Security News
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".
The American Civil Liberties Union has sued the US government, claiming Homeland Security agents trampled over people's constitutional rights - by buying phone location data from commercial brokers rather than getting necessary search warrants. "These practices raise serious concerns that federal immigration authorities are evading Fourth Amendment protections for cell phone location information by paying for access instead of obtaining a warrant," the ACLU said in a statement this week.
Instagram and TikTok social-media influencers Kelly Fitzpatrick and Sabrina Kelly-Krejci are among 13 defendants in a lawsuit filed by Amazon, which alleges that they participated in an an online scam to sell counterfeit luxury goods. Counterfeit goods are strictly forbidden in the Amazon marketplace, but generic products - often called "Dupes" - are allowed.
A campaign to sue Facebook over lax privacy policies that allowed Cambridge Analytica to slurp almost a million people's personal data from the social networking website hopes to become a representative action in the High Court, its instigators said today. The campaign said in a statement: "In 2013 and 2014, thousands of people participated in the thisisyourdigitallife app on Facebook. Facebook allowed this app to harvest the data of the app users' friends without their friends' permission or knowledge, including Alvin Carpio, the representative claimant. By taking data without consent, it is alleged that Facebook failed to meet their legal obligations under the Data Protection Act 1998.".
Palo Alto Networks has threatened a startup with legal action after the smaller biz published a comparison review of one of its products. Israel-based Orca Security received a cease-and-desist letter from a lawyer representing Palo Alto after Orca uploaded a series of online videos reviewing of one of Palo Alto's products and compared it to its own.
As tensions soared between the world's two biggest economies, President Donald Trump signed an executive order on August 6 giving Americans 45 days to stop doing business with TikTok's Chinese parent company ByteDance - effectively setting a deadline for a sale of the app to a US company. "Today we are filing a complaint in federal court challenging the administration's efforts to ban TikTok in the US," the company said in a blog post.