Security News
You don't have to pay to vote in the US. Up until recently, you wouldn't have necessarily known that, were you to have run a Google search for how or where to vote. Such a search would have been polluted with ads like this one offering "Same-day processing" of voter registration for $129:. That ad, which directs to a site from PrivacyWall.org, is the first ad in a Google search for "Register to vote" that was run in an analysis done by watchdog Tech Transparency Project.
Less than one-third of Americans said they are concerned about their data security while working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Unisys Security report found. The Unisys Security Index, released on Tuesday, calculates a score out of 300 that measures consumer attitudes over eight areas of security in four categories.
A report published Tuesday by security provider Avira explores the reluctance on the part of many to adopt these contact tracing apps. Commissioned by Avira and conducted by research firm Opinion Matters, an online survey of 2,005 people found that 71% of them would not use COVID-19 contact tracing apps.
92% of Americans say they care about online safety and data privacy, yet a new report from iProov showed 44% polled shared passwords and mobile devices with their partners. "You wouldn't have the same key to your house, your car, and every building you ever need to go into. But it's also not possible to remember different passwords for every single site you use. So, Americans are recycling and sharing passwords because they want a convenient way to access their accounts. Biometric authentication is the modern replacement for keys."
Results from separate studies by Checkmarx and ExpressVPN reveal consumers won't easily share their personal information with tracing apps due to concern for misuse. The VPN provider ExpressVPN and software security company Checkmarx queried 1,200 and 1,500 consumers, respectively, to find out what Americans think about digital contact-tracing systems having access to their health information.
A large percentage of Americans currently do not take the necessary steps to protect their passwords and logins online, FICO reveals. Only 42 percent are using separate passwords to access multiple accounts; 17 percent of respondents have between two to five passwords they reuse across accounts; and 4 percent use a single password across all accounts.
Senator Ron Wyden was reacting to Vice's discovery of a brochure by Westbridge Technologies - the US sales wing of the controversial NSO Group - which pitched NSO's Pegasus technology, rebadged as Phantom, to a police force in San Diego, California. The reference to spying on an ex-partner relates to claims that an employee of NSO Group who was caught using the firm's technology to spy on a woman they were interested in romantically.
Senator Ron Wyden was reacting to Vice's discovery of a brochure by Westbridge Technologies - the US sales wing of the controversial NSO Group - which pitched NSO's Pegasus technology, rebadged as Phantom, to a police force in San Diego, California. The reference to spying on an ex-partner relates to claims that an employee of NSO Group who was caught using the firm's technology to spy on a woman they were interested in romantically.
Israeli spyware maker NSO Group has rubbished Facebook's claim it can be sued in California because it allegedly uses American IT services and has a business presence in the US. Last October, Facebook and its WhatsApp subsidiary sued the software developer and its affiliate Q Cyber Technologies in California, claiming that the firms made, distributed, and operated surveillance software known as Pegasus that remotely infects, hijacks, and extracts data from the smartphones of WhatsApp users. WhatsApp security manager Claudiu Gheorghe in a previous filing identified 720 malicious attacks on WhatsApp from the IP address 104.223.76.220, a server in California provided by QuadraNet and allegedly run by NSO. QuadraNet did not immediately respond to The Register's request to clarify the account holder for that IP address.
The United States threatened Thursday to cut off Beijing-controlled China Telecom from serving the US market because of legal and security risks, the Justice Department announced Thursday. The agencies making the recommendation - which also included the Justice Department, the Commerce Department, and the US Trade Representative - said China Telecom is vulnerable to "Exploitation, influence and control" by the Chinese government.