Top 10 Cybersecurity Trends for 2023: From Zero Trust to Cyber Insurance

As technology advances, cyberattacks are becoming more sophisticated. With the increasing use of technology in our daily lives, cybercrime is on the rise, as evidenced by the fact that cyberattacks caused 92% of all data breaches in the first quarter of 2022. Staying current with cybersecurity...

Italian Watchdog Bans OpenAI's ChatGPT Over Data Protection Concerns

The Italian data protection watchdog, Garante per la Protezione dei Dati Personali aka Garante, has imposed a temporary ban of OpenAI's ChatGPT service in the country, citing data protection concerns. To that end, it has ordered the company to stop processing users' data with immediate effect,...

Porn ID Laws: Your State or Country May Soon Require Age Verification

An increasing number of states are passing age-verification laws. It’s not clear how they’ll work...

Banning TikTok

Congress is currently debating bills that would ban TikTok in the United States. We are here as technologists to tell you that this is a terrible idea and the side effects would be intolerable. Details matter. There are several ways Congress might ban TikTok, each with different efficacies and si...

TikTok CEO told to "step up efforts to comply" with digital laws

EU Commissioner Thierry Breton, the EU's digital policy chief, "explicitly conveyed" to TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew that the company must "step up efforts to comply" with the European Union's rules on copyright, data protection, and the Digital Services Act DSA--an EU regulation setting out "an...

What Stricter Data Privacy Laws Mean for Your Cybersecurity Policies

For today's businesses data privacy is already a big headache, and with modern privacy laws expanding to more of the world's population, regulatory compliance is on track to become a more complicated, high-stakes process touching on every aspect of an organization. In fact, Gartner predicts that ...

Irish Regulator Fines Facebook $277 Million for Leak of Half a Billion Users' Data

Ireland's Data Protection Commission DPC has levied fines of €265 million $277 million against Meta Platforms for failing to safeguard the personal data of more than half a billion users of its Facebook service, ramping up privacy enforcement against U.S. tech firms. The fines follow an inquiry...

Court rules webcam monitoring of remote employee was an invasion of privacy

A Dutch court has ruled that the decision to fire a remote employee because he refused to keep his webcam on during working hours was unjustified. The employee worked remotely for a Florida-based software development company with a Dutch office. The court ruled that the request to keep the webcam...

Spyware Maker Intellexa Sued by Journalist

The Greek journalist Thanasis Koukakis was spied on by his own government, with a commercial spyware product called "Predator." That product is sold by a company in North Macedonia called Cytrox, which is in turn owned by an Israeli company called Intellexa. Koukakis is suing Intellexa. The lawsu...

Coffee app in hot water for constant tracking of user location

A mobile app violated Canadas privacy laws via some pretty significant overreach with its tracking of device owners. The violation will apparently not bring the app owners, Tim Hortons, any form of punishment. However, the fallout from this incident may hopefully serve as a warning to others with...

Is Leaking a SCOTUS Opinion a Crime? The Law Is Far From Clear

The leak of a draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade quickly sparked a court investigation. Which laws may have been violated, if any, remains uncertain...

Why data protection and privacy are not the same, and why that matters: Lock and Code S03E09

Theres a mistake commonly made in the United States that a law that was passed to help people move their healthcare information to a new doctor or provider was actually passed to originally implement universal, wide-ranging privacy controls on that same type of information. This is the mixup with...

Chinese Hackers Target Taiwan's Financial Trading Sector with Supply Chain Attack

An advanced persistent threat APT group operating with objectives aligned with the Chinese government has been linked to an organized supply chain attack on Taiwan's financial sector. The attacks are said to have first commenced at the end of November 2021, with the intrusions attributed to a...

Facebook Agrees to Pay $90 Million to Settle Decade-Old Privacy Violation Case

Meta Platforms has agreed to pay $90 million to settle a lawsuit over the company's use of cookies to allegedly track Facebook users' internet activity even after they had logged off from the platform. In addition, the social media company will be required to delete all of the data it illegally...

A week in security (February 7 – February 13)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs: Securitas breached, 3TB of airport employee records exposed How to avoid being scammed this Valentine’s Day News Corp falls victim to cyberattack “We absolutely do not care about you”: Sugar ransomware targets individuals Microsoft takes macros out of the equation...

France Rules That Using Google Analytics Violates GDPR Data Protection Law

French data protection regulators on Thursday found the use of Google Analytics a breach of the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation GDPR laws in the country, almost a month after a similar decision was reached in Austria. To that end, the National Commission on Informatics and...

Data Privacy Day: Know your rights, and the right tools to stay private

Not all data privacy rights are the same. There’s the flimsy, the firm, the enforceable, and the antiquated, and, unfortunately, much of what determines the quality of your own data privacy rights is little more than your home address. Those in Chile, for example, enjoy a globally rare...

Using Foreign Nationals to Bypass US Surveillance Restrictions

Remember when the US and Australian police surreptitiously owned and operated the encrypted cell phone app ANOM? They arrested 800 people in 2021 based on that operation. New documents received by Motherboard show that over 100 of those phones were shipped to users in the US, far more than...

The 2021 Naughty and Nice Lists: Cybersecurity Edition

Editor’s note: We had planned to publish our Hacky Holidays blog series throughout December 2021 – but then Log4Shell happened, and we dropped everything to focus on this major vulnerability that impacted the entire cybersecurity community worldwide. Now that it’s 2022, we’re feeling in need of...

How to Cultivate a Security-first Approach to Your Business

Businesses of all types and sizes are struggling with complexity. They?re addressing hybrid workforces that need to be secured, digital transformation programs, geographic regulations and data laws, industry regulations, and the list goes on. In the midst of this complexity, organizations have to...