Security News

Urban surveillance and public safety technologies are finding new use cases following the COVID-19 pandemic and increasing AI capabilities. ABI Research forecasts a CAGR of 11.6 % with 1.4 billion Closed-Circuit Television surveillance cameras in urban areas worldwide in 2030.

Remember when the US and Australian police surreptitiously owned and operated the encrypted cell phone app ANOM? They arrested 800 people in 2021 based on that operation. For legal reasons, the FBI did not monitor outgoing messages from Anom devices determined to be inside the U.S. Instead, the Australian Federal Police monitored them on behalf of the FBI, according to previously published court records.

The video surveillance systems market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 10.06% over the forecast period 2021 to 2026, according to ResearchAndMarkets. Commercial segment is to dominate the video surveillance systems market.

Any individual or any company can become their target, as long as someone pays to spy on them. Engagement: This part consists of engaging contact with the target or people close to it in an effort to build enough trust to entice the target to download/execute files or click on infecting links.

Facebook has disrupted the operations of seven different spyware-making companies, blocking their Internet infrastructure, sending cease and desist letters, and banning them from its platform. "As a result of our months-long investigation, we took action against seven different surveillance-for-hire entities to disrupt their ability to use their digital infrastructure to abuse social media platforms and enable surveillance of people across the internet," said Director of Threat Disruption David Agranovich and Head of Cyber Espionage Investigations Mike Dvilyanski.

Although a patch was released in September, any still-vulnerable Hikvision IP Network Video Recorder products are being actively targeted by the Mirai-based botnet known as Moobot. FortiGuard Labs has released a report detailing how the Moobot botnet is leveraging a known remote code execution vulnerability in Hikvision products to spread a Moobot, which carries out distributed denial of service attacks.

Israel's Ministry of