Sam Schechner reports: A European Union privacy watchdog could fine Facebook Inc. as much as $1.63 billion for a data breach announced Friday in which hackers compromised the accounts of more than 50 million users, if regulators find the company violated the bloc’s strict new privacy law. Ireland’s Data Protection Commission, which is Facebook’s lead…
Month: September 2018
App flaw let anyone access UK Conservative politicians’ data
Jon Fingas reports: The UK Conservative party is learning a hard lesson about the importance of basic security measures in mobile apps. Users have discovered that you could log into the party’s conference app using only an attendee’s email address, providing access to all kinds of sensitive data. And when many of the conference participants are…
Telegram fixes IP address leak in desktop client
Catalin Cimpanu reports: Telegram users who specifically utilize the application for its anonymity features are advised to update their desktop clients as soon as possible to patch a bug that will leak their IP address in some scenarios. The bug was found by Dhiraj Mishra, a bug hunter from Mumbai, India, and was patched by…
2 men arrested in Oklahoma, suspected in $14 million cryptocurrency theft, hacking of California company
Bill Miston reports on quick work by law enforcement: Two men arrested in Oklahoma City this week are suspected of hacking and stealing millions of dollars from a California-based cryptocurrency company. Fletcher Robert Childers, 23, and Joseph Harris, 21, both of Missouri, were arrested by Oklahoma City Police at a west side hotel Monday. According…
Facebook says it detected security breach after traffic spike
Catalin Cimpanu reports: An unusual traffic spike is what alerted Facebook engineers that something might be wrong, and it was an investigation into this heightened activity that led engineers to discover a massive security breach this week. Facebook confirmed the hack earlier today, in a press release. It said hackers stole access tokens for roughly…
UK: Bupa Insurance Services fined £175,000 for systemic data protection failures
From the U.K. Information Commissioner’s Office: Bupa Insurance Services Limited (Bupa) has been fined £175,000 by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) for failing to have effective security measures in place to protect customers’ personal information. Between 6 January and 11 March 2017, a Bupa employee was able to extract the personal information of 547,000 Bupa…