Protect Against Romance Scams

The Federal Trade Commission FTC has released a short video to help users spot and defend against romance scams. In this type of fraud, cyber criminals gain the confidence of their victims and trick them into sending money. The video includes stories that romance scammers tell to online daters to...

Louisiana Gov Declares Emergency After Rampant Cyberattacks Plague Schools

After a rash of public schools were hit with ransomware, Louisiana’s governor has declared a statewide state of emergency. School districts in the northern part of the state – including Monroe City, Morehouse Parish and Sabine Parish – have been affected. Monroe City, on its website, noted that i...

Facebook Agrees to Pay $5 Billion Fine and Setup New Privacy Program for 20 Years

The Federal Trade Commission FTC today officially confirmed that Facebook has agreed to pay a record-breaking $5 billion fine over privacy violations surrounding the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Besides the multibillion-dollar penalty, the company has also accepted a 20-year-long agreement that...

Privacy Experts: Facebook's $5B Fine Unlikely to Do Much

The $5 billion fine that the Federal Trade Commission has slapped on Facebook for privacy violations may be the largest ever levied by the agency, but it’s being derided as “chump change” and ineffective by lawmakers and privacy analysts. The settlement, reported Friday evening, stems from...

Facebook to Pay $5 Billion Fine to Settle FTC Privacy Investigation

After months of negotiations, the United States Federal Trade Commission FTC has approved a record $5 billion settlement with Facebook over its privacy investigation into the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The settlement will put an end to a wide-ranging probe that began more than a year ago and...

FEC: Campaigns Can Use Discounted Cybersecurity Services

The U.S. Federal Election Commission FEC said today political campaigns can accept discounted cybersecurity services from companies without running afoul of existing campaign finance laws, provided those companies already do the same for other non-political entities. The decision comes amid much...

D-Link Agrees to 10 Years of Security Audits to Settle FTC Charges

Taiwanese networking equipment manufacturer D-Link has agreed to implement a "comprehensive software security program" in order to settle a Federal Trade Commission FTC lawsuit alleging that the company didn't take adequate steps to protect its consumers from hackers. Your wireless router is the...

Under Trump, Cybersecurity Has Waned

Opinion: Congress has abdicated its role in preventing and punishing cyberattacks. The Cyber Solarium Commission is our best defense...

FTC Releases Alert on Updating Software

The Federal Trade Commission FTC has released an alert on keeping software up to date to help protect sensitive information such as financial and tax information. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency CISA encourages consumers to review the FTC article and FTC’s OnGuardOnline for...

VLC Player Gets Patched for Two High-Severity Bugs

Maintainers of the popular open-source VLC media player patched two high-severity bugs Friday. The flaws were an out-of-bound write vulnerability and a stack-buffer-overflow bug. Developers behind the software, VideoLAN, said the patches were two of 33 fixes being pushed out to the media player a...

Hackers Stole Customers' Credit Cards from 103 Checkers and Rally's Restaurants

If you have swiped your payment card at the popular Checkers and Rally's drive-through restaurant chains in past 2-3 years, you should immediately request your bank to block your card and notify it if you notice any suspicious transaction. Checkers, one of the largest drive-through restaurant...

Beers with Talos Ep. #53: Shiny happy election security (and ninjas)

Beers with Talos BWT Podcast Ep. 53 is now available. Download this episode and subscribe to Beers with Talos: If iTunes and Google Play aren't your thing, click here. Recorded May 10, 2019 — Election security has been a dominant headline for some time, so it’s high time we take a look at what th...

Apple Defends Parental Control App Removal Amid Backlash

Apple is defending its decision to take down several highly popular parental control apps amidst a firestorm of backlash, saying it did so for “privacy and security” reasons. Apple came under scrutiny this weekend after a New York Times article alleged that the phone giant had unfairly removed or...

New York, Canada, Ireland Launch New Investigations Into Facebook Privacy Breaches

Facebook has a lot of problems, then there are a lot of problems for Facebook—and both are not going to end anytime sooner. Though Facebook has already set aside $5 billion from its revenue to cover a possible fine the company is expecting as a result of an FTC investigation over privacy...

New York, Canada, Ireland Launch New Investigations Into Facebook Privacy Breaches

Facebook has a lot of problems, then there are a lot of problems for Facebook—and both are not going to end anytime sooner. Though Facebook has already set aside $5 billion from its revenue to cover a possible fine the company is expecting as a result of an FTC investigation over privacy...

Facebook Could Be Fined Up To $5 Billion Over Privacy Violations

Facebook expects to face a massive fine of up to $5 billion from the Federal Trade Commission FTC as the result of an investigation into its privacy policies—that's about one month's revenue for the social media giant. To be clear the amount of fine is not what the FTC has announced or hinted yet...

Facebook May Face $5 Billion FTC Fine for Data Misuse

UPDATE Facebook may be facing fines as high as $5 billion after a year-long Federal Trade Commission FTC investigation into its data-security practices. Though it wasn’t mentioned in its earnings call on Wednesday, the social-media giant in a release for its Q1 2019 earnings said that it was...

Canadian Police Raid ‘Orcus RAT’ Author

Canadian police last week raided the residence of a Toronto software developer behind “Orcus RAT,” a product that’s been marketed on underground forums and used in countless malware attacks since its creation in 2015. Its author maintains Orcus is a legitimate Remote Administration Tool that is...

Midpoint (European Commission - DIGIT): Attacker can read password from log data

Summary: Attacker can read plain text password from log data. Steps To Reproduce: 1. From application dashboard choose Users section, I simultaneously ran process hacker to see the process disk write and read behavior. 2. change the password of one of the users, and you see in process hacker wind...

Google Will Prompt European Android Users to Select Preferred Default Browser

Google announced some major changes for its Android mobile operating system in October after the European Commission hit the company with a record $5 billion antitrust fine for pre-installing its own apps and services on third-party Android phones. The European Commission accused Google of forcin...