Security, Spoken

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A Popular Electric Scooter Can Be Hacked to Speed Up or Stop Feb 13, 2019

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The fleets of electric scooters that have inundated cities are alarming enough as is. Now add cybersercurity concerns to the list: Researchers from the mobile security firm Zimperium are warning that Xiaomi’s popular M365 scooter model has a worrying bug. The flaw could allow an attacker to remotely take over any of the scooters to control crucial things like, ahem, acceleration and braking.

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Senators Grill Facebook, Google, and Apple Over Invasive Apps Feb 12, 2019

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Three of the Senate’s biggest privacy advocates are sending letters to Facebook, Google, and Apple executives Thursday, following a recent TechCrunch report that Facebook used an iOS and Android app to monitor the phones of users as young as 13 years old. The app, called Research and sometimes referred to as Project Atlas, gave Facebook complete visibility into users' app activity, web searches, encrypted data, and even private messages.

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Security News This Week: A Teen Won't Tell Apple How He Hacked MacOS Feb 11, 2019

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It's frankly hard, at the end of this long week, to devote much mental energy to any news that's not Jeff Bezos going to war with the National Enquirer, but stay with us! There's a lot going on—including some intriguing developments in special counsel Robert Mueller's probe. Before we get too far into it, though, please take a moment to update to iOS 12.1.4, which fixes that very bad FaceTime group chat bug and a few more previously undisclosed vulnerabilities as well.

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Google's Making It Easier to Encrypt Even Cheap Android Phones Feb 11, 2019

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One of the easiest ways to protect your privacy and security on a smartphone is set a passcode or biometric lock to enable disk encryption. That way if your phone gets lost or stolen, no one can take data off the device in a readable form. But not all smartphones—and tablets, and smartwatches, and so on—offer that protection. They don’t have the processing power to deal with resource-intensive encryption.

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Twitter Still Can't Keep Up With Its Flood of Junk Accounts, Study Finds Feb 08, 2019

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Since the world learned of state-sponsored campaigns to spread disinformation on social media and sway the 2016 election, Twitter has scrambled to rein in the bots and trolls polluting its platform. But when it comes to the larger problem of automated accounts on Twitter designed to spread spam and scams, inflate follower counts, and game trending topics, one study argues that the company still isn’t keeping up with the deluge of garbage and abuse.

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What It Takes to Pull Off the Country's First Online Census Feb 07, 2019

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On a frigid morning in Washington, DC, last week, four staffers from the United States Census Bureau stood shoulder to shoulder on a stage, smiling widely as they soaked in the whoops, whistles, and eager applause from the crowd seated before them. The Esri Federal GIS Conference, an annual event where government employees gather to talk about mapping technology, isn’t exactly what you’d call a rowdy affair.

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A New Google Chrome Extension Will Detect Your Unsafe Passwords Feb 06, 2019

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Data breaches that compromise people's usernames and passwords have become so common, and used in crime for so long, that millions of stolen credential pairs have actually become practically worthless to criminals, circulating online for free. And that doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of the more current credentials sold on the black market. All of this means that it's increasingly difficult to keep track of which of your passwords you need to change.

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Security News This Week: Facebook Takes Down Hundreds of Fake Pages From Iran Feb 04, 2019

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As happens infrequently—but definitely not never—Apple wrestled with an embarrassing and problematic security bug this week in its iOS FaceTime group calling feature. The flaw was bad enough that Apple took the drastic step of pulling group FaceTime functionality altogether. A full fix will come next week.

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Hackers Are Passing Around a Megaleak of 2.2 Billion Records Feb 01, 2019

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When hackers breached companies like Dropbox and LinkedIn in recent years—stealing 71 and 117 million passwords, respectively—they at least had the decency to exploit those stolen credentials in secret, or sell them for thousands of dollars on the dark web. Now, it seems, someone has cobbled together those breached databases and many more into a gargantuan, unprecedented collection of 2.

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Why Facebook's Banned 'Research' App Was So Invasive Feb 01, 2019

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For the past three years, Facebook has paid consumers as young as 13 to download a “Facebook Research” application that gives the company wide-ranging access to their mobile devices, according to a TechCrunch investigation published Tuesday. In order to allow people with iPhones to participate, Facebook sidestepped the strict privacy rules imposed by Apple in its App Store by taking advantage of a business applications program designed for internal company use.

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