Cyberlaw

Sikur is a smartphone maker that likes to put an emphasis on security. In 2015, the company released the GranitePhone, which offered users multiple layers of data privacy protection. In the meantime, Sikur has been working on a new device, which was announced at the 2018 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The SikurPhone includes an app called SikurWallet, which according to the makers is designed to be the “digital marketplace’s safest wallet.”

In a Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA) session held today, Bill Gates made a comment about cryptocurrencies that suggests he is not currently a huge advocate of the decentralized and unregulated digital payment systems. In contrast, Steve Wozniak has offered a more favorable view of virtual currency, even though he has actually been subject to Bitcoin-trading fraud himself.

French electronics company Archos has unveiled plans to release a hardware wallet that will provide cryptocurrency owners with a physical layer of security for their virtual currency transactions. The Archos Safe-T mini hardware device can be connected to a computer or smartphone via microUSB cable. The wallet will be released in June, 2018 and will cost €49.99 (~US$61).

Apparently the 911 emergency services communication center in Elk Grove, California has been receiving hundreds of calls coming from an Apple repair and refurbishing site in the vicinity. Since October, 2017 the total of 911 calls traced to the facility has reached over 1,600. The calls are believed to be accidental and possibly being caused by the SOS mode that the iPhone and Apple Watch feature.

The President of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, has claimed that the country’s cryptocurrency has enjoyed booming business on the first day of its pre-sale. Apparently, investors have snatched up US$735 million worth of Petro digital currency. Meanwhile, Bitcoiin2Gen (B2G), which has the masterful Steven Seagal as its celebrity ambassador, is currently lagging behind with a still impressive US$27.97 million in its pre-ICO fundraising round.

Instead of using malicious apps or website exploits, hackers just hijacked Tesla's cloud servers and made sure their illicit cryptomining endeavors would not seem suspicious.

The cryptocurrency craze continues as a sovereign state and a controversial celebrity become involved in the virtual currency (VC) industry. Venezuela's government has made its "petro" currency available in a presale launch, while Steven Seagal has been promoting a digital currency called Bitcoiin 2Gen.

The United States Air Force has made bounty payouts totaling US$103,883 to hackers invited to test the force's systems and software. The event ran from December 9, 2017 to January 1, 2018.

White House spokesman, Rob Joyce, doesn't believe the US government is ready to attempt regulating Bitcoin until the good and bad aspects of the cryptocurrency are fully understood. The US official was discussing the topic at the Munich Security Conference in Germany.

The US Department of Defense has stated that the United States Air Force (USAF) must ensure its computers are operating Windows 10 by March 31, 2018. The Microsoft OS is considered to be a crucial component in the overall readiness of the armed service branch.

The imminent release of the LitePay service lead to a sudden appreciation for Litecoin over the past few days. Litecoin is thus expected to become more useful and appreciate even further as LitePay is compatible with Visa-enabled online/offline sale outlets.

Although Facebook already filed an appeal, it is worth mentioning that the Berlin regional court ruled against its data-collection practices, saying that the default settings break the law, while some terms and conditions do not meet the legal standards needed to get the users' effective consent.

Financial regulators have issued warnings that a massive price crash involving Bitcoin and other popular virtual currencies (VC) would lead to financial ruin for many investors. The lucrative VC market is currently worth hundreds of billions of dollars but is notorious for its series of soaring peaks and troughs.

Microsoft has announced support for Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection, a Windows 10 only feature, to Windows 7 SP1 and Windows 8.1. This is to help organizations protect themselves during the transition to Windows 10 from the aforementioned OSs.

The Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities exposed inherent flaws in hardware and software design, which we've been using for many years. Chip vendors and developers alike are scrambling to quickly release fixes to prevent any damage to customer data. Intel, AMD along with motherboard partners and Microsoft have released security patches over the past month to cover the necessary mitigation. This tutorial will help you in determining whether your PC has received the required mitigation so as to thwart any potential abuse of these vulnerabilities.

Friday's Winter Olympics opening ceremony in Pyeongchang came under cyber attack from malware known as "Olympic Destroyer." The virus affected Internet and television services used by media representatives but did not cause any major long-term disruption.

After CoinCheck and NiceHash, the BitGrail hack is the third major incident in less then 4 months. Of course, the Italian exchange kept most of the funds in a hot wallet, and many other exchanges are probably still doing this, practically inviting hackers to rob them blind.

With ransomware on the prowl every other day, it has become all the more important to ensure that critical files are protected from being encrypted or altered. The Windows 10 Fall Creators Update includes a new functionality called Controlled Folder Access that can help prevent modification of critical files and folders by unauthorized software. This tutorial will show you how to enable this functionality to protect both personal and corporate data.

Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) has detained a group of scientists who attempted to use a supercomputer at a top secret nuclear facility to mine Bitcoin. Security was alerted when the would-be miners tried to connect the computer to the Internet.

Microsoft has listed out a few servicing changes to Windows and Office keeping in view the deployment requirements of the enterprise. The company also detailed availability and support cadences of Office 2019 and Windows 10 LTSC.

Apple confirmed that the US Government has asked questions regarding intentional throttling of old iPhones and reaffirmed that it would not degrade the customer experience to force upgrades.

Hackers are trying to spread the stolen NEM coins to as much as 20 accounts, but Coincheck and the NEM Foundation have already tagged all the affected coins, making the affected cryptocurrency easily trackable on exchanges.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Intel had informed select customers about the Meltdown/Spectre vulnerabilities. What's news, however, is that somehow the Chinese Government could have gotten to know about the vulnerabilities much before the US Government did.

