Security News
France's privacy watchdog has imposed a €60 million fine against Microsoft's Ireland subsidiary for dropping advertising cookies in users' computers without their explicit consent in violation of data protection laws in the European Union. The Commission nationale de l'informatique et des libertés noted that users visiting the home page of its Bing search engine did not have a "Mechanism to refuse cookies as easily as accepting them."
Clearview AI does not have a legitimate interest in collecting and using this data either, particularly given the intrusive and massive nature of the process, which makes it possible to retrieve the images present on the Internet of several tens of millions of Internet users in France. The seriousness of this breach led the CNIL chair to order Clearview AI to cease, for lack of a legal basis, the collection and use of data from people on French territory, in the context of the operation of the facial recognition software it markets.
A major Internet cable in the South of France was severed yesterday at 20:30 UTC, impacting subsea cable connectivity to Europe, Asia, and the United States and causing data packet losses and increased website response latency. Users still face problems due to app and content providers routing traffic through the impacted paths.
On Tuesday, the European Court of Justice issued rulings that limit indiscriminate data retention in France and Germany. The ECJ determined [PDF] that EU law disallows national legislation that requires indiscriminate retention of telecom traffic and location data to fight crime and protect public safety.
The mobile threat campaign tracked as Roaming Mantis has been linked to a new wave of compromises directed against French mobile phone users, months after it expanded its targeting to include European countries. Attack chains involving Roaming Mantis, a financially motivated Chinese threat actor, are known to either deploy a piece of banking trojan named MoqHao or redirect iPhone users to credential harvesting landing pages that mimic the iCloud login page.
French data protection regulators on Thursday found the use of Google Analytics a breach of the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation laws in the country, almost a month after a similar decision was reached in Austria. Of the data protection decree, which govern the transfers of personal data to third countries or international entities.
The Commission nationale de l'informatique et des libertés, France's data protection watchdog, has slapped Facebook and Google with fines of €150 million and €60 million for violating E.U. privacy rules by failing to provide users with an easy option to reject cookie tracking technology. HTTP cookies are small pieces of data created while a user is browsing a website and placed on the user's computer or other device by the user's web browser to track online activity across the web and store information about the browsing sessions, including logins and details entered in form fields such as names and addresses.
France's National Commission on Informatics and Liberty, the country's data privacy and protection body, has announced a 60 million euro sanction against Facebook and a 150 million euro penalty against Google. As a result, today CNIL announced an administrative fine of 60 million Euros against Facebook Ireland Ltd. and an additional 100,000 Euros per day of delay of compliance, starting from March 2022.
The French national cyber-security agency ANSSI said today that the Russian-backed Nobelium hacking group behind last year's SolarWinds hack has been targeting French organizations since February 2021. While ANSSI has not determined how Nobelium compromised email accounts belonging to French orgs, it added that the hackers used them to deliver malicious emails targeting foreign institutions.
The French National Agency for the Security of Information Systems on Wednesday issued an alert to warn organizations that a threat group tracked as APT31 has been abusing compromised routers in its recent attacks. The agency has shared indicators of compromise to help organizations detect potential attacks.