Cory Doctorow reports: Hacking Team (previously) was an Italian company that developed cyberweapons that it sold to oppressive government around the world, to be used against their own citizens to monitor and suppress political oppositions; in 2015, a hacker calling themselves “Phineas Fisher” hacked and dumped hundreds of gigabytes’ worth of internal Hacking Team data,…
Category: Commentaries and Analyses
A DJI Bug Exposed Drone Photos and User Data
Lily Hay Newman reports: DJI makes some of the most popular quadcopters on the market, but its products have repeatedly drawn scrutiny from the United States government over privacy and security concerns. Most recently, the Department of Defense in May banned the purchase of consumer drones made by a handful of vendors, including DJI. Now DJI has…
Facebook May Face 100M Euro Lawsuit From France’s Internet Society Over Privacy Breach
Daniel R. Stoller reports: A French nongovernmental organization wants Facebook Inc. to pay 100 million euros ($113 million) and fix any problems stemming from recent data security incidents and privacy breaches. The Internet Society of France, a public interest group that advocates for online rights, sent a formal notice to Facebook and its subsidiaries Instagram…
Sins of Others May be Visited on Employer
Matt Fisher writes: Healthcare organizations are learning tough lessons that actions of employees can come back with serious consequences to the organization. When it comes to maintaining the privacy and security of patient data, no action comes without a consequence. While some actions are completely uncontrollable, that does not necessarily mean that liability cannot potentially…
They Hacked Their School District When They Were 12. The Adults Are Still Trying to Catch Up.
Benjamin Herold has a great piece on EdWeek about two teens in Michigan who have been charged criminally with hacking. It is a case that Doug Levin previously brought to the public’s attention in the context of a question as to whether schools are failing to deal effectively with young curious minds. This particular case…
VirtualBox zero-day published by disgruntled researcher
Catalin Cimpanu reports on a zero-day published by researcher Sergey Zelenyuk and his decision to go public instead of going through the usual system of notification, waiting, etc. Some of the issues he raises are ones that I have been hearing about recently from other researchers who are disenchanted, to say the least, with the…