Security News

Facebook Sues 4 Vietnamese for Hacking Accounts and $36 Million Ad Fraud
2021-07-01 02:34

Facebook on Tuesday revealed it filed two separate legal actions against perpetrators who abused its ad platform to run deceptive advertisements in violation of the company's Terms and Advertising Policies. "In the second case, the defendants are a group of individuals located in Vietnam who got users to self-compromise their Facebook accounts and ran millions of dollars of unauthorized ads."

Facebook sues hackers who hijacked advertising agencies' accounts
2021-06-30 16:31

Facebook has filed lawsuits against two groups of suspects who took over advertising agency employees' accounts and abused its ad platform to run unauthorized or deceptive ads. The social network says that four Vietnamese nationals took over the Facebook accounts of multiple employees working at marketing and advertising agencies using a technique known as session theft.

Facebook Sues Four Vietnamese Nationals for Hacking Accounts
2021-06-30 13:46

Facebook this week announced filing two lawsuits - one against an organization and its agents and one against four individuals in Vietnam - over advertising-related schemes. According to Facebook, four individuals residing in Vietnam employed session/cookie theft techniques to compromise the accounts of employees at advertising and marketing agencies, leveraging them to run unauthorized ads.

WhatsApp Sues Indian Government Over New Internet Regulations
2021-05-30 20:42

WhatsApp on Wednesday fired a legal salvo against the Indian government to block new regulations that would require messaging apps to trace the "First originator" of messages shared on the platform, thus effectively breaking encryption protections. "Requiring messaging apps to 'trace' chats is the equivalent of asking us to keep a fingerprint of every single message sent on WhatsApp, which would break end-to-end encryption and fundamentally undermines people's right to privacy," a WhatsApp spokesperson told The Hacker News via email.

Nintendo Sues Video-Game Pirates
2021-04-27 20:46

Gaming giant Nintendo has filed a lawsuit against video-game piracy group ringleader Gary Bowser, a Canadian national behind Team Xecuter, which law enforcement said built and sold hacking devices that enabled consoles to play unauthorized versions of games. Bowser was arrested last October, along with his alleged Team Xecuter co-conspirators for targeting Nintendo Switch, the Nintendo 3DS, the Nintendo Entertainment Classic Edition, Sony PlayStation Classic and Microsoft Xbox, the Department of Justice said.

Watchdog thinks Google tricked Australians into giving up data, sues. Judge semi-agrees
2021-04-16 11:30

Australian federal court sent a message to Big Tech about its willingness to act on privacy violations when it ruled today that Google had "Partially" misled consumers about collecting mobile phone personal location data. For Google to not collect a device's location data, the user needed to let their wishes be known in both the "Location History" and the "Web & App Activity" setting segments.

Watchdog thinks Google tricked Australians into giving up data, sues. Judge semi-agrees
2021-04-16 11:30

Australian federal court sent a message to Big Tech about its willingness to act on privacy violations when it ruled today that Google had "Partially" misled consumers about collecting mobile phone personal location data. For Google to not collect a device's location data, the user needed to let their wishes be known in both the "Location History" and the "Web & App Activity" setting segments.

Proposed Bill Would Allow Americans to Sue Foreign Cyber-Actors
2021-03-10 16:03

A bill introduced in the House of Representatives this week could allow United States citizens to seek monetary damages if cyber-attacks by foreign threat actors harm them in any way. Per the bill, Americans would be able to make claims in federal or state courts if they are in any way affected by cyber-attacks that foreign states have conducted against them.

Vote machine biz Smartmatic sues Fox News and Trump chums for $2.7bn over bogus claims of rigged 2020 election
2021-02-05 02:41

Electronic voting machine maker Smartmatic has sued Fox News, three of its hosts, and two of Donald Trump's loyalists - Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell - for an eye-popping $2.7bn in defamation damages over the false claims it stole the 2020 presidential election for Joe Biden. The voting tech biz, in its court filing, said Fox News broadcast entirely bogus claims that Smartmatic's devices were engineered to secretly swing vote counts in Biden's favor in US states where the results were close.

Facebook sues makers of malicious Chrome extensions for scraping data
2021-01-14 15:16

Facebook has taken legal action against the makers of malicious Chrome extensions used for scraping user-profiles and other information from Facebook's website and from users' systems without authorization. After being installed on the users' computers, these Chrome extensions also installed malicious code in the background which allowed the defendants to scrape user data from Facebook's site.