Security News
Pôle emploi, France's governmental unemployment registration and financial aid agency, is informing of a data breach that exposed data belonging to 10 million individuals. Although the agency does not specify the number of impacted individuals, Le Parisien reports an estimate of 10 million people to be impacted.
French police should be able to spy on suspects by remotely activating the camera, microphone and GPS of their phones and other devices, lawmakers agreed late on Wednesday, July 5. Covering laptops, cars and other connected objects as well as phones, the measure would allow the geolocation of suspects in crimes punishable by at least five years' jail.
Cybersecurity researchers have exposed the workings of a scam ring called CryptosLabs that's estimated to have made €480 million in illegal profits by targeting users in French-speaking individuals in France, Belgium, and Luxembourg since April 2018. The syndicate's massive fake investment schemes primarily involve impersonating 40 well-known banks, fin-techs, asset management firms, and crypto platforms, setting up a scam infrastructure spanning over 350 domains hosted on more than 80 servers, Group-IB said in a deep-dive report.
Despite the opposition of 38 civil society groups, the French National Assembly has approved the use of algorithmic video surveillance during the 2024 Paris Olympics. On Thursday, the French National Assembly adopted Article 7 of the pending bill, which authorizes automated analysis of surveillance video from fixed and drone cameras.
A French citizen was scheduled to appear before a US court on Friday on a nine-count indictment related to his alleged involvement in the ShinyHunters cybercrime gang that trafficked in identity and corporate data theft and sometimes extortion. Since early 2020, the ShinyHunters crew has stolen "Millions of customer records" and sold sensitive data belonging to more than 60 companies in Washington state and elsewhere around the world, according to the US Attorney's office.
Popular short-form video hosting service TikTok has been fined €5 million by the French data protection watchdog for breaking cookie consent rules, making it the latest platform to face similar penalties after Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft since 2020. The regulator said it conducted several audits between May 2020 and June 2022, finding that the ByteDance-owned company did not offer a straightforward option to refuse all cookies as opposed to just one click for accepting them.
A cybercrime group dubbed Bluebottle has been linked to a set of targeted attacks against the financial sector in Francophone countries located in Africa from at least July 2022 to September 2022. "The group makes extensive use of living-off-the-land, dual use tools, and commodity malware, with no custom malware deployed in this campaign," Symantec, a division of Broadcom Software, said in a report shared with The Hacker News.
Apple tracked users without their consent and deserves to be fined €6 million, according to a top advisor to France's data privacy watchdog. The Commission nationale de l'informatique et des libertés launched an investigation into Apple after a complaint filed by France Digitale, a lobby group supporting startups, accused the company of violating EU privacy laws last year.
The André-Mignot teaching hospital in the suburbs of Paris had to shut down its phone and computer systems because of a ransomware attack that occurred on Saturday evening. Jean-Noël Barrot, the Minister Delegate in charge of Digital Transition and Telecommunications, said the hospital immediately isolated the infected systems to limit the spread of the malware to additional devices and alerted the French National Authority for Security and Defense of Information Systems.
The French data protection watchdog on Tuesday fined electricity provider Électricité de France €600,000 for violating the European Union General Data Protection Regulation requirements. The Commission nationale de l'informatique et des libertés said the electric utility breached European regulation by storing the passwords for over 25,800 accounts by hashing them using the MD5 algorithm as recently as July 2022.