Security News

Under the new Civil Cyber-Fraud Initiative that the U.S. Department of Justice announced today, government contractors are accountable in a civil court if they don't report a breach or fail to meet required cybersecurity standards. Deputy Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco said that the initiative allows the DoJ to pursue government contractors that keep silent about a breach incident or don't comply with cybersecurity standards.

When Colorado resident Andrew Schober downloaded the Electrum Atom Bitcoin wallet from Reddit, he also picked up a piece of clipboard hijacking malware that eventually redirected his 16.4552 Bitcoin to a wallet controlled by two teenagers living in the U.K. At today's price, 16.4552 Bitcoin would be worth ~$773,000. Because they were juveniles at the time of the alleged theft, Schober is suing their parents for the nearly $1 million he lost in the heist.

A company is suing the Police Digital Service over a framework worth up to £18m after losing a bid to provide a mass surveillance platform, claiming police managers broke laws on the awarding of public contracts. Excession Technologies Ltd is suing the organisation formerly known as the Police ICT Company on the grounds that it broke the Defence and Security Public Contracts Regulations after allegedly misunderstanding Excession's platform was capable of doing.

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 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 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.