Security News
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
The American Civil Liberties Union announced on Tuesday that it has filed a lawsuit against the FBI in an effort to find out how the law enforcement agency can access information stored on encrypted devices. The FBI has often turned to third parties for help in accessing information stored on encrypted devices, but it has come to light in recent court documents that the agency's Electronic Device Analysis Unit has been acquiring solutions that can help it break into encrypted devices on its own.
Australia's consumer watchdog launched legal action against Facebook on Wednesday, alleging the social media giant "Misled" thousands of Australians by collecting user data from a free VPN service advertised as private. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has accused Facebook and two of its subsidiaries - Facebook Israel and Onavo Inc - of misleading people who downloaded its virtual private network app Onavo Protect, by collecting and using their "Very detailed and valuable personal activity data".