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“Four separate operations responsible for bombarding consumers nationwide with billions of unwanted and illegal robocalls pitching auto warranties, debt-relief services, home security systems, fake charities, and Google search results services have agreed to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that they violated the FTC Act and the agency’s Telemarketing Sales Rule (TSR), including its Do Not …
Consumer Data Protection: Consumer reporting agencies are companies that collect, maintain, and sell vast amounts of sensitive data. GAO-19-469T: Published: Mar 26, 2019. Publicly Released: Mar 26, 2019. “In 2017, a breach at Equifax, one of the largest companies, compromised at least 145.5 million consumers’ data. “Consumers have little control over what information these companies have, …
Data Breaches: Range of Consumer Risks Highlights Limitations of Identity Theft Services, GAO-19-230: Published: Mar 27, 2019. Publicly Released: Mar 27, 2019. “Data breaches have exposed the personal data of hundreds of millions of people and put them at risk for identity theft. We looked at what you can do if you’re a victim of …
“The Federal Trade Commission issued orders to seven U.S. Internet broadband providers and related entities seeking information the agency will use to examine how broadband companies collect, retain, use, and disclose information about consumers and their devices. The orders seek information about the companies’ privacy policies, procedures, and practices. The orders were sent to: AT&T Inc., …
“Search Encrypt uses local encryption to secure your searches. It combines AES-256 encryption with Secure Sockets Layer encryption. Search Encrypt then retrieves your search results from its network of search partners. After you’re done searching, your search terms expire so they are private even if someone else has access to your computer.”
Krebs on Security – “Hundreds of millions of Facebook users had their account passwords stored in plain text and searchable by thousands of Facebook employees — in some cases going back to 2012, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. Facebook says an ongoing investigation has so far found no indication that employees have abused access to this data. …
Gizmodo: “A recent experiment by Josh Frantz, a senior security consultant at Rapid7, suggests that users are taking few if any steps to protect their private information before releasing their used devices back out into the wild. For around six months, he collected used desktop, hard disks, cellphones and more from pawn shops near his …
ZDNet: “A database containing 257,287 legal documents, with some marked as “not designated for publication,” was left exposed on the public internet without a password, allowing anyone to access and download a treasure trove of sensitive legal materials. The database, which was left online for roughly two weeks, contained unpublished legal documents relating to US …
Motherboard: “Elsevier, the company behind scientific journals such as The Lancet, left a server open to the public internet, exposing user email addresses and passwords. The impacted users include people from universities and educational institutions from across the world. It’s not entirely clear how long the server was exposed or how many accounts were impacted, …
Slate – Our research shows that any one of us might end up helping the facial recognition industry, perhaps during moments of extraordinary vulnerability. “If you thought IBM using “quietly scraped” Flickr images to train facial recognition systems was bad, it gets worse. Our research, which will be reviewed for publication this summer, indicates that …
“The Federal Trade Commission, the nation’s primary privacy and data security enforcer, released its annual report highlighting its privacy and data security work for 2018. The FTC’s privacy and security enforcement actions in 2018 included shutting down revenge porn website MyEx.com, approving a settlement with peer-to-peer payment service Venmo over deceptive privacy settings, approving an …
BBC: “Fabian is world renowned for destroying ransomware – the viruses sent out by criminal gangs to extort money. Because of this, he lives a reclusive existence, always having to be one step ahead of the cyber criminals. He has moved to an unknown location since this interview was carried out…Ransomware is a particularly nasty …
