Category «Cybercrime»

How tech companies use dark patterns to discourage us from exercising our rights to privacy

Dark Patterns – How tech companies use dark patterns to discourage us from exercising our rights to privacy. The Norwegian Consumer Council (the Forbrukerrådet or NCC) report criticizes “features of interface design crafted to trick users into doing things that they might not want to do, but which benefit the business in question.” “In this …

Subjects: Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Internet, Microsoft, Privacy, Social Media

Study – Password Managers: Under the Hood of Secrets Management

Independent Security Evaluators: “Password managers allow the storage and retrieval of sensitive information from an encrypted database. Users rely on them to provide better security guarantees against trivial exfiltration than alternative ways of storing passwords, such as an unsecured flat text file. In this paper we propose security guarantees password managers should offer and examine …

Subjects: Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, E-Mail, E-Records, Internet

Google – Fighting disinformation across our products

Google Blog: “Providing useful and trusted information at the scale that the Internet has reached is enormously complex and an important responsibility. Adding to that complexity, over the last several years we’ve seen organized campaigns use online platforms to deliberately spread false or misleading information. We have twenty years of experience in these information challenges …

Subjects: Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Internet, Knowledge Management, Social Media

Climate Change Still Seen as the Top Global Threat, but Cyberattacks a Rising Concern

Worries about ISIS and North Korea persist, as fears about American power grow: “The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report last year expressing serious concerns about the possible impacts of climate change, both in the near and distant future. Broadly speaking, people around the world agree that climate change poses a severe risk …

Subjects: Climate Change, Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Defense

T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T are selling access to their customers’ location data

and that data is ending up in the hands of bounty hunters and others not authorized to possess it, letting them track most phones in the country – via Motherboard: “…Motherboard’s investigation shows just how exposed mobile networks and the data they generate are, leaving them open to surveillance by ordinary citizens, stalkers, and criminals, …

Subjects: Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Internet, Privacy

There’s No Good Reason to Trust Blockchain Technology

Opinion – Wired: “…What blockchain does is shift some of the trust in people and institutions to trust in technology. You need to trust the cryptography, the protocols, the software, the computers and the network. And you need to trust them absolutely, because they’re often single points of failure. When that trust turns out to …

Subjects: Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Economy, Financial System

Scammer groups are exploiting Gmail ‘dot accounts’ for online fraud

ZDNet: “Cyber-criminal groups are exploiting a Gmail feature to file for fraudulent unemployment benefits, file fake tax returns, and bypass trial periods for online services. The trick is an old one and has been used in the past. It refers to Gmail’s “dot accounts,” a feature of Gmail addresses that ignores dot characters inside Gmail …

Subjects: Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, E-Mail

UN launches Cyber Policy Portal

“The United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) has just launched a Cyber Policy Portal that serves as an interactive, ‘at a glance’ tool for policymakers and experts. For the first time on a single site, users can access concise yet comprehensive cyber policy profiles of all 193 UN Member States, as well as regional and international …

Subjects: Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Government Documents, Knowledge Management, Legal Research

Hackers Are Passing Around a Megaleak of 2.2 Billion Records

Wired: “When hackers breached companies like Dropbox and LinkedIn in recent years—stealing 71 million and 117 million passwords, respectively—they at least had the decency to exploit those stolen credentials in secret, or sell them for thousands of dollars on the dark web. Now, it seems, someone has cobbled together those breached databases and many more …

Subjects: Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, E-Mail, ID Theft, Privacy, Social Media

Seven Out of Every Ten Open Vulnerabilities Belong to Just Three Vendors

Computer Business Review: “Seven out of every ten open vulnerabilities observed by customers belongs to just three vendors, Oracle, Microsoft and Adobe. These are the findings of cyber security enterprise Kenna Security in their new report Prioritization to Prediction, which explores how enterprises are dealing with open vulnerabilities. In their report Kenna found that Oracle …

Subjects: Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, E-Mail, E-Records, Intellectual Property, Knowledge Management