for the government of Saudi Arabia.
Twitter recently confirmed that a vulnerability in its code led to the exposure of data of anonymous users on the platform. Private user data on more than 5.4 million accounts was accessed before the company patched the bug that let malicious actors into the system.
