Security News
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission announced today that it filed a lawsuit against Idaho-based data broker Kochava for selling sensitive and precise geolocation data collected from hundreds of millions of mobile devices. The company provides access to consumers' location data through a data feed its clients can access via online data marketplaces after paying for a $25,000 subscription.
Amazon is suing over 10,000 administrators of Facebook groups that offer to post fake reviews on the online souk's website in exchange for products and money. Group admins charged $10 per fake review, according to CNBC. Reviewers were also lured with promises of free products in return for sham assessments of items such as car stereos or camera tripods.
Google on Monday disclosed that it's taking legal action against a nefarious actor who has been spotted operating fraudulent websites to defraud unsuspecting people into buying non-existent puppies. "The actor used a network of fraudulent websites that claimed to sell basset hound puppies - with alluring photos and fake customer testimonials - in order to take advantage of people during the pandemic," Google's CyberCrime Investigation Group manager Albert Shin and senior counsel Mike Trinh said.
A Mandiant shareholder has launched a legal challenge to block Google's $5.4 billion takeover of the threat intelligence firm. According to a lawsuit filed in a New York federal district court by shareholder Shiva Stein, Mandiant made "Materially incomplete and misleading" statements to investors in financial documents filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission about the planned acquisition.
Network equipment maker Ubiquiti on Tuesday filed a lawsuit against infosec journalist Brian Krebs, alleging he defamed the company by falsely accusing the firm of covering up a cyber-attack. On March 30, 2021, Krebs reported that Ubiquiti had disclosed a January breach involving a third-party cloud provider, later revealed to be AWS, and that an unnamed source within the firm had claimed the company was downplaying a catastrophic compromise.
Today, the US Federal Trade Commission sued Intuit, the maker of tax preparation software TurboTax, over deceptive advertising campaigns pitching free tax filing products that millions couldn't use. As the consumer protection watchdog explained, Intuit allegedly pushed supposedly "Free" products in a years-long ad campaign, misleading Americans that they could use TurboTax to file their taxes for free.
Meta has filed a joint lawsuit with Chime, a financial technology and digital banking company, against two Nigerian individuals who allegedly used Instagram and Facebook accounts to impersonate Chime and target its users in phishing attacks. The two defendants, Arafat Eniola Arowokoko and Arowokoko Afeez Opeyemi, presumably used a network of at least five Facebook accounts and over 800 Instagram accounts to impersonate the fintech company, attempting to take over customers' accounts.
Facebook's parent company Meta Platforms on Monday said it has filed a federal lawsuit in the U.S. state of California against bad actors who operated more than 39,000 phishing websites that impersonated its digital properties to mislead unsuspecting users into divulging their login credentials. The attacks were carried out using a relay service, Ngrok, that redirected internet traffic to the phishing websites in a manner that concealed the true location of the fraudulent infrastructure.
Meta has filed a federal lawsuit in California court to disrupt phishing attacks targeting Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp users. The attackers behind these phishing campaigns used almost 40,000 phishing pages that would impersonate the four platforms' login pages.
Google took steps to shut down the Glupteba botnet, at least for now. So Google is also suing the botnet's operators.