“We will hold them accountable”: General Motors sued for selling customer driving data to third parties

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has sued General Motors GM for the unlawful collection and sale of over 1.5 million Texans’ private driving data to insurance companies without their knowledge or consent. In June, the Attorney General AG announced he had opened an investigation into several car...

US senators ask FTC to investigate car makers’ privacy practices

An ongoing US Senate investigation indicated that connected car makers violate consumer privacy by sharing and selling drivers’ data, including their location, on a vast scale, and that the same car makers often obtain consumer consent through deception. Based on this investigation, senators have...

TikTok facing fresh lawsuit in US over children’s privacy

The Federal Trade Commission FTC has announced its referred a complaint against TikTok and parent company ByteDance to the Department of Justice. The investigation originally focused on Musical.ly which was acquired by ByteDance on November 10, 2017, and merged it into TikTok. The FTC started a...

Ring agrees to pay $5.6 million after cameras were used to spy on customers

Amazons Ring has settled with the Federal Trade Commission FTC over charges that the company allowed employees and contractors to access customers private videos, and failed to implement security protections which enabled hackers to take control of customers’ accounts, cameras, and videos. The FT...

The State of Stalkerware in 2023–2024

The State of Stalkerware in 2023 PDF The annual Kaspersky State of Stalkerware report aims to contribute to awareness and a better understanding of how people around the world are impacted by digital stalking. Stalkerware is commercially available software that can be discreetly installed on...

CVE-2024-1942

Mattermost versions 8.1.x before 8.1.9, 9.2.x before 9.2.5, and 9.3.0 fail to sanitize the metadata on posts containing permalinks under specific conditions, which allows an authenticated attacker to access the contents of individual posts in channels they are not a member of...

A Vending Machine Error Revealed Secret Face Recognition Tech

A student investigation at the University of Waterloo uncovered a system that scanned countless undergrads without consent...

FTC Bans InMarket for Selling Precise User Location Without Consent

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission FTC is continuing to clamp down on data brokers by prohibiting InMarket Media from selling or licensing precise location data. The settlement is part of allegations that the Texas-based company did not inform or seek consent from consumers before using their...

Is Web Scraping Illegal? Depends on Who You Ask

Web scraping has existed for a long time, and depending on who you ask, it can be loved or hated. But where is the line drawn between extracting data for legitimate business purposes and malicious data extraction that hurts business? The bar is getting blurrier by the day, and the introduction of...

Judge rules it’s fine for car makers to intercept your text messages

A federal judge has refused to bring back a class action lawsuit that alleged four car manufacturers had violated Washington state’s privacy laws by using vehicles’ on-board infotainment systems to record customers’ text messages and mobile phone call logs. The judge ruled that the practice doesn...

U.S. Dept Of Defense: Elasticsearch is currently open without authentication on https://██████l

An Elasticsearch instance accessible at https://██████l was found to be open without authentication, exposing data to unauthorized access. The vulnerability allowed listing and extraction of sensitive data stored in the Elasticsearch indexes. To mitigate, authentication and authorization controls...

A week in security (August 7 - August 13)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs: Zoom clarifies user consent requirement when training its AI Several hospitals still counting the cost of widespread ransomware attack Old exploit kits still kicking around in 2023 YouTube makes sweeping changes to tackle spam on Shorts videos Googles "browse...

TikTok facing fines for violating children’s privacy

The European Data Protection Board is expected to fine TikTok for violating the privacy of young children within the next four weeks. The European Data Protection Board said a binding decision has been reached over TikTok's processing of childrens data, after the ByteDance-owned app submitted leg...

Privacy Violation: Unauthorized Access to Blocking Status of Profiles

Lines of code Vulnerability details Impact The smart contract contains a critical privacy violation that allows unauthorized users to access the blocking status of profiles. The isBlocked function, which is intended to check if one profile is blocked by another, lacks proper access controls and...

Code injection

tktchurch/website contains the codebase for The King's Temple Church website. In version 0.1.0, a Stripe API key was found in the public code repository of the church's project. This sensitive information was unintentionally committed and subsequently exposed in the codebase. If an unauthorized...

Software company accused of illegally profiling millions of mobile phone users

A digital rights and privacy organization has filed a complaint against software company TeleSign for gathering and selling information on millions of mobile phone users. The organization that filed the complaint is nyob. nyob is an Austrian based digital right organization that focusses on...

Elon Musk and the Dangers of Censoring Real-Time Flight Trackers

Elon Musk claims plane-tracking data is a risky privacy violation. But the world loses a lot if this information disappears—and that's already happening...

Ex-Twitter employee Gets 3.5 Years Jail for Spying on Behalf of Saudi Arabia

A former Twitter employee who was found guilty of spying on behalf of Saudi Arabia by sharing data pertaining to specific individuals has been sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison. Ahmad Abouammo, 45, was convicted earlier this August on various criminal counts, including money launderin...

Computer Repair Technicians Are Stealing Your Data

Laptop technicians routinely violate the privacy of the people whose computers they repair: Researchers at University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, recovered logs from laptops after receiving overnight repairs from 12 commercial shops. The logs showed that technicians from six of the locations ha...

Coffee app in hot water for constant tracking of user location

A mobile app violated Canadas privacy laws via some pretty significant overreach with its tracking of device owners. The violation will apparently not bring the app owners, Tim Hortons, any form of punishment. However, the fallout from this incident may hopefully serve as a warning to others with...