Crown Sterling Claims to Factor RSA Keylengths First Factored Twenty Years Ago

Earlier this month, I made fun of a company called Crown Sterling, for...for...for being a company that deserves being made fun of. This morning, the company announced that they "decrypted two 256-bit asymmetric public keys in approximately 50 seconds from a standard laptop computer." Really. The...

300 shades of gray: a look into free mobile VPN apps

The times, they are a changin'. When users once felt free to browse the Internet anonymously, post about their innermost lives on social media, and download apps with frivolity, folks are playing things a little closer to the vest these days. Nowadays, users are paying more attention to privacy a...

Leaky Server Exposes 419M Phone Numbers of Facebook Users

Phone numbers linked to the Facebook accounts of hundreds of millions of users has been found online on an insecure server in the latest privacy gaffe for the social media giant. The server, which lacked password protection, contained more than 419 million records over several databases of Facebo...

Firefox 69 Now Blocks 3rd-Party Tracking Cookies and Cryptominers By Default

Mozilla has finally enabled the "Enhanced Tracking Protection" feature for all of its web browser users worldwide by default with the official launch of Firefox 69 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. The company enabled the "Enhanced Tracking Protection" setting by default for its browser in Ju...

Chinese Face-Swapping App ZAO Sparks Privacy Concerns After Going Crazily Viral

What could be more exciting than seeing yourself starring alongside your favorite actor in a movie, music video, or TV program? Yes, that's possible—well, kind of, by using a new AI-based deepfake app that has gone viral in China over this weekend, climbing to the top of the free apps list in the...

Chinese Face-Swapping App ZAO Sparks Privacy Concerns After Going Crazily Viral

What could be more exciting than seeing yourself starring alongside your favorite actor in a movie, music video, or TV program? Yes, that's possible—well, kind of, by using a new AI-based deepfake app that has gone viral in China over this weekend, climbing to the top of the free apps list in the...

News Wrap: Dentist Offices Hit By Ransomware, Venmo Faces Privacy Firestorm

In this week’s news wrap podcast, editor Lindsey O’Donnell and Tara Seals break down the top news of the week – from ransomware attacks to companies responding to outcry over privacy issues. Top stories include: Ring announced it is working with more than 400 US police departments to streamline...

Venmo's Public Transactions Policy Stirs Privacy Concerns

Your simple $5 Venmo payment to a friend after splitting a pizza could easily expedite various malicious attacks, from stalking to spear-phishing, according to researcher concerns. Many have weighed in on Venmo’s privacy practices, but the latest are Mozilla Foundation and the Electronic Frontier...

Facebook Records User Audio, Sparking Privacy Questions

Facebook has admitted that it has been transcribing audio chats between its users on its Messenger platform. Sources said that it’s paying hundreds to third-party outside contractors to do so. The latter calls into question Facebook’s data-handling practices when it comes to being open with its...

Facial recognition technology: force for good or privacy threat?

All across the world, governments and corporations are looking to invest in or develop facial recognition technology. From law enforcement to marketing campaigns, facial recognition is poised to make a splashy entrance into the mainstream. Biometrics are big business, and third party contracts...

This Tesla Mod Turns a Model S Into a Mobile 'Surveillance Station'

The Surveillance Detection Scout can track license plates and faces near your Tesla—with all the privacy concerns that implies...

Facebook Plans on Backdooring WhatsApp

This article points out that Facebook's planned content moderation scheme will result in an encryption backdoor into WhatsApp: In Facebook's vision, the actual end-to-end encryption client itself such as WhatsApp will include embedded content moderation and blacklist filtering algorithms. These...

Amazon Alexa, Google Home Are On a Collision Course With Regulation

Voice assistants are growing rapidly in popularity — but at the same time, the privacy concerns and security issues with popular home assistant devices like Amazon Echo and Google Home are peaking too. Earlier in July, Amazon came under fire after acknowledging that it retains the voice recording...

Parental monitoring apps: How do they differ from stalkerware?

In late June, Malwarebytes revived its long-running campaign against a vicious type of malware in use today. This malware peers into text messages. It pinpoints victims’ movements across locations. It reveals browsing and search history. Often hidden from users, it removes their expectation of,...

Bluetooth Flaws Could Allow Global Tracking of Apple, Windows 10 Devices

Vulnerabilities in the way Bluetooth Low Energy is implemented on devices by manufacturers can open the door to global device tracking for the Windows 10, iOS and macOS devices that incorporate it, according to research from Boston University. An academic team at BU uncovered the flaws, which exi...

CVE-2014-10374

On Fitbit activity-tracker devices, certain addresses never change. According to the popets-2019-0036.pdf document, this leads to "permanent trackability" and "considerable privacy concerns" without a user-accessible anonymization feature. The devices, such as Charge 2, transmit Bluetooth Low...

Design/Logic Flaw

On Fitbit activity-tracker devices, certain addresses never change. According to the popets-2019-0036.pdf document, this leads to "permanent trackability" and "considerable privacy concerns" without a user-accessible anonymization feature. The devices, such as Charge 2, transmit Bluetooth Low...

CVE-2014-10374

CVE-2014-10374 concerns Fitbit activity-tracker devices where BLE advertising uses a TxAdd flag for random addresses, but the addresses remain constant. This leads to “permanent trackability” and privacy concerns when a device is sniffed at multiple fixed locations, enabling an adversary to tell ...

CVE-2014-10374

On Fitbit activity-tracker devices, certain addresses never change. According to the popets-2019-0036.pdf document, this leads to "permanent trackability" and "considerable privacy concerns" without a user-accessible anonymization feature. The devices, such as Charge 2, transmit Bluetooth Low...

Research on Human Honesty

New research from Science: "Civic honesty around the globe": Abstract: Civic honesty is essential to social capital and economic development, but is often in conflict with material self-interest. We examine the trade-off between honesty and self-interest using field experiments in 355 cities...