Security News

Facebook has been accused of lying to a US court in its ongoing legal battle against government malware maker NSO Group. A series of filings from NSO lawyers lay out the Israeli security company's reasoning for its no-show in court on 2 March, including the accusation that Facebook never properly served its lawyers with legal papers, despite telling the court that it had. The accusations were made in court documents [PDF] in which NSO has asked the court to vacate the earlier default judgement entered at the start of last week after the security shop's lawyers failed to turn up at the California US District Court.

Australia's privacy watchdog announced legal action against Facebook Monday for alleged "Systematic failures" exposing more than 300,000 Australians to a data breach by Cambridge Analytica. The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner said it had initiated proceedings against the tech giant and that Facebook committed "Serious and/or repeated interferences with privacy".

The Social Network chalked up an easy win this week when a US court issued a default notice in its favor against Israeli spyware builder NSO group. Facebook filed suit back in 2019, alleging NSO developed code for exploits in acquired crypto chat app WhatsApp.

Facebook announced on Thursday that it has filed a lawsuit against domain registrar Namecheap and its Whoisguard privacy protection service over its refusal to provide information on a series of domains that impersonated the social media company and its services. Facebook says it regularly looks for domain names and apps that infringe its trademarks and it has come across 45 domains that impersonated Facebook and its services, and which leveraged Whoisguard to disguise the registrant's information.

On Tuesday, multiple reports suggested that Facebook has decided not to support its Libra virtual currency in its own products and will instead offer users the ability to make payments with government-issued currencies, or that the platform and its partners are weighing whether they should recast it as mostly a payments network that could operate with multiple coins. According to a report from The Information that cited three sources, Facebook has been mulling offering digital versions of currencies such as the US dollar and the euro, in addition to its proposed Libra token.

India: Facebook removed a network of 37 Facebook accounts, 32 Pages, 11 Groups and 42 Instagram accounts whose activity originated in India and which focused on the Gulf region, US, UK and Canada. Egypt: Facebook removed a network of 333 Facebook accounts, 195 Pages, 9 Groups and 1194 Instagram accounts.

GoodRx - a mobile app that saves US consumers money on prescription drugs - has apologized and sworn to do better after a Consumer Reports investigation found that it was sharing people's data with 20 other internet-based companies. On Friday, GoodRx said in a blog post that it has "Never and will never sell our users' personal health information." Having said that, the Consumer Reports story led the company to re-examine its policies when it comes to sharing data with third parties.

Despite Facebook claim, "Download Your Information" doesn't provide users with a list of all advertisers who uploaded a list with their personal data. As a user this means you can't exercise your rights under GDPR because you don't know which companies have uploaded data to Facebook.

Facebook is suing the data analytics firm OneAudience for allegedly developing a malicious, social-media-profile-grabbing software development kit and then paying app developers to embed it in their apps. According to the complaint, OneAudience's malicious SDK swiped the data that Facebook users had agreed to share with the app - data that may have included their name, email address, the country where they logged in from, time zone, Facebook ID, and, sometimes, gender.

Facebook on Thursday filed a federal lawsuit against oneAudience data intelligence firm over a tactic it used to gather information about users of social media platforms. New Jersey-based oneAudience paid software makers to install "Malicious" software in their apps in order to "Improperly" collect data about people at Facebook and other social media sites, Facebook said.