“Ethnicity recognition” tool listed on surveillance camera app store built by fridge-maker’s video analytics startup

The bizarre promotional video promises “Face analysis based on best of breed Artificial Intelligence algorithms for Business Intelligence and Digital Signage applications.” What follows is footage of a woman pushing her hair behind her ears, a man grimacing and baring his teeth, and an actor in a...

IRS To Ditch Biometric Requirement for Online Access

The Internal Revenue Service IRS said today it will be transitioning away from requiring biometric data from taxpayers who wish to access their records at the agencys website. The reversal comes as privacy experts and lawmakers have been pushing the IRS and other federal agencies to find less...

ControllerV1.sol initialization function callable multiple times

Handle sirhashalot Vulnerability details Impact The initialize function in ControllerV1.sol has a comment of "This function is not supposed to call multiple times" but it has no checks that prevent it from being called multiple times. An initialization function should only be possible to call onc...

Me on App Store Monopolies and Security

There are two bills working their way through Congress that would force companies like Apple to allow competitive app stores. Apple hates this, since it would break its monopoly, and its making a variety of security arguments to bolster its argument. I have written a rebuttal: I would like to...

What's the Deal With Anti-Cheat Software in Online Games?

Cheat deterrents like kernel drivers are raising legitimate privacy concerns. But it's not all bad news...

Google Has a New Plan to Kill Cookies. People Are Still Mad

Google has scrapped FLoC, its controversial cookie replacement. Now it’s back with Topics—but rivals and privacy experts are still nervous...

Is the Internet of Things the Next Ransomware Target?

Ransomware attacks over the last couple years have been traumatic, impacting nearly every business sector and costing billions of dollars. The targets have mostly been our data: steal it, encrypt it, and then charge us a fee to get it back. Over the last several years, there's been concern across...

Signal CEO Resigns, WhatsApp Co-Founder Takes Over as Interim CEO

Moxie Marlinspike, the founder of the popular encrypted instant messaging service Signal, has announced that he is stepping down as the chief executive of the non-profit in a move that has been underway over the last few months. "In other words, after a decade or more, it's difficult to overstate...

Audio bugging with the Fisher Price Chatter Bluetooth Telephone

The Fisher Price Chatter Bluetooth Telephone is a reincarnation of a familiar kids toy. It acts as a Bluetooth headset, so the user can connect their smartphone to it and take calls using the kids phone handset. Cute! Unfortunately, little to no consideration has been given to privacy and securit...

5 security lessons from 18 months of working from home

A little more than 20 months ago, many people around the world were asked or instructed to work from home to help slow the spread of COVID-19. It caused a seismic change to the way we all do business. Now, our latest research reveals how IT decision makers security concerns have been changed by...

New research shows IoT and OT innovation is critical to business but comes with significant risks

The need for much improved IoT and operational technology OT cybersecurity became clearer this year with recent attacks on network devices,1 surveillance systems,2 an oil pipeline,3 and a water treatment facility,4 to name a few examples. To better understand the challenges customers are facing,...

New research shows IoT and OT innovation is critical to business but comes with significant risks

The need for much improved IoT and operational technology OT cybersecurity became clearer this year with recent attacks on network devices,1 surveillance systems,2 an oil pipeline,3 and a water treatment facility,4 to name a few examples. To better understand the challenges customers are facing,...

Planned Parenthood Breach Opens Patients to Follow-On Attacks

Planned Parenthood’s Los Angeles PPLA division has been hacked, with cyberattackers making off with sensitive personal health information for at least 400,000 patients. In a data-breach notice PDF filed with the state of California, the organization said that it had detected the intrusion on Oct...

Scalpers, and their bot armies, swing in to net web-based Spiderman tickets

29 November 2021 was “Spider Monday” and tickets for Marvel’s film Spider-Man: No Way Home went on sale with the sort of marketing fervor for which Disney and the Marvel Cinematic Universe MCU are famous. As tickets to one of the most eagerly anticipated Christmas films featuring one of the most...

What is facial recognition?

Facebook recently announced it would give up on its facial recognition system. Facebook, or Meta, was using software to automatically identify people in images posted to its social network. Since facial recognition has become an increasingly toxic concept in many circles and Facebook was having...

Facebook Postpones Plans for E2E Encryption in Messenger, Instagram Until 2023

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, disclosed that it doesn't intend to roll out default end-to-end encryption E2EE across all its messaging services until 2023, pushing its original plans by at least a year. "We're taking our time to get this right and we don't plan to...

CVE-2021-3572 vulnerabilities

Vulnerabilities for packages: pypy-bootstrap...

Facebook to Shut Down Facial Recognition System and Delete Billions of Records

Facebook's newly-rebranded parent company Meta on Tuesday announced plans to discontinue its decade-old "Face Recognition" system and delete a massive trove of more than a billion users' facial recognition templates as part of a wider initiative to limit the use of the technology across its...

On Cell Phone Metadata

Interesting Twitter thread on how cell phone metadata can be used to identify and track people who dont want to be identified and tracked...

How social media mistakes can impact cybersecurity

We talked to members of our Malware Removal Support team and asked them what kind of problems they get asked to solve for our customers. To understand why they get to handle these questions, it is also necessary to know that the Malwarebytes software is unable to resolve the problems users are...