Cyberlaw

Days after Canon, Intel is the next major company to face a massive data breach. Over 20GB of confidential design data including SDKs, flash tools, marketing templates, debug tools, and more were stolen and subsequently leaked online.

A large number of Canon domains were recently targeted by the Maze ransomware attack, resulting in the theft of over 10TB of sensitive user data. While Canon claims that photo images weren’t compromised, other sensitive user information is currently at risk.

The Indian Government is looking at banning even more Chinese-origin apps. Over 200 apps are on the list, with the most prominent one being PUBG Mobile. Games like Call of Duty: Mobile, Clash of Clans, and Clash Royale are likely on the list as well, due to their deep-rooted affiliation with Tencent.

Following a directive issued by the Indian Trade Ministry, Amazon has made it mandatory for all sellers to mention its 'country of origin' on every product listing. Sellers have until August 10 to comply. Other platforms, such as Flipkart, are expected to follow suit in the coming days.

A California resident filed a lawsuit against LinkedIn for allegedly snooping on user clipboard data on the social media app’s iOS version. The issue was brought to light thanks to a new privacy-oriented feature in iOS 14 that tells users when apps access clipboard data.

Despite its 20-year reliance on Huawei-made telecom hardware, the United Kingdom has now decided to remove Huawei from its 5G infrastructure by the end of 2020. The shift in policy is based on a new report from British cybersecurity experts that fear Huawei may be forced to use untrusted technology as a result of recent sanctions put on the company by the United States.

The hopeful PlayStation 4 homebrew scene has waited a long while for a new kernel exploit, after the release of the firmware 5.05 jailbreak back in 2018. That wait is unlikely to end anytime soon, in light of recent developments.

The Indian government has banned 59 Chinese-origin apps in the country. Some of the banned apps include TikTok, Share It, UC Browser, WeChat, Mobile Legends, UC Browser, and Club Factory. The directive also instructs Google and Apple 24 hours to take the apps off their respective platforms.

A report by Awake Security indicates that 70 Google Chrome extensions, downloaded by over 32 million people, have been stealing user data and browsing history on a massive scale. The large-scale operation was enabled by a malicious domain registrar, GalComm.

Indian intelligence agencies have allegedly requested the Indian government to ban or warn the public about 52 red-flagged apps of Chinese origin, amid mounting tensions between the two countries. Among the flagged apps are the popular networking platform TikTok, SHAREit, and UC Browser

A new website advertising pre-built Hackintoshes could soon fall foul of Apple's legal team. Their Ryzen systems go against Apple's EULA and precedent has been set in the past regarding shutting down commercial Hackintosh builds. This might not be the only stumbling block if other concerns turn out to be authentic.

Activision Blizzard recently announced that it would be delaying its World of Warcraft: Shadowlands livestream to make way for “more important voices.” However, the decision appears insincere, especially in light of Blizzard’s treatment of Hearthstone Grandmaster Blitzchung for speaking out about the Hong Kong protests.

In a recent poll from the Washington Post and the University of Maryland, more than half of smartphone users in America expressed distrust in how big tech companies would handle tracking and reporting coronavirus cases. Additionally, exactly half said they would not use an app to track the spread of coronavirus.

The latest version of Vivaldi now includes a tracker blocker developer by DuckDuckGo. The tool, which is powered by DuckDuckGo's Tracker Radar software, makes browsing the Internet a bit more private out of the box. However, other privacy-focused extensions should still be used.

A new exploit discovered in iOS 13.4.1 on A13 devices may lead to an eventual Jailbreak method for the iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro, and iPhone 11 Pro Max running the latest version of iOS. While the bug itself is not able to Jailbreak affected devices, it is an important first step.

Two new zero-day vulnerabilities have been found for the popular teleconferencing software Zoom. The exploits, one of which affects the Windows client and the other of which affects the macOS client, are currently up for auction on the Dark Web. The Windows exploit is particularly nasty as it allows for Remote Code Execution, or RCE.

