Google is in hot waters with the law in the UK. The search giant is being sued in the high court for as much as £3.2 billion for secretly tracking and collecting personal information of 4.4 million iPhone users in the UK. The lawsuit action again the company is being led by former Which? director Richard Lloyd. He claims that claims Google bypassed the privacy settings of Apple iPhones’ Safari browser between August 2011 and February 2012 to divide people into categories for advertisers.
The Guardian reports that Lloyd’s campaign group ‘Google You Owe Us’ told the court information collected by Google included race, physical and mental health, political [...]
If anyone logged on to Twitter late last night, must have been greeted with a “Keeping Your Account Secure” notice. It is fair to say that not everyone went ahead and read the whole thing. However, what the popup window informs users about is quite damning. It essentially says that the passwords of all 330 million Twitter users were exposed in plain text. This happened due to a bug that the company claims to have fixed now.
Twitter claims that its investigation showed that there was no evidence that any breach of the unmasked passwords occurred. However, out of an “abundance of caution,” it has adviced all users to change their [...]
It might be an understatement to say that Facebook has had a tumultuous month and a half. Ever since the Cambridge Analatyica data breach controversy broke out, Facebook has been under the cosh for its lackadaisical data privacy guidelines. However, not all is gloomy for the social media giant as the company seeks to build its own chipset designing team.
According to a job listing on its corporate website, Facebook is looking to hire a manager to build an:
End-to-end SoC/ASIC, firmware and driver development organization.
The listing indicates that the process of building this team is still in its early stages. Interestingly, Facebook AI researcher Yann LeCun [...]
OnePlus has just launched the new Lava Red colour variant of the OnePlus 5T in India, a few weeks after it was unveiled in China. While OnePlus 5T suitors might be rejoicing about another possible option to buy, there are a few customers who might be left with a sour taste in their mouths after shopping on the OnePlus store.
A few days ago, OnePlus shut down all credit card payments options on its official website after a few reports claimed that a lot of customers were facing issues after making payments on the OnePlus store. Affected customers reported cases of fraudulent [...]
The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has responded to reports that someone sold over 1 billion Aadhar card details for just Rs. 500. In a statement, the organisation has claimed that all data is safe. In response, UIDAI has also filed an FIR for unauthorised access to Aadhaar data, such as names and other demographic details, due to the misuse of the grievance redressal facility at the office of the Surat district administration in Gujarat.
UIDAI denied that the breach allowed access to millions of Aadhaar cardholders’ details, saying the search facility is available for the purpose of grievance redressal to designated personnel and state government [...]
Lawsuits and counter lawsuits within tech companies have been going on since as far as one can imagine. But, a tech giant owing considerable amount of money to consumers could be the new talking point. British consumers who used an iPhone between June 2011 and February 2012 could receive as much as US $672 each from Google as compensation for the search giant bypassing Safari privacy settings between those dates.
Google’s backdoor method of installing cookies on iPhones despite them being blocked in Safari’s settings was discovered in 2012.
A British campaign group launched a class action lawsuit on behalf of the 5.4 million iPhone users in England and Wales affected by [...]
Only yesterday (29th November), the news broke out of a major security flaw that allowed anyone to gain root access to a Mac device running MacOS High Sierra.
Apple issued a statement:
Security is a top priority for every Apple product, and regrettably we stumbled with this release of macOS.
When our security engineers became aware of the issue Tuesday afternoon, we immediately began working on an update that closes the security hole. This morning, as of 8:00 a.m., the update is available for download, and starting later today it will be automatically installed on all systems running the latest version (10.13.1) of macOS High Sierra.
We greatly regret this [...]
Securing our gadgets in this day and age is of utmost priority since most of our lives are now digital. But, it appears that your Mac running MAcOS High Sierra might be susceptible to a serious security hack.
Apple’s latest MacOS High Sierra operating system has a very serious flaw that can allow anyone with access to a Mac gain root access by simply typing “root” as the username. It appears that the flaw doesn’t even require someone to enter a password, which means that anyone with zero hacking knowledge and evil intentions can get into your Mac.
Apple has responded to the complaints and announced that it is working on a fix.
Patrick [...]
OnePlus cannot seem to catch a break. A few days after it was revealed that OnePlus left an application that allowed backdoor entry to OnePlus devices, a new application has been found recording sensitive data and storing it unencrypted inside the phone. This app is reportedly called OnePlusLogKit and, like its name suggests, logs an extensive amount of user data.
The same researcher who exposed the EngineerMode app a few days ago has made the new revelation as well. The researcher wrote in a post that all of the user data stored by this app is unencrypted, and also added that this data could also likely be sent to China. The researcher, who goes by the moniker of Elliot [...]
Security researchers claimed to have found severe vulnerabilities in WPA2 ( WiFi Protected Access II). This is an extremely popular security protocol, so much so that it used by almost every WiFi device on the planet. The vulnerabilities can allow anyone near your your router to access the WiFi traffic being sent through it.
There is a dedicated website called krackattacks.com, named after the proof-of-concept attack called KRACK (Key Reinstallation Attacks). Researcher Mathy Vanhoef of imec-DistriNet, KU Leuven.
Concretely, attackers can use this novel [KRACK] attack technique to read information that was previously assumed to be safely encrypted. This can be abused to [...]
Google recently hosted its launch event on October 4th and announced the new Google Home Mini. A US$49 smart speaker to compete with Amazon Echo Dot but, with Google’s own AI Google Assistant. The Home Mini was available for pre-orders from 4th October and some of the early units shipped have a defect that was anticipated due to the “always listening” feature.
Smart home products are a great addition and smart speakers like the Amazon Echo, Google Home do make your life easier with voice commands. But, the fact that these speakers are always listening to you and how much of that is recorded and sent back to the company is a cause for scepticism in the minds [...]
In a yet another case of a Chinese smartphone maker recording sensitive data of its users, OnePlus has been found to do something similar. Normally, there is a certain level of information sent to the company like crashes, bugs and general issues that could be fixed by a software update. However, OnePlus was found to collect data that includes IMEI numbers, MAC addresses, mobile network names and IMSI prefixes, serial numbers, and more.
Christopher Moore, a software engineer, made a post on his personal blog showing his discoveries. During a Hack Challenge, Moore began proxying the internet traffic from his OnePlus 2 using OWASP ZAP. What this means is that it essentially [...]
