Facebook—Meta—was just fined $276 million (USD) for a data leak that included full names, birth dates, phone numbers, and location. Meta’s total fine by the Data Protection Commission is over $700 million. Total GDPR fines are over €2 billion (EUR) since 2018. Powered by WPeMatico
Month: November 2022
Diplomatic code cracked after 500 years: In painstaking work backed by computers, Pierrot found “distinct families” of about 120 symbols used by Charles V. “Whole words are encrypted with a single symbol” and the emperor replaced vowels coming after consonants with marks, she said, an inspiration probably coming from Arabic. In another obstacle, he used … Read More “Charles V of Spain Secret Code Cracked” »
Laptop technicians routinely violate the privacy of the people whose computers they repair: Researchers at University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, recovered logs from laptops after receiving overnight repairs from 12 commercial shops. The logs showed that technicians from six of the locations had accessed personal data and that two of those shops also copied … Read More “Computer Repair Technicians Are Stealing Your Data” »
Nothing beats a dog’s nose for detecting explosives. Unfortunately, there aren’t enough dogs: Last month, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a nearly 100-page report about working dogs and the need for federal agencies to better safeguard their health and wellness. The GOA says that as of February the US federal government had approximately … Read More “The US Has a Shortage of Bomb-Sniffing Dogs” »
Researchers claim that supposedly anonymous device analytics information can identify users: On Twitter, security researchers Tommy Mysk and Talal Haj Bakry have found that Apple’s device analytics data includes an iCloud account and can be linked directly to a specific user, including their name, date of birth, email, and associated information stored on iCloud. Apple … Read More “Apple’s Device Analytics Can Identify iCloud Users” »
Brian Krebs writes about how the Zeppelin ransomware encryption scheme was broken: The researchers said their break came when they understood that while Zeppelin used three different types of encryption keys to encrypt files, they could undo the whole scheme by factoring or computing just one of them: An ephemeral RSA-512 public key that is … Read More “Breaking the Zeppelin Ransomware Encryption Scheme” »
Researchers have new evidence of how squid brains develop: Researchers from the FAS Center for Systems Biology describe how they used a new live-imaging technique to watch neurons being created in the embryo in almost real-time. They were then able to track those cells through the development of the nervous system in the retina. What … Read More “Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Brains” »
Kirkus reviews A Hacker’s Mind: A cybersecurity expert examines how the powerful game whatever system is put before them, leaving it to others to cover the cost. Schneier, a professor at Harvard Kennedy School and author of such books as Data and Goliath and Click Here To Kill Everybody, regularly challenges his students to write … Read More “First Review of A Hacker’s Mind” »
Time-triggered Ethernet (TTE) is used in spacecraft, basically to use the same hardware to process traffic with different timing and criticality. Researchers have defeated it: On Tuesday, researchers published findings that, for the first time, break TTE’s isolation guarantees. The result is PCspooF, an attack that allows a single non-critical device connected to a single … Read More “Successful Hack of Time-Triggered Ethernet” »
Twitter is having intermittent problems with its two-factor authentication system: Not all users are having problems receiving SMS authentication codes, and those who rely on an authenticator app or physical authentication token to secure their Twitter account may not have reason to test the mechanism. But users have been self-reporting issues on Twitter since the … Read More “Failures in Twitter’s Two-Factor Authentication System” »