The latest version of Firefox for Windows, Firefox 75, includes a default telemetry practice that sends users' default browser settings to Mozilla once a day. The data is sent via a Windows scheduled task. While disabling this telemetry is relatively simple, the fact that it is enabled by default is concerning for privacy-minded individuals.

Tuned, an app designed for couples, is now available on iOS. The app comes from the NPE Team within Facebook. Though Tuned is billed as a private app for couples, users should be aware that anything sent through Tuned could be sent to third parties for targeted advertising, per Facebook's data use policies.

Because of the Corona-Breakout a large number of people is staying home causing Internet usage to climb up. Although the data usage it is not yet absolutely critical, the EU is already discussing ways to restrict data traffic in favor of essential services. This led to the suggestion that Netflix could temporarily lower its video resolution to SD level.

Google, Facebook and Twitter have also sent the majority of their employees home. Inevitably, the big social media are increasingly relying on AI routines to have potentially inappropriate content removed. Now they warn that this will lead to more erroneous deletions.

Many repressive states censor government-critical articles and block citizens' access to the material. The Reporters Without Borders organization is now breaking new ground to make censored articles accessible to everyone. They just paste the material into an Uncensored Library within Minecraft.

Facebook will soon send invitations to some users of its Viewpoints marketing research app. The invites will allow users to record a phrase and the names of some of their friends in exchange for $5. Facebook claims these recordings will only be used to improve speech recognition in Facebook products like their Portal smart hub.

The IRS is suing social media giant Facebook for allegedly undervaluing its 2010 IPO, thereby avoiding over $9 billion in tax payments.

An Android trojan by the name of xHelper has been found to reinstall itself after removal. Worse still, the malware reinstalls itself even after a factory reset. Malwarebytes has devised a fairly complex manner of removing the malware, which it says is the worst mobile malware the antivirus firm has ever encountered.

Liquidated in 2018, Swiss firm Crypto AG seems to have been involved in helping the US and German governments spy on no less than 120 countries for decades. The story has just surfaced thanks to an investigation carried out by The Washington Post, Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF), and Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen (SRF).

The latest Huawei-related security issue is huge and it's enough to describe it in a few words for everyone to figure out: for over a decade, the Chinese behemoth has been using backdoors intended for law enforcement to access mobile networks — and the sensitive/private information they carry — all over the world.

Although Wacom hardware should have no reason for sending out the history of application use of its owners, it looks like this has been happening for a while and there's no official explanation for that yet. Nevertheless, this story is quite intriguing and worth keeping an eye on.

iPhones are way more secure than Androids, right? Apparently not. A new report with information from forensic experts heavily points towards the reverse being the case. Androids may now be more secure than iPhones, with a Huawei flagship being surprisingly secure.

Although there are still freeware products that are completely free, others come with hidden traps that the user only gets to find out about via scandals. The free Avast antivirus is such a product — it turns out that the Czech firm behind it has been selling the browser history of its users to the highest bidder.

A new draft of a government resolution in Russia mandates that all electronics sold in the country carry pre-installed software from Russian companies that espouses the "formation of the priority of traditional Russian spiritual and moral values." However, these values are not explicitly defined in the resolution. The document is a followup to legislation signed into law last year forcing all smart devices and computers sold in Russia to be pre-installed with Russian-made software.

Ubuntu 20.04 LTS "Focal Fossa" will finally kill the pre-installed Amazon Web App. The move comes in the wake of Canonical's eliminations of the Ubuntu web launcher dependency. Many users hated the Amazon Web App, which was introduced as a pre-installed link in Ubuntu 12.10.

Sources told Krebs on Security that Microsoft is working to patch an "extraordinarily serious" vulnerability, potentially affecting every Windows system released in the last 20 years.

The FBI has asked Apple for help unlocking a pair of iPhones that belong to a mass shooter. Even though the agency has both devices in its possession, it is unable to get past the lock screen. Apple says that it will help the FBI in every way it can.

Donald Trump recently signed off on the TRACED Act. The Act, which received bipartisan support in the US Congress, imposes stiffer penalties on robocallers. It also seeks to tackle the issue of caller ID spoofing.

