#privacy

Government public record databases apparently help law enforcement officials save lives, prevent further crimes from being committed by perpetrators, and also provide a detailed information platform that can stitch together obscure tidbits of data that can help them hunt down and capture fugitives and individuals fleeing from an arrest warrant.

ESET researchers have discovered a new major privacy threat within a “long-running cyber-espionage campaign” in the Middle East. The new malicious agent is an Android messenger app Welcome Chat. The rogue app is believed to be linked to the Gaza Hackers group a.k.a Molerats.

Researchers from cybersecurity company ESET have published a comprehensive paper on a little-known but apparently quite dangerous advanced persistent threat (APT) group Evilnum. The research outlines the major directions of the group’s attacks and evaluates its threat level.

Californian Reyes Daniel Ruiz, who worked as a reliability engineer among other roles at Yahoo! from 2009 to 2018, abused his position by accessing Yahoo’s backend to steal “hashed” passwords, crack them and log into email accounts of women, including some coworkers.

The ubiquitous digitization brings both the better ways of handling information and more opportunities for bad actors to exploit whatever we put online.

A 900-megabyte database of Telegram users’ phone numbers, nicknames, and unique identifiers has been found posted on one of the forums on the dark web. The exact number of affected accounts isn’t known but estimated to be in the millions.

This piece has been written by Jesse McGraw, an activist, writer, former hacker and first person in recent U.S. history convicted for corrupting industrial control systems

If you are into discussing private matters or sensitive topics like the Tiananmen Square tragedy over video calls, don’t use Zoom for that. The service announced a new feature that would make it easier to ban people from the desired country at their government’s request.

Brave, a popular privacy-focused browser, has faced a backlash from the community after users noticed affiliate links popping up in the autocomplete form in the browser’s address bar. In a discussion on Twitter, Brave CEO Brendan Eich called the links in autocomplete a mistake and promised not to let such a thing happen again.

According to Gallup, in 2018, about two-thirds of people worldwide had confidence in their local police. Given the law enforcement response to the protests in the U.S., this number will probably be quite different in subsequent reports. But batons, rubber bullets, and tear gas aren’t the only tools for the job.

Humans have a thing for patterns. Occasionally, our brains see things that aren’t there or miss out on something in plain sight. In fact, there’s a curious list of cognitive biases that play part in false conclusions, poor decisions, and occasional conspiracy theories. When it comes to privacy and spyware controversies, the challenge is especially […]

The Chinese province of Hangzhou has proposed that authorities assign a permanent health rating to its residents, which would be based on people’s medical records and lifestyle habits. The move comes after China introduced and successfully deployed a similar QR system amid the coronavirus outbreak in an effort to hinder the further spread of the […]