Security News
More than 1,200 Iranian citizens have been targeted in extensive cyber-surveillance operations backed by the Iranian government, researchers with cybersecurity firm Check Point report. The attacks, which Check Point refers to collectively as Domestic Kitten, have been ongoing for roughly four years, orchestrated by a threat actor tracked as APT-C-50, which executes the campaigns on behalf of the Iranian government.
A former employee of prominent home security company ADT has admitted that he hacked into the surveillance feeds of dozens of customer homes, doing so primarily to spy on naked women or to leer at unsuspecting couples while they had sex. Authorities say that the IT technician "Took note of which homes had attractive women, then repeatedly logged into these customers' accounts in order to view their footage for sexual gratification." He did this by adding his personal email address to customer accounts, which ultimately hooked him into "Real-time access to the video feeds from their homes."
Eagle Eye Networks shared the trends that will have the biggest impact on video surveillance, security, and use of analytics to drive business intelligence and improvement in 2021. The shift to the benefits of cloud in the video surveillance space are powerful and undeniable, including major cost savings, heightened data security, remote access and maintenance, flexible storage and retention, scalability, increased stability, and disaster recovery.
A warning issued this week by the FBI warns owners of smart home devices with voice and video capabilities that these types of systems have been targeted by individuals who launch so-called "Swatting" attacks. "Smart home device manufacturers recently notified law enforcement that offenders have been using stolen e-mail passwords to access smart devices with cameras and voice capabilities and carry out swatting attacks," the FBI said.
Microsoft has dialed back components of its Productivity Score tool for Microsoft 365 apps following concerns about user privacy. Called Productivity Score, the tool assigns each 365 user in an organization a score out of 100 across categories including communication, meetings, collaboration and teamwork - which can be viewed by admins.
The European Union on Monday agreed to tighten up rules for the sale and export of cybersurveillance technology. EU lawmakers and the European Council reached a provisional deal to update controls of so-called dual use goods such as facial recognition technology and spyware to prevent them from being used to violate human rights.
"There are over 6,000 systems and 80,000 cameras in operation across 183 LAs!" So exclaimed the UK's outgoing Surveillance Camera Commissioner as he detailed just how many council CCTV cameras there are across the nation. In a public plea asking councils to take compliance with surveillance laws seriously, Tony Porter lifted the lid on the scale and depth of CCTV camera deployment across Great Britain.
India's Securities and Exchange Board appears to have sent a circular to stock exchanges that calls for market participants to upgrade information security as bad actors seek to take advantage of the financial services industry's move to working from home. SEBI appears not to have made its document public, but India's National Stock Exchange - the nation's largest - plus the Bombay Stock Exchange and Multi Commodity Exchange of India all late last week published the same 14-point security guidelines that say SEBI has called for market participants to implement a security baseline on the computers their staff use when working from home.
The tactics associated with surveillance capitalism - the commodification of personal data for profit as mastered by companies like Google and Facebook - have followed the same path. The race between competing political campaigns to out-collect, out-analyze and out-leverage voter data has raised concerns about the damaging effects it has on privacy and democratic participation, but also about the fact that all of this data, if seized by adversarial nation-states, opens up opportunities for affecting an election and sowing electoral chaos.
A U.S. federal appeals court ruled that the controversial National Security Agency mass surveillance program exposed in 2013 was illegal - and may have even been unconstitutional. The call comes seven years after former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden outed the mass surveillance program, which enabled snooping in on millions of American's phone calls, in a bombshell leak that drew widespread worries about privacy.