A security developer on Twitter recently released a tutorial on how to create a WiFi hacking gadget using a Raspberry Pi Zero W. The module runs Raspbian Buster, under the hacker-friendly re4son kernel.

Ookla, the organization behind speedtest.net, has launched a free VPN. Speedtest VPN is a free virtual private network service, currently only for users of the Speedtest Android and iOS apps. The VPN is currently in beta and caps users' bandwidth, but a paid tier is coming once the VPN exits beta.

Following a damning New York Times report, popular chat app ToTok was pulled from the Google Play Store. The report indicated that the app was UAE government spyware masquerading as a chat app to monitor the personal information of millions of users.

Apple recently revamped its Apple Security Bounty program. The new Bounty program is open to all researchers and substantially ups the reward ceiling. Is this enough to help Apple find critical iOS and macOS vulnerabilities in time?

Facebook’s security troubles continue. In a recent security incident, the personal information of nearly 270 million people was leaked to a public server. This comes in the context of ongoing security and privacy concerns pertaining to the social media platform.

Two computer programmers were arrested by the FBI this month on charges of procuring and distributing pirated content. The two programmers ran subscription-based websites that illegally streamed copyrighted content without the knowledge or consent of the copyright holders. One of the websites had more content available than Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, and Vudu.

Multiple families have reported their Ring cameras have been accessed by unknown third parties. The bad actors were able to access the video feeds and speakers of the cameras to frighten members of the affected households, including children. Ring has stated that the malicious parties probably accessed the cameras by using the victims' usernames and passwords, which were likely leaked in an unrelated data breach and recycled for the Ring cameras.

Google announced on Friday that it has imaged over 10 million miles of roads and paths in Street View. Additionally, Google Earth has now imaged over 36 million square miles of the earth's surface, which covers 98% of the inhabited world.

A bug in iOS 13.3 allows users to easily circumvent the Communication Limits feature. While Communication Limits is supposed to block users (specifically children) from communicating with or adding unknown or unapproved numbers, simply setting up the phone to not sync to iCloud will bypass the feature and allow users to add new numbers without verification.

Apple is suing Gerard Williams III, one of the founders of Nuvia, for breaching an intellectual property contract and soliciting Apple employees to leave Apple and work at Nuvia. Williams denies that he actively recruited Apple employees and claims that Apple intruded on his privacy by reading through his personal text messages.

Epic, the developer of the smash hit arena shooter Fortnite, has reignited an argument with Google over the revenue share practices of the Play Store. Epic is reportedly hoping to bring Fortnite to the Play Store but has requested an exemption from the current 70/30 revenue split all other app developers are subject to on the Play Store. Google has offered a flat "No" in response.

TechCrunch Security Editor Zack Whittaker blew the whistle on Lenovo on his Twitter account recently over Chinese PC manufacturer Lenovo's alleged attempts to pay Information Security "influencers" to say good things about ThinkShield, Lenovo's new corporate security solution. Others chimed in saying that Lenovo wanted the posts to seem authentic and did not want the sponsorships to be revealed.

Despite the ongoing trade war between the U.S. and China, Huawei received a small reprieve in the way of a general license allowing U.S. firms to transact with the Chinese telecom giant. That license is set to expire on Monday, but sources familiar with the matter claim the U.S. Department of Commerce will extend the license by six months.

Brave, a Chromium-based browser designed around user privacy and anonymity, has finally released version 1.0 after four years in development. The browser has a unique method for upending the traditional ad-revenue basis of websites built around blockchain technologies and anonymity.

YouTube will update its terms of service to more clearly point out that the website can shut down channels that are deemed unprofitable. While this has sparked passionate debate among users and content creators, the law concerning a website's control over its posted content is nuanced and complex. As it stands, it looks like YouTube is well within its rights to shut down channels that it deems conflict with its terms of service.

DuckDuckGo, the privacy-focused Google alternative, hit 50 million unique searches on November 4. This is a huge milestone that marks the continued growth for the private search engine. DuckDuckGo does not track user browsing history, relying solely on keyword frequency to improve its search results without intruding in its users' lives.