Items tagged with data sovereignty
Researchers at the threat analysis company ThreatFabric have published a report detailing some recent evolutions in Android malware droppers on the Google Play Store. Recent changes to Google Play policies restricting access to certain permissions have pushed malware developers to find workarounds. Google is...
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See Tickets, an online event ticket vendor that services both Europe and North America, has disclosed a major data breach affecting its payment processing portals. While the data breach notice is light on details, See Tickets customers should know that their payment information, including credit card credential, may...
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This week, the Northern District of California court is considering whether to let a lawsuit filed against Google continue as a class action lawsuit. The suit in question is seeking statutory damages on behalf of millions of Google Chrome users, claiming that Google misled users of Chrome’s Incognito mode into a false...
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Mullvad VPN, the Swedish VPN service that powers Mozilla VPN, is currently in the midst of a security audit of its Android app. While conducting this audit, the company discovered that Android’s VPN settings don’t block the operating system from making certain connections to Google servers outside the VPN tunnel...
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Back in 2018, the Associated Press (AP) published a piece bringing attention to the fact that Google still collects some user location data even when Location History is disabled in Google Account settings. Two years later, the Arizona Attorney General sued Google for deceptive location tracking practices, citing this...
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On September 5, Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), the second largest school district in the United States, published a news release disclosing a ransomware attack on its internal systems. While LAUSD is far from the only school to have been hit by ransomware this year, the size of the school district has...
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Last year, Cloudflare, a company that provides DDoS mitigation, content delivery network (CDN) services, and many others, published a blog post declaring its intention to kill CAPTCHAs. Now about a year and a half later, the company is introducing an alternative to standard CAPTCHAs that should be much faster and...
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Edward Snowden has gained Russian citizenship nine years after fleeing the United States and landing in Russia. On Monday, Russian president Vladimir Putin signed a decree granting citizenship to 75 foreigners residing in the country, with Snowden among them.
Snowden, a former NSA contractor, publicly exposed the...
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Threat analysis teams from two different cybersecurity firms, Cyderes and Stairwell, have published a joint report detailing a new ransomware technique that may be the next big evolution in ransomware. Rather than encrypting data on victims’ computers, ransomware may soon corrupt the data instead, rendering it...
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Researchers at the cybersecurity firm ReasonLabs have discovered a credit card scam campaign estimated to have extracted tens of millions of dollars from tens of thousands of credit card holders. This scheme utilizes fake dating websites, a dedicated payment processor, and customer support services all created and...
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Among the many features and devices announced at the Google I/O event in May of this year was a new feature for the Google app giving users the option to request that their personal information be removed from Google search results. The company told users at the time of the announcement that the feature would be made...
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Cybersecurity researchers at Proofpoint have been keeping tabs on an Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) known as TA453 and recently found the threat actor employing a phishing technique that makes use of sock puppet email accounts. Sock puppets are alternate accounts or personas used in a deceptive manner by a single...
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After introducing video end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for a subset of its wired doorbell and camera devices over a year ago, Ring has announced that it is now extending this capability to its wireless devices. While the company doesn’t specify in its announcement which of its battery-powered devices will support E2EE...
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Internal moves and discussions at Apple may indicate that the company is moving to grow its advertising business. Apple already generates around $4 billion in ad revenue every year. However, according to Bloomberg, Apple’s vice president of the ad group, Todd Teresi, is pushing for a significant expansion of the...
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Facebook’s collection and sale of user data for advertising purposes took a huge hit when Apple introduced its App Tracking Transparency (ATT) feature, with Facebook projecting that it will lose out on $10 billion in revenue this year. However, it appears that Meta, Facebook’s parent company, may still have some...
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Amazon published a press release this morning announcing that it has entered into a merger agreement with iRobot, the company best known for its Roomba line of robot vacuum cleaners. So long as the deal receives shareholder and regulatory approval, Amazon will acquire iRobot for a $61 per share, totaling approximately...
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Google announced its Privacy Sandbox initiative back in 2019 with the stated goal of changing the online advertising business that supports much of the web to use more privacy-preserving technologies. At present, online advertising relies heavily on third-party cookies that track users’ behavior across different...
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Near the end of 2020, Apple introduced a dedicated app privacy section to the App Store, requiring developers to disclose what user information is linked to users’ identities and used to track them. Then, in May of 2021, Google announced that a similar feature was in the works for its Play Store. Almost a year later...
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Ring, the smart home security company acquired by Amazon in 2018 for $1 billion, has a history of raising privacy concerns with its user data practices. Less than a year after Amazon completed its acquisition of Ring, an inside source revealed that the company’s employees had full access to customers’ live video...
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We recently wrote about TikTok’s extensive user data collection and an FCC commissioner's letter asking Apple and Google to ban the app from their app stores for violating their privacy policies. While TikTok goes to great lengths to collect user data, there is some small solace in the fact that users can avoid the...
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