Tal Shahaf of Reuters reports: A fierce legal battle between Facebook and Israeli cyber security firm NSO ramped up this week with the latter telling a California court that the social media giant lied about providing material related to its lawsuit against the high-tech firm. Facebook is suing NSO for allegedly spying on smartphone users…
Category: Commentaries and Analyses
Hackers are targeting other hackers by infecting their tools with malware
Zack Whittaker reports: A newly discovered malware campaign suggests that hackers have themselves become the targets of other hackers, who are infecting and repackaging popular hacking tools with malware. Cybereason’s Amit Serper found that the attackers in this years-long campaign are taking existing hacking tools — some of which are designed to exfiltrate data from a database through…
All bets off as children’s data is leaked
ITPro reports: The way that the Department for Education (DfE) handles sensitive data on children and students needs a thorough independent investigation, experts argue, following revelations that one of its datasets had been used to help betting companies target new customers. The data scare was flagged in an investigation by The Sunday Times, but IT Pro’s sister…
Talkspace threatened to sue a security researcher over a bug report
Zack Whittaker reports that Talkspace threatened a researcher who blogged about a problem he found on their site in signing up for a free year’s subscription. John Jackson said he was able to sign up to Talkspace, a popular therapy app, as if he were an employee at one of the companies whose health insurance…
Melbourne professor quits after health department pressures her over data breach
Josh Taylor reports: A prominent university professor has quit after the health department pressured her university to stop her speaking out about the Medicare and PBS history of over 2.5 million Australians being re-identifiable online due to a government bungle. In 2016, Vanessa Teague, a cryptographer from the University of Melbourne, and two of her…
US property and demographic database of 200 million records leaked on the web
Paul Bischoff reports: An exposed online database consisting of some 200 million records included a wide range of sensitive personal and demographic data about residents and their properties. Homeowners were identified as well as info about their credit ratings, net worth, and income, among other details. At this time we have not been able to…