Security News
The mobile phone numbers and other personal information for approximately 533 million Facebook users worldwide has been leaked on a popular hacker forum for free. The sold data included 533,313,128 Facebook users, with information such as a member's mobile number, Facebook ID, name, gender, location, relationship status, occupation, and email addresses.
The Harris Federation, a not-for-profit charity responsible for running 50 primary and secondary academies in London and Essex, has become the latest UK education body to fall victim to ransomware. In a message to pupils and parents, the group, which is led and run by teachers, admitted that criminals had meddled with its servers.
China's government on Thursday called on Washington to drop efforts to expel three state-owned Chinese phone companies from the United States in a new clash over technology and security. The United States should "Stop the wrong practice of generalizing the concept of national security and politicizing economic issues" and "Stop abusing state power to unreasonably suppress Chinese enterprises," said a ministry spokesman, Zhao Lijian.
Encrypted phone network Sky Global has seemingly shut down after European police swooped on users and distributors, and its chief exec was indicted by American prosecutors. News of the company shutdown was broken by Vice News after raids in Belgium and the Netherlands on Sky ECC users and resellers.
A new UK law will explicitly authorise the "Voluntary" slurping of data from mobile phones of crime suspects and witnesses. The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, which was introduced to Parliament this week, contains clauses that will allow police and others to extract data from mobile phones if the user "Voluntarily" hands the device over.
A series of police raids in Belgium have resulted in the apparent shutdown of the Sky ECC encrypted mobile phone network. As the second major encrypted phone network to be shut down by police in Europe, Sky ECC's seeming downfall has parallels with the Encrochat story, where French and Dutch police man-in-the-middle'd the encrypted phone network on suspicion it was being used mainly by organised criminals.
Businesses and consumers are relying on the voice call more than ever during the pandemic with voice traffic up 184% in 2020 compared to 2019, according to a Hiya report. Nearly 40% of all respondents reported losing money to phone scams in 2020 - with an average of $182 per person.
Police have arrested 10 people in the U.K., Belgium and Malta for allegedly hijacking mobile phones belonging to U.S. celebrities including internet influencers, sports stars and musicians to steal personal information and millions in cryptocurrency, authorities said. The European Union police agency Europol said Wednesday that the gang is believed to have stolen more than $100 million in cryptocurrencies by using so-called SIM swap attacks.
Chicago-based wireless carrier UScellular started informing customers last week that their personal information may have been accessed and their phone numbers ported as a result of a cybersecurity breach. Since employees were already logged into the CRM system, the attackers were able to access the CRM with the employee credentials and access wireless customer accounts and phone numbers.
Cybersecurity researchers on Tuesday disclosed a now-patched security flaw in TikTok that could have potentially enabled an attacker to build a database of the app's users and their associated phone numbers for future malicious activity. Although this flaw only impacts those users who have linked a phone number with their account or logged in with a phone number, a successful exploitation of the vulnerability could have resulted in data leakage and privacy violation, Check Point Research said in an analysis shared with The Hacker News.