Intel has identified the root cause of the recent reboot issues plaguing the company's 'Broadwell' and 'Haswell' chips that received a microcode update for the Meltdown and Spectre exploits. The company has issued an updated guidance for customers and partners in this regard.

In a step up towards addressing the spate of privacy concerns surrounding Windows 10, Microsoft is introducing new privacy tools that will enable users to see the exact data being sent as telemetry information.

The darling of the mobile phone enthusiast community is in hot water once again. Less than a week after it was discovered that OnePlus was sending user data to servers in China without permission, the Chinese OEM's merchant platform was compromised. OnePlus has just revealed the full scope of the attack: up to 40,000 users may have had their credit card information stolen.

F-Secure's security researchers discovered another flaw in Intel's Active Management Technology (AMT) that a hacker can potentially misuse to gain remote access to a system.

Users of older generation 'Haswell' and 'Broadwell' Intel CPUs are reporting of constant reboots after applying patches to address the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities. Intel is looking at issuing a revised firmware to address specific issues related to these CPUs.

With the massive vulnerabilities recently discovered in Intel CPUs, the main question on everyone's minds are when affected devices will be updated to guard against possible exploits. Apple is ahead of the game; apparently, the latest versions of their various operating systems protect against Meltdown, and a fix for Spectre is coming to Safari in the next few days. The best part? These mitigations have no perceptible effect on performance.

Recent changes to NVIDIA's EULA prohibits datacenter deployment of their consumer grade GeForce GPUs apart from those used for blockchain processing. This being seen as a move to curb deployment of cost-effective GeForce GPUs for half-precision Deep Neural Network processing.

Armstrong Zoom Internet has sent notices to its users that copyright infringement can lead to speed throttling that not only affects file transfer but also the ability to remotely control connected devices such as smart thermostats and video monitoring services.

Many Android games have been found to track the user's TV viewing habits for displaying ads. The games use software from Alphonso that collects data from the phone's microphone, identifies the audio stream, and displays targeted advertising.

Vincenzo and Giacomo Barbato have emerged victorious in the legal battle against Apple in naming their brand after Steve Jobs. Their company currently produces clothing and plans to enter into electronics very soon.

In emails to The Verge, HTC and Motorola have clarified that they do not slow down phones as the batteries start wearing out. This comes in the wake of Apple's now controversial policy of slowing down phones with ageing batteries.

A Google security researcher has discovered that the included third-party password manager in Windows 10, Keeper, comes with a security vulnerability that injects privileged UI into web apages that exposes a user's passwords.

Some Firefox users recently found an unwarranted add-on installed in their browsers. The add-on, which is a page tool tied to the popular online show "Mr. Robot," was installed for some users that are a part of Mozilla's Studies program. While not malicious, the add-on was installed without the users' knowledge and raised some alarm from fervent Mozilla fans.

The Indian Intelligence Bureau has directed its border troops to format their smartphones and delete a number of specified apps, citing the reason as a discovered data trail leading from these apps to China.

HP stealthily replaced the "Touchpoint Manager" app with a new version called "Touchpoint Analytics Service", causing full CPU usage on its clients' systems and syphoning user data.

The US Federal Communications Commission is set to cast a vote that will repeal the Net Neutrality laws that keep the Internet fun for everyone. American or not, it's time you had a say in this matter. Let your voice be heard today.

Children's smartwatches have been found to have glaring security holes, some of which can present a serious threat to the safety of the children that wear them. These security issues, along with privacy concerns, have led German officials to ban the sale of children's smartwatches.

OnePlus has dropped the ball yet again, with a user discovering a data siphon that sends his private phone information and logs to a remote OnePlus server.

Google Clips is a small wearable action camera that automatically takes pictures of what it judges to be special moments. It learns who the important people in your life are via machine learning, and it may pose a serious privacy concern.

It's been a good week for privacy intrusions, with GO Keyboard being reported to siphon user data. This time out, it's the Wechat app on all the headlines, as the app's new privacy policy sheds light on how public, private user data actually is.

In another major misstep for Equifax, an employee of the credit services company responded to customer tweets with a link to a fake phishing website. The site, which was styled to look like the official Equifax site dedicated to the hack, was a fake used to demonstrate how easily malicious parties could further exploit Equifax's customers.

Piriform, makers of the popular PC cleaning software CCleaner, said that a few versions of the program's 32-bit binary were hijacked by hackers who could insert a two-stage backdoor capable of remote code execution. Investigation is on to understand what exactly caused the hijack that resulted in about 2.27 million users getting affected.

One week after announcing a major data breach affecting over 143 million consumers, Equifax is pointing blame at a security vulnerability in the Apache Struts web framework. However, the vulnerability was publicly announced in March and a patch was available months before the attack.

Data from Kaspersky Labs shows that the number of cryptocurrency mining trojan infections in 2017 has passed 1.65 million to date. Criminals use infected PCs to crunch transactions and route the success fee to their own digital wallets.

Qualcomm has published a blog post detailing some of the mobile innovations that were made possible by the collaboration with Google and other Android OEMs. Cheekily, the list of innovations seem to reflect some of the new features that will be debuting in the new iPhones set to be launched later today.

Equifax announced today that the personal information of over 143 million American consumers was compromised in late July. Items such as birth dates, social security numbers, and even drivers licenses were stolen by hackers, in addition to over 200,000 credit card numbers.