Security News
Inventor of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee, is having another crack at fixing the internet's biggest problems with the launch of a new enterprise server. The Inrupt Enterprise Solid Server is the first product from a company the inventor started two years ago in response to the problem of personal data online, where tech giants like Facebook and Google build vast databases on user's profiles and sell them to advertisers to make massive profits.
Inventor of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee, is having another crack at fixing the internet's biggest problems with the launch of a new enterprise server. The Inrupt Enterprise Solid Server is the first product from a company the inventor started two years ago in response to the problem of personal data online, where tech giants like Facebook and Google build vast databases on user's profiles and sell them to advertisers to make massive profits.
In 1965, Gordon Moore published a short informal paper, Cramming more components onto integrated circuits. In it, he noted [PDF] that in three years, the optimal cost per component on a chip had dropped by a factor of 10, while the optimal number had increased by the same factor, from 10 to 100.
For the second time in as many years, Google is working to fix a weakness in its Widevine digital rights management technology used by online streaming sites like Disney, Hulu and Netflix to prevent their content from being pirated. The latest cracks in Widevine concern the encryption technology's protection for L3 streams, which is used for low-quality video and audio streams only.
Governments around the world are using the pandemic as a justification to expand surveillance and crack down on dissent online, resulting in a 10th consecutive annual decline in internet freedom, a human rights watchdog report said Wednesday. "The pandemic is accelerating society's reliance on digital technologies at a time when the internet is becoming less and less free," said Michael Abramowitz, president of the nonprofit group.
Taiwan's CERT detected cyber-crooks impersonating medical authorities to attack the country's tech industry during the early stages of the COVID pandemic. "Attackers used COVID-19 social engineering to increase the success rate of their attacks," said TWCERT/CC director Chih-Hung Lin.
The Bletchley Park Trust, the host of Britain's National Museum of Computing and the site of critical feats of wartime code-cracking, has hit financial strife and expects to lay off around a third of its staff. The Trust posted news of its plight late last week, writing that it "Is proposing to restructure as a result of the financial impact of the coronavirus crisis."
A high-risk vulnerability in TeamViewer for Windows could be exploited by remote attackers to crack users' password and lead to further system exploitation. TeamViewer is an application developed by German company TeamViewer GmbH and is available for Windows, macOS, Linux, Chrome OS, iOS, Android, Windows RT Windows Phone 8 and BlackBerry operating systems.
Popular video conferencing app Zoom recently fixed a new security flaw that could have allowed potential attackers to crack the numeric passcode used to secure private meetings on the platform and snoop on participants. Zoom meetings are by default protected by a six-digit numeric password, but according to Tom Anthony, VP Product at SearchPilot who identified the issue, the lack of rate limiting enabled "An attacker to attempt all 1 million passwords in a matter of minutes and gain access to other people's private Zoom meetings."
A security issue in popular video conferencing platform Zoom was disclosed this week, which could have allowed attackers to crack private meeting passcodes and snoop in on video conferences. The problem, which has already been fixed, stems from Zoom not having any check against repeated incorrect meeting password attempts.