Security News
Security researchers have discovered 75 applications on Google Play and another ten on Apple's App Store engaged in ad fraud. The Satori team have informed Google and Apple about their findings and the apps have been removed from the official Android and iOS stores.
Wearable technology company Fitbit has announced a new clause that requires users to switch to a Google account "Sometime" in 2023. "In 2023, we plan to launch Google accounts on Fitbit, which will enable use of Fitbit with a Google account," the Google-owned fitness devices maker said.
Malwarebytes has addressed an issue that prevented users from accessing websites and services hosted on the google.com domain, including Google search and Youtube. According to a large number of reports from people affected by this, their browsers were prevented from accessing Google sites after Malwarebytes flagged and blocked them as malicious.
Google and its Youtube domains are being flagged as malicious by Malwarebytes as of Wednesday morning, blocking users from accessing a whole range of websites. "Malwarebytes is aware of a temporary issue with the web filtering component of our product that may be blocking certain domains, including google.com," a Malwarebytes spokesperson told The Register.
Tech companies are throwing their users to the wolves by allowing company employees, cops, and other third parties to access unprotected messages. "After the reversal of Roe v. Wade and with more rights cutbacks on the way, tech companies are throwing their users to the wolves by allowing company employees, cops, and other third parties to access unprotected messages."
Indonesia's competition regulator, the Komisi Pengawas Persaingan Usaha has alleged that Google has violated local anti-monopoly laws by abusing its dominant position for the distribution of apps and its requirement that developers must use its payment systems. Google therefore has a lot to lose if it is found to have abused its monopoly.
Extended spellcheck features in Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge web browsers transmit form data, including personally identifiable information and in some cases, passwords, to Google and Microsoft respectively. In cases where Chrome Enhanced Spellcheck or Edge's Microsoft Editor were enabled, "Basically anything" entered in form fields of these browsers was transmitted to Google and Microsoft.
South Korea's Personal Information Protection Commission has issued two large fines for privacy violations: a $50 million penalty for Google and $22 million for Meta. The PIPC's beef is that neither Google nor Meta properly obtain consent or inform users on how they collect and use data, particularly with regards to behavioral information used to predict interests for marketing and advertising purposes.
Google closed its $5.4 billion Mandiant acquisition today in a move that brings the threat intel and incident response giant under the Google Cloud umbrella. Six months and one shareholder lawsuit later, the two companies' combined services and products help customers shift to a "More proactive approach" to security operations, according to Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian.
Google's open source security team says OSS-Fuzz, its community fuzzing service, has helped fix more than 8,000 security vulnerabilities and 26,000 other bugs in open source projects since its 2016 debut. The group would like to see open source developers do more fuzzing to make the world a better place, or at least make software a bit more secure.