Respect in Security: Anti-Harrassment Initiative

Respect in Security aims to make a concrete difference to the levels of abuse and harassment that are unfortunately all too common in our industry...

Serial Swatter Who Caused Death Gets Five Years in Prison

A 18-year-old Tennessee man who helped set in motion a fraudulent distress call to police that led to the death of a 60-year-old grandfather in 2020 was sentenced to 60 months in prison today. 60-year-old Mark Herring died of a heart attack after police surrounded his home in response to a swatti...

Can two VPN “wrongs” make a right? Lock and Code S02E10

This week on Lock and Code, were presenting you something a little different. Were telling you a story—with no guest interview included—that involves the use of VPNs. In 2016, a mid-20s man began an intense, prolonged harassment campaign against his new roommate. He emailed her from spoofed email...

Slack hurries to fix direct message flaw that allowed harassment

The enormous work messaging platform Slack quickly reversed course yesterday, promising to revise a brand-new direct message feature that could have been misused for harassment. Added to the company’s “Slack Connect” product—which lets enterprise users share messages with contract workers and...

Mother charged with using deepfakes to shame daughter’s cheerleading rivals

A Pennsylvania woman reportedly sent doctored photos and videos of her daughters cheerleader rivals to their coaches, in an attempt to embarrass them and get them kicked off the team. Shes alleged to have used deepfake technology to create photo and video depictions of the girls naked, drinking,...

A Bird-Feed Seller Beat a Chess Master. Then It Got Ugly

Twitch and YouTube chess star Levy Rozman has faced over a week of sustained harassment after calling out an alleged cheater...

Defending online anonymity and speech with Eva Galperin: Lock and Code S02E03

This week on Lock and Code, we discuss the top security headlines generated right here on Labs. In addition, we talk to Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity for Electronic Frontier Foundation, about the importance of protecting online anonymity and speech. In January, the New York Times expose...

The state of stalkerware in 2020

The state of stalkerware in 2020 PDF Main findings Kasperskys data shows that the scale of the stalkerware issue has not improved much in 2020 compared to the last year: The number of people affected is still high. In total, 53,870 of our mobile users were affected globally by stalkerware in 2020...

FBI Warn Hackers are Using Hijacked Home Security Devices for 'Swatting'

Stolen email passwords are being used to hijack smart home security systems to “swat” unsuspecting users, the Federal Bureau of Investigation warned this week. The announcement comes after concerned device manufacturers alerted law enforcement about the issue. Swatting is a dangerous prank where...

A Hidden Risk for Domestic Violence Victims: Family Phone Plans

Abusers can use shared accounts to stalk and harass victims, and plans aren’t always easy to escape...

Former eBay Execs Allegedly Made Life Hell for Critics

Surveillance. Harassment. A live cockroach delivery. US attorneys have charged six former eBay workers in association with an outrageous cyberstalking campaign...

Cybersecurity for journalists: How to defeat threat actors and defend freedom of the press

When you’re a journalist or work for the press, there may be times when you need to take extra cybersecurity precautions—more so than your Average Joe. Whether a reporter is trying to crowd-source information without revealing their story or operating in a country where freedom of the press is a...

Neo-Nazi SWATters Target Dozens of Journalists

Nearly three dozen journalists at a broad range of major publications have been targeted by a far-right group that maintains a Deep Web database listing the personal information of people who threaten their views. This group specializes in encouraging others to harass those targeted by their ire,...

Adult Sites Lack Privacy, Open the Door for Harassment and Tracking

An analysis of 22,500 porn sites found that third-party tracking of users is rampant, privacy policies are difficult to understand and a majority fail to implement basic HTTPS encryption. In all, it’s a recipe for enabling sexual violence and shaming, according to an academic paper released this...

1 in 3 Americans Suffered Severe Online Harassment in 2018

And roughly 80 percent of Americans say tech companies should do more to prevent it, according to a new survey from the Anti-Defamation League...

Snowden’s Attorney Urges Canada to Take in Whistleblower Helpers (Part Two)

In our second part of Threatpost’s interview of lawyer Robert Tibbo, who represented former N.S.A. contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden, Tibbo describes the present day systematic harassment of families that sheltered Snowden while he was in Hong Kong in 2013. Tibbo also describes how h...

Snowden’s Attorney Talks Govt Harrassment of Whistleblower Helpers (Part One)

Human rights lawyer Robert Tibbo represented former N.S.A. contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden when he fled the United States to Hong Kong in 2013. Less publicized has been Tibbo’s work representing several families from the Hong Kong refugee community that welcomed Snowden into their...

International Women’s Day: Women in tech share their stories

From the metoo movement to Oprah's Time's Up speech to the women's marches on cities throughout the world—it's been a banner year for women's rights. And on this International Women's Day, we wanted to do more than pay lip service to the changes in feminist dialogue. After all, tech is an industr...

Harassment By Package Delivery

People harassing women by delivering anonymous packages purchased from Amazon. On the one hand, there is nothing new here. This could have happened decades ago, pre-Internet. But the Internet makes this easier, and the article points out that using prepaid gift cards makes this anonymous. I am...

Harassment scandals, Sheldon Cooper, Black Mirror and blockchain

Lots of good jokes in a popular TV show The Big Bang Theory are related to Sheldon Cooper's bureaucracy in interpersonal relationships: all these "roommate agreement", "relationship agreement", etc. However, because of these endless harassment scandals in media, now it seems like a best practice ...