Changing California’s privacy law: A snapshot at the support and opposition

This month, the corporate-backed, legislative battle against California privacy met a blockade, as one Senate committee voted down and negotiated changes to several bills that, as originally written, could have weakened the state’s data privacy law, the California Consumer Privacy Act. Though the...

Threat Source newsletter (July 18, 2019)

Newsletter compiled by Jonathan Munshaw. Welcome to this week’s Threat Source newsletter — the perfect place to get caught up on all things Talos from the past week. A group we’re calling “SWEED” may be behind years of Agent Tesla attacks. This week, we uncovered everything we know about this...

Facebook Faces Lawsuit Over Massive 2018 Data Breach

Facebook lost a key court ruling last week and now must face a lawsuit tied to a data breach of its platform disclosed in 2018, which impacted nearly 30 million of its users. The data breach, first disclosed by Facebook in September 2018, directly impacted the access tokens of 30 million accounts...

Amazon Alexa Secretly Records Children, Lawsuits Allege

A federal lawsuit is alleging that Amazon is recording children who use its Alexa devices, without their consent or knowledge. Alexa is the built-in voice assistant shipped with devices like Amazon Echo, Amazon Dot, Fire TV and some third-party gadgets. “Alexa routinely records and voiceprints...

Student uses Snapchat’s gender filter to bust pervert cop

By Uzair Amir The cop thought he was talking to an underage girl but it was a grown-up man using Snapchat’s gender filter. A 20-year old student from California’s San Francisco Bay Area used the much-criticized gender-swapping filter of Snapchat to catch a 40-year old police officer. According to...

Millions of Golfers Land in Privacy Hazard After Cloud Misconfig

Finding cloud databases with sensitive information left open to the internet has become par for the course these days – as a new exposure of millions of sensitive data points for the users of a golf app demonstrates. Millions of golfer records from the Game Golf app, including GPS details from...

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak: I'm speaking at the Code for America Summit in Oakland, California on May 30, 2019. I'm speaking on "Securing a World of Physically Capable Computers" at Oxford University on Monday, June 17, 2019. The list is maintained on this pa...

The top six takeaways for corporate data privacy compliance

For nearly two months, Malwarebytes Labs has led readers on a journey through data privacy laws around the world, exploring the nuances between “personal information” and “personal data,” as well as between data breach notification laws in Florida, Utah, California, and Iowa. We explored the risk...

CyberAegis Aether Competition Team Reflects Bright Future for Young Women in STEM & Cybersecurity

I am always excited to get involved in conversations around getting more young women into STEM earlier. Recently, I was able to catch up with the members of the CyberAegis Aether team, an all-girls, middle school cybersecurity competition team. Here is what they had to say: Tell us a little bit...

First Hacker Convicted of 'SIM Swapping' Attack Gets 10 Years in Prison

A 20-year-old college student who stole cryptocurrency worth more than $5 million by hijacking victims' phone numbers has pleaded guilty and accepted a sentence of 10 years in prison. Ortiz was arrested last year on charges of siphoning millions of dollars in cryptocurrency from around 40 victims...

The California Consumer Privacy Act: Will It Apply to Your Organization?

In August 2018, California issued a revised version of a new consumer privacy law--the California Consumer Privacy Act CCPA. This statute goes into effect on January 1, 2020 and provides broad privacy protections to California consumers. This statute will have wide-ranging effects outside of...

A week in security (January 14 – 20)

Last week on the Malwarebytes Labs blog, we took a look at how the government shutdown is influencing cybersecurity jobs, Advanced Persistent Threats group APT10, the comeback of Fallout EK, the hosting of malicious sites on legitimate servers, and the Collection 1 data breach. Other cybersecurit...

Wallarm to Sponsor AppSec Cali

If you are a SecOps or DevOps professional on the west coast you can not miss the premier California application security event: AppSec California, January 22–25th in Santa Monica. Here are testimonials from the previous AppSec Cali events: “I'm looking forward to AppSecCali next week. Last year...

VOIPO Database Exposes Millions of Texts, Call Logs

UPDATE An improperly secured database owned by a California voice-over-internet provider left millions of customer call logs, SMS message logs and credentials in plain text open for months for the taking. The database belongs to VOIPO, which provides mobile services for consumers and commercial...

Unprotected VOIP Server Exposed Millions of SMS Messages, Call Logs

A California-based Voice-Over-IP VoIP services provider VOIPO has accidentally left tens of gigabytes of its customer data, containing millions of call logs, SMS/MMS messages, and plaintext internal system credentials, publicly accessible to anyone without authentication. VOIPo is one of a leadin...

School hackers steal personal data of half a million students & staff

By Waqas A school district in the United States has suffered a cyber attack in which unknown hackers managed to steal a trove of personal data belonging to over 500,000 staff and students. The targeted school was San Diego Unified School District in California whose database was accessed by hacke...

San Diego School District Data Breach Hits 500k Students

A phishing attack against California’s San Diego Unified School District has led to hackers scooping up Social Security numbers and addresses of more than 500,000 students and staff. The district became aware of the breach Oct. 2018. The actual breach occurred between January 2001 and November...

“Fire Danger Rating” on “High” in Security Climate

November was a scary month in California. After four years of drought, the forests and towns in the northern part of the state exploded into wildfires, displacing thousands of residents and destroying millions of dollars of property. The foul air in San Francisco and the surrounding areas was a...

californiaoutdoorproperties.com XSS vulnerability

Open Bug Bounty ID: OBB-702506 Description| Value ---|--- Affected Website:| californiaoutdoorproperties.com Open Bug Bounty Program:| Create your bounty program now. It's open and free. Vulnerable Application:| Custom Code Vulnerability Type:| XSS Cross Site Scripting / CWE-79 CVSSv3 Score:| 6.1...

Calif. Man Pleads Guilty in Fatal Swatting Case, Faces 20+ Years in Prison

A California man who pleaded guilty Tuesday to causing dozens of swatting attacks -- including a deadly incident in Kansas last year -- now faces 20 or more years in prison. Tyler Raj Barriss, in an undated selfie. Tyler Barriss, 25, went by the nickname SWAuTistic on Twitter, and reveled in...