Hacking, Security & Privacy News - Page 7

The losses come following Apple's privacy changes that went into effect in April 2021.

The changes Apple made to iOS made it so that users must opt-in to allow ad-tracking by social media applications instead of an opt-out from it being enabled by default. Rather than an opt-out option being relegated to deep in the settings menu, a pop-up now appears before opening an app that uses advertising and data collection.

"Like others in our industry, we faced headwinds as a result of Apple iOS changes. Apple created two challenges for advertisers: one is that the accuracy of our ads targeting decreased, which increased the cost of driving outcomes; the other is that measuring those outcomes became more difficult," Meta Platform chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg said in its earnings call.

A married US couple has been arrested on espionage-related charges, with Jonathan and Diana Toebbe, both of Annapolis, Maryland arrested in Jefferson County, West Virginia by the FBI and Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) after they tried to sell data on nuclear-powered warships to a foreign government.

Attorney General Merrick B. Garland explains: "The complaint charges a plot to transmit information relating to the design of our nuclear submarines to a foreign nation. The work of the FBI, Department of Justice prosecutors, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service and the Department of Energy was critical in thwarting the plot charged in the complaint and taking this first step in bringing the perpetrators to justice".

The couple are in big sh*t, with Jonathan Toebbe being an employee of the Department of the Navy, where he was a nuclear engineer and worked on the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program, which is known as the Naval Reactors. Toebbe had an active national security clearance through the US Department of Defense, which let him have access to the Restricted Data he tried to sell to a foreign government.

Today couldn't get worse for Facebook, with the world's largest social media company down right now, and a Facebook whistleblower exposing some dark sides to the Mark Zuckerberg-led company.

Now, this is where things get worse: over 1.5 billion users have had their information up for sale on a hacker forum, with the personal data of over 1.5 billion Facebook users now up for grabs. You can buy it right now, either in a lump -- 1.5 billion users' information -- or maybe you just want 17 million users' information.

1 million accounts would cost you $5000 or so, which means 1.5 billion Facebook users' data is only going to cost you $7.5 million. Today, of all days, where Facebook has gone down, a whistleblower has exposed the social media giant, and their stock price is crashing... 1,500,000,000 users' data gets leaked and goes up for sale.

There's a new trojan going around that is now targeting gamers, known as "BloodyStealer" that is attacking gaming services like Bethesda, Epic Games, GOG, EA Origin, Steam, Telegram, and VimeWorld

BloodyStealer is able to take gamers' data including passwords, credit card details, screenshots, cookies, and client sessions from the above gaming services. The malware was discovered back in March 2021 in an advertisement on an underground forum, according to Kaspersky.

The malware has built-in protections to defend itself against analysis and has already been deployed in Europe, Latin America, and the Asia-Pacific region. Kaspersky notes that the sellers of BloodyStealer are selling the "malware-as-a-service (MaaS) distribution model" which costs $10 per month, or $40 as a lifetime license.

The elite have always had the attitude of "rules for thee, but not for me" but Facebook is in trouble, yet again, this time with its now-not-so-secret XCheck program.

Facebook's internal XCheck program lets whitelisted users break the same rules that would otherwise see a regular user, or someone on the opposite side of the political spectrum, get banned. XCheck, otherwise known as just Cross Check, has improved quality control when it comes to moderation from high-profile users like celebrities, and politicians.

XCheck is meant to see posts made by whitelisted users get flagged, and have them routed through better-trained moderators to make sure that Facebook's rules are upheld and enforced. Instead, XCheck users -- some 5.8 million of them -- were being protected in 2020. Just 10% of the posts that were flagged for XCheck got reviewed, according to a document witnessed by The Wall Street Journal.

ProtonMail has been busted holding onto the IP addresses of a French climate activity, as well as their browser fingerprint -- after Swiss authorities requested the data.

ProtonMail is meant to have end-to-end encryption by default, but it didn't -- the company states "By default, we do not keep any IP logs which can be linked to your anonymous email account". But we now know that's not true, and the company has since updated its privacy policy.

After the company sent over the metadata of the French activity, ProtonMail then removed the portion of its policy that said the company didn't log IP addresses. In its place, is "ProtonMail is email that respects privacy and puts people (not advertisers) first".

Clubhouse was all the rage... if you could get into it -- but it seems that those who did, have now had not just their phone number leaked but the phone numbers of their entire synced contact list.

3,800,000,000+ phone numbers have just leaked onto the Darknet, yeah -- 3.8 billion phone numbers.

The full phone number database of Clubhouse hit the Darknet, up for sale to the highest bidder. This means that even if you didn't join up or use Clubhouse, your phone number is probably included in that list on the Darknet. The reason is that all Clubhouse users' phone contacts were synced into the "secret database" of Clubhouse.

The White House has blamed China for several cyberattacks aimed at Microsoft's business email server, the Microsoft Exchange Server.

According to the White House website, the US, along with other allies such as the European Union, the United Kingdom, and NATO, are revealing how the People's Republic of China (PRC) has been conducting malicious cyber activity that is endangering national security. The statement from the White House says that the PRC has been using "contract hackers," and due to the lack of interest China has in taking responsibility for the hacks and stopping them, it's believed that they are intentional.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) recently published four indictments for four Chinese nationals over a hacking campaign that occurred between 2011 and 2018. The DOJ website states that the hacking campaign targeted the following industries; aviation, defense, education, government, health care, biopharmaceutical, and maritime. Additionally, the hackers obtained trade secrets, chemical formulas, sensitive technologies, proprietary genetic-sequencing technology.

Ransomware has become a big deal with the recent attack on the US by a Russian-linked hacking group that was carried out on July 4.

Atlas VPN, a free VPN app, has posted an update to its blog where it states that with data it has acquired, "31% of businesses in the US are forced to close down as a consequence of falling victim to ransomware attacks." For those that don't know, ransomware is a form of malware where an individual threatens to publish personal data of a victim that is then forced into paying the individual, either for access to the data or for it not to be published.

Atlas VPN states that the data provided here has been sourced from Cybereason, who surveyed 1,263 cybersecurity professionals in April 2021. Of those 1,263 cybersecurity professionals, it was found that companies between 500+ employees were most likely to fall victim to ransomware (30%), followed by companies with 250-500 employees (23%), "100-249 employees (25%), 50-99 employees (11%), 10-49 employees (10%), and fewer than 10 people (1%)."

The world has been gripped by the pandemic, changing the very fabric of our society bit-by-bit, and now the Biden administration will lurk around in your smartphone spying on your text messages but it's okay... it's for your own safety, they're the government.

In a new post by Politico, the Biden administration is going into the second season of Utopia by ramping up its attack on anti-vaxxers in an article Polico titled "'Potentially a death sentence': White House goes off on vaccine fearmongers" for maximum fear and SEO.

Anyway, inside of that article are some details on what the Biden administration and DNC have planned for the near future for all Americans: they'll be spying on your text messages. Why? Well, for your safety of course -- as the Biden administration will be working with Big Tech and SMS carriers to "dispel misinformation about vaccines".