Clear Message Sent: Don’t Roll the Dice on Data Privacy Compliance

Last month, two leading companies each received what were then record-setting fines for data breach violations: £183 million for British Airways and then, just two weeks later, $5 billion for Facebook. Regulators sent a clear message to organizations around the world — if you don't treat your...

Black Hat 2019: Ethical Hackers Must Protect Digital Human Rights

LAS VEGAS – At a time when technology is being utilized for human-rights abuses, the security space needs to turn its focus to public interest defense technology, security stalwarts urged during Black Hat USA 2019. Security has long focused on protecting company data and providing cyber-defense f...

'Opt Out' Is Useless. Let People Opt In

It's not so crazy to want Big Tech to ask for your data—and conversations with AI assistants—before they take it...

Threat Source newsletter (July 25, 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. No one really likes talking about election security. It’s a sticky subject, costs lots of money and doesn’t come with an easy fix...

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...

CVE-2019-2668

Vulnerability in the Oracle One-to-One Fulfillment component of Oracle E-Business Suite subcomponent: Print Server. Supported versions that are affected are 12.1.1 - 12.1.3 and 12.2.3 - 12.2.8. Easily exploitable vulnerability allows unauthenticated attacker with network access via HTTP to...

Think FaceApp Is Scary? Wait Till You Hear About Facebook

The idea that FaceApp is somehow exceptionally dangerous threatens to obscure the real point: All apps deserve this level of scrutiny...

A week in security (July 8 – 14)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs, we looked at ways to send your sensitive information in a secure fashion, examined some tactics in incident response land, and explored federal data privacy law. We also looked at how security tools can turn against you, and took a deep dive into the rather fiendis...

Google Home Captures Porn and More, Unbeknownst to Users

Google Home smart speakers and the Google Assistant virtual assistant have been caught eavesdropping without permission — capturing and recording highly personal audio of domestic violence, confidential business calls — and even some users asking their smart speakers to play porn on their connect...

What should a US federal data privacy law ideally include?

In the constant David-and-Goliath struggle between digital privacy advocates and corporate privacy invaders, the question of how to legally protect Americans with a comprehensive, federal data privacy law provides conflicting answers. Advocates want protections, which Big Tech interprets as...

Marriott Faces $123 Million GDPR Fine Over Starwood Data Breach

After fining British Airways with a record fine of £183 million earlier this week, the UK's data privacy regulator is now planning to slap world's biggest hotel chain Marriott International with a £99 million $123 million fine under GDPR over 2014 data breach. This is the second major penalty...

Amazon Admits Alexa Voice Recordings Saved Indefinitely

Amazon has acknowledged that it retains the voice recordings and transcripts of customers’ interactions with its Alexa voice assistant indefinitely. The admission raises questions about how long companies should be able to save highly-personal data collected from voice assistant devices. After U....

Smart cities, difficult choices: privacy and security on the grid

All is not well in the land of smart city planning, as the latest major planned development from Google's sister company Sidewalk Labs continues to run into problems in Toronto, Canada. A groundswell of support? Building a city “From the ground up” is apparently no longer a thing: at least some...

Maine inches closer to shutting down ISP pay-for-privacy schemes

Maine residents are one step closer to being protected from the unapproved use, sharing, and sale of their data by Internet service providers ISPs. A new state bill, already approved by the state House of Representatives and Senate, awaits the governor’s signature. If signed, the bill would provi...

Is 'Sign in with Apple' Marketing Spin or Privacy Magic? Experts Weigh In

Apple’s “Sign in with Apple” feature promises to protect user privacy – and while many are looking at that claim as more of a marketing move than anything else, authentication experts say it has the potential to have an enormous impact on the data privacy ecosystem. The giant from Cupertino took...

NIST’s privacy framework lets privacy tell its own story

Online privacy remains unsolved. Congress prods at it, some companies fumble with it while a small handful excel, and the public demands it. But one government agency is trying to bring everyone together to fix it. As the Senate sits on no fewer than four data privacy bills that their own members...

Snapchat Privacy Blunder Piques Concerns About Insider Threats

Snap, the company behind the popular Snapchat social media app, has found itself in hot water after a recent report revealed that Snap employees were abusing their access to private user data – which includes location data, saved Snaps and phone numbers. According to a Thursday Motherboard report...

Flyeralarm Secures Web Shop with RIPS

Download PDF The Challenge At FLYERALARM, around 15,000 products and 24,000 dispatches are coordinated on a daily bases by a PHP-based web shop and backend that drives the major revenue of the company. Every day, the complex code base is customized and advanced by 80+ developers to meet new...

Twitter Leaks Apple iOS Users' Location Data to Ad Partner

Twitter has disclosed a security bug in its platform that it said inadvertently leaked iOS users’ location data. The Twitter for iOS bug leaked location data at the ZIP code or city level, according to the social media company’s announcement on Monday. Twitter stressed that it has fixed the bug,...

The top six takeaways for user privacy

Last week, Malwarebytes Labs began closing out our data privacy and cybersecurity law blog series, a two-month long exploration spanning five continents, 50 states, just as many data breach notification laws, three non-universal definitions of personal information and personal data, five pending ...