Using Fake Student Accounts to Shill Brands

It turns out that its surprisingly easy to create a fake Harvard student and get a harvard.edu email account. Scammers are using that prestigious domain name to shill brands: Basically, it appears that anyone with $300 to spare can ­- or could, depending on whether Harvard successfully shuts down...

XenForo 跨站脚本漏洞

XenForo is an open source commercial Internet forum software package written in the PHP programming language. A cross-site scripting vulnerability exists in XenForo versions prior to 2.2.7, which stems from a lack of filtering and escaping of user input when creating a new advertisement in the...

PT-2021-23721

Name of the Vulnerable Software and Affected Versions XenForo versions 2.2.7 and earlier Description A threat actor with access to the admin panel can create a new Advertisement via the Advertising function and save an XSS payload in the body of the HTML document. This payload will execute global...

Zuckerberg’s Metaverse, and the possible privacy and security concerns

The news is currently jam-packed with tales of Facebooks Meta project. Of particular interest to me is Facebook’s long-stated desire to introduce adverts into the VR space, and what this may mean for Meta too. I’ve talked about the privacy and legal aspects of adverts in gaming and other tech...

Sinclair Confirms Ransomware Attack That Disrupted TV Stations

Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns hundreds of local television stations across the U.S., confirmed Monday that it has suffered a ransomware attack. The incident is disrupting its advertising operations, among other things, and spread to many of its owned TV affiliates over the weekend, knockin...

Proxyware Services Open Orgs to Abuse – Report

Services that allow consumers to resell their own internet bandwidth for profit to businesses that want to resell it are ripe for abuse, according to researchers. The burgeoning business model is growing in popularity with consumers who earn about $1 for every 10GB of their bandwidth shared with...

The best browsers for privacy and security

Unfortunately there is a low correlation factor between what most people find the best browsers and what are the best browsers when it comes to privacy and security. If you look at the market share of the most popular browsers, there is one browser that steals the crown without a lot of...

Custom WhatsApp Build Delivers Triada Malware

Triada malware, both pernicious and persistent, has resurfaced. Its most recent sighting is buried inside an advertising component of a modified version of the popular WhatsApp messenger called FM WhatsApp. The malware, first spotted by researchers at Kaspersky in 2016, is a type of mobile...

Triada Trojan in WhatsApp mod

WhatsApp users sometimes feel the official app is lacking a useful feature of one sort or another, be it animated themes, self-destructing messages which automatically delete themselves, the option of hiding certain conversations from the main list, automatic translation of messages, or the optio...

Is it game over for VR advergaming?

We’ve been warning about advergaming—the combination of virtual reality VR and ads—for years on the Labs Blog. I’ve given a few talks on the subject too, and how ad networks will slowly work their way into enclosed spaces formerly reserved for your head. They still might, but thanks to a recent...

Google Extends Support for Tracking Party Cookies Until 2023

Google's sweeping proposal to deprecate third-party cookies in Chrome browser is going back to the drawing board after the company announced plans to delay the rollout from early 2022 to late 2023, pushing back the project by nearly two years. "While there's considerable progress with this...

Banning Surveillance-Based Advertising

The Norwegian Consumer Council just published a fantastic new report: "Time to Ban Surveillance-Based Advertising." From the Introduction: The challenges caused and entrenched by surveillance-based advertising include, but are not limited to: privacy and data protection infringements opaque...

Google to Let Android Users Opt-Out to Stop Ads From Tracking Them

Google is tightening its privacy practices that could make it harder for apps on Android phones and tablets to track users who have opted out of receiving personalized interest-based ads. The change will go into effect sometime in late 2021. The development, which mirrors Apple's move to enable...

Facebook bans Signal ads that reveal the depth of what it knows about you

Most of our readers are well aware of the fact that the big tech corporations, especially those that run social media know a great deal about us and our behavior. But it rarely hits home how much personal data they have about us and how they can guess, quite correctly, even more. Lots more. Signa...

Google's Grand Plan to Eradicate Cookies Is Crumbling

Regulators in the EU and competitors have raised concerns about the company's proposals to rewrite the rules of online advertising...

Chrome users, here’s how to opt out of the Google FLoC trial

Two weeks after Google launched a trial to replace run-of-the-mill online user tracking with new-fangled online user tracking, several companies and organizations have pushed back, criticizing the new technology—called FLoC—which is designed to respect peoples privacy more, as a detriment to user...

Millions of Chrome users quietly added to Google’s FLoC pilot

Last month, Google began a test pilot of its Federated Learning of Cohorts—or FLoC—program, which the company has advertised as the newest, privacy-preserving alternative in Google Chrome to the infamous third-party cookie. Sounds promising, right? Well, about that. Despite Google’s rhetoric abou...

Google limits which apps can access the list of installed apps on your device

Apps on Android have been able to infer the presence of specific apps, or even collect the full list of installed apps on the device. What's more, an app can also set to be notified when a new app is installed. Apart from all the usual concerns about misuse of such a data grab, the information ca...

New KrebsOnSecurity Mobile-Friendly Site

Dear Readers, this has been long overdue, but at last I give you a more responsive, mobile-friendly version of KrebsOnSecurity. We tried to keep the visual changes to a minimum and focus on a simple theme that presents information in a straightforward, easy-to-read format. Please bear with us ove...

Will Google’s Privacy Sandbox take the bite out of tracking cookies?

Third-party cookies have been the lynchpin of online advertising for many years. Plans to phase cookies out forever continue to run at a steady pace, with Google in the driving seat. In 2019, it announced its vision for a “Privacy Sandbox”. The building blocks for this were essentially: 1. Most...