Information Technology Security

By Vilius Petkauskas,  Cyber News A German citizen is suing the European Commission for transferring citizens’ data from one of the Commission’s websites to the United States. In a twist of irony, the executive branch of the European Union (EU), the European Commission (EC), is being sued for violating the personal data protection laws it created. According to Europäische Gesellschaft für Datenschutz (EuGD), a Germany-based organization supporting consumers in the enforcement of legal claims over breaches of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a German consumer believes his right to the protection of personal data was violated. While the GDPR does not apply to European institutions directly, they have to follow a similar law that closely resembles the restrictive nature of the GDPR. Both sets of legislation were created with the help of the Commission. “When calling up the website […] and registering for an event offered there, the US cloud service in its function as web...

By Sergiu Gatlan,  Bleeping Computer Mozilla says that all Firefox users will now be protected by default against cross-site tracking while browsing the Internet. This is because, starting today, Mozilla is rolling out and enabling its Total Cookie Protection set of privacy improvements for all Firefox users worldwide. Total Cookie Protection forces all websites to keep their cookies in separate "jars," thus blocking attempts to track you across the web and building browsing profiles. First introduced with the release of Firefox 86 in February 2021, this privacy feature was only active until now in private browsing or when users would manually enable ETP Strict Mode in the web browser's settings. "Total Cookie Protection offers strong protections against tracking without affecting your browsing experience," said Mozilla today. "Total Cookie Protection is Firefox's strongest privacy protection to date, confining cookies to the site where they were create...

By Geoff Herbert, Penn Live If you’ve seen new Facebook profile pictures that look like a painting or cartoon, then you’ve probably noticed they all appear to come from a website and app called “New Profile Pic.” New Profile Pic, also sometimes written as one word “NewProfilePic,” allows users to submit photos of themselves for an “AI-driven” update that makes them look like works of art. The free app is currently No. 1 on the Apple Store and has exploded in popularity on social media this month. But some have also questioned its safety after some claimed the app “takes all your information and sends it to Moscow” as part of a Russian malware scam. The Daily Mail further suggested the app had Kremlin ties because it was developed by a tech company “overlooking the Moscow River three miles from Red Square,” but is that true? According to fact-checking website Snopes , New Profile Pic was created by a mobile development group called Informe Laboratories, Inc. , and copyrighted by Liner...

By  KrebsOnSecurity Some of more tech-savvy Democrats in the U.S. Senate are asking the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate identity-proofing company ID.me for “deceptive statements” the company and its founder allegedly made over how they handle facial recognition data collected on behalf of the Internal Revenue Service, which until recently required anyone seeking a new IRS account online to provide a live video selfie to ID.me. In a letter to FTC Chair Lina Khan, the Senators charge that ID.me’s CEO Blake Hall has offered conflicting statements about how his company uses the facial scan data it collects on behalf of the federal government and many states that use the ID proofing technology to screen applicants for unemployment insurance. The lawmakers say that in public statements and blog posts, ID.me has frequently emphasized the difference between two types of facial recognition: One-to-one, and one-to-many. In the one-to-one approach, a live video selfie is compare...

A surprising number of the top 100,000 websites effectively include keyloggers that covertly snag everything you type into a form. By Wired When you sign up for a newsletter, make a hotel reservation, or check out online, you probably take for granted that if you mistype your email address three times or change your mind and X out of the page, it doesn't matter. Nothing actually happens until you hit the Submit button, right? Well, maybe not. As with so many assumptions about the web, this isn't always the case, according to new research : A surprising number of websites are collecting some or all of your data as you type it into a digital form. Researchers from KU Leuven, Radboud University, and University of Lausanne crawled and analyzed the top 100,000 websites, looking at scenarios in which a user is visiting a site while in the European Union and visiting a site from the United States. They found that 1,844 websites gathered an EU user's email address without their con...

By Griffin Davis, Tech Times Experts claim that AI can actually ease the rising privacy concerns over the internet. This may be true given that artificial intelligence has been applied in various technologies that make life easier.   Google, Apple, and other giant tech firms rely on AI and machine learning innovations to further enhance their products.  On the other hand, artificial intelligence was also used to create self-driving cars and drug development. All these details show that AI can be used in many things, including online security.  How Can AI Ease Privacy Concerns? Venture Beat reported that AI could be used to enhance online privacy. While protecting internet cybersecurity, artificial intelligence can also make your online activities easier, such as shortening online processes by re-entering your needed information.  Now, here are some ways how AI can transform the internet into a safer online place:  AI can be used to generate first-part...

Other providers are signaling they'll oppose the new policy in India, which will require VPN providers to collect and turn over data on customers. By Michael Kan, PC Mag India’s new policy requiring VPN services to collect and hand over data on customers is prompting NordVPN to consider pulling its servers from the country.  “We are committed to protecting the privacy of our customers; therefore, we may remove our servers from India if no other options are left,” NordVPN told us. India is implementing the new policy to help it fight cybercrime. But the data-collection requirement also undermines the whole point of installing a VPN, which are often designed to protect a user's privacy.  Under the new policy, VPN providers would need to log data on which IP addresses their customers are using and store the information for at least five years. As a result, the data could be used to map out customers' web activities if it’s ever turned over to Indian authorities.  NordVPN sa...

By Katie Bo Lillis and Sean Lyngaas, CNN Washington (CNN) - The FBI conducted up to 3.4 million warrantless searches of Americans' electronic data last year including 1.9 million related to a cyber threat from Russia, according to an annual transparency report released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Friday. The report is the first time that the US intelligence community has disclosed even an approximate number of the FBI's searches of American data using the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The law is focused on threats emanating from outside of the United States, but also allows the FBI, the CIA and others to search data for Americans' information provided there is a validly predicated foreign intelligence purpose. The report does not suggest that the FBI acted improperly. The report highlights the big trove of intelligence data that the bureau can tap in pursuing hackers, spies and terrorists. More than half of the FBI's queries w...

Google to allow users to remove personal information By Aimee Picchi, CBS Google is now allowing people to remove their personal contact information — phone numbers, physical addresses and email addresses — from its search results. The Alphabet-owned search giant said on Wednesday that it is making the change to protect users from "unwanted direct contact or even physical harm." Google said it had previously allowed people to request the removal of some specific types of info, but that the new policy represents a broader attempt to help protect personal data for users. Prior to the new policy, people could ask for more specific information to be removed, such as bank account or credit card numbers.  The change comes amid a surge in online fraud. The Federal Trade Commission reporting that consumers lost $5.8 billion to scammers last year, a jump of 70% from the previous year. Much of that fraud is perpetrated through online scams, such as romance swindles, as well as though ...

Searches in national-security investigations came without warrants, could stoke privacy concerns in Congress By Dustin Volz, Wall Street Journal WASHINGTON—The Federal Bureau of Investigation performed potentially millions of searches of American electronic data last year without a warrant, U.S. intelligence officials said Friday, a revelation likely to stoke longstanding concerns in Congress about government surveillance and privacy. An annual report published Friday by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence disclosed that the FBI conducted as many as 3.4 million searches of U.S. data that had been previously collected by the National Security Agency. Senior Biden administration officials said the actual number of searches is likely far lower, citing complexities in counting and sorting foreign data from U.S. data. It couldn't be learned from the report how many Americans' data was examined by the FBI under the program, though officials said it was also almost cer...

By Mayank Parmar, Bleeping Computers Microsoft is working on a built-in VPN functionality for the Edge browser called ' Edge Secure Network ', but there's a catch - it is not a proper replacement for your VPN. Edge's Secure Network is powered by Cloudflare - one of the most trusted DNS hosts in the industry - and it aims to protect your device and sensitive data as you browse. The feature is in the early stage of development available to select users in Edge Canary and it's not a full-fledged VPN service offered in rival browsers like Opera. So how does Microsoft Edge's Secure Network actually work? As per the support document and our tests, Edge uses Cloudflare's routing to encrypt your internet connection and protect your data from online threats like hackers. Microsoft says Edge Secure network feature sends your traffic through an encrypted tunnel to create a secure connection, which means even HTTP URLs are accessed securely in a bid to make it harder ...

By Bill Toulas, Bleeping Computer Hetzner Online GmbH, a German cloud services provider, told some customers this week that their data had been irreversibly lost and were provided a 20€ compensation in online credit. Hetzner, which operates several data centers in Germany and Finland, suffered a rare occurrence of multiple hardware failures that have wiped some customers' snapshots, with no way of recovering them. The news of this data loss comes from a letter shared by a Hetzner customer on Y Combinator stating one of Hetzner's clusters located in Nuremberg was impacted by a very unfortunate series of events where multiple disks failed in brief succession. According to that notice, Hetzner's cloud services achieve data security by copying the snapshots across three hard disks, so even if two fail, the data will still be available. In this case, though, not even that redundancy level was enough to save the customers' data. "Unfortunately, we have to inform you tha...

AirTag stalking could be worse than we thought, but there are things you can do to protect yourself By Tom Pritchard Ever since the launch of Apple's AirTags last year, we’ve been hearing stories about how they’re being used for an unintended purpose: stalking. It's been a particular problem for women, and now it seems it may be even more serious than people realized. So much so that it could be time to take Apple AirTags off the market. That's according to research by Motherboard(opens in new tab), which got hold of reports from eight major police departments, covering a period of eight months. In that time there were 150 reports that mentioned AirTags, 50 of which came from women who had received notifications that a rogue AirTag was tracking them. Half of those 50 women suspected a man in their lives may have been responsible for planting the AirTag — with the goal of following and harassing them. In one case, a woman had called the police because a man had escalated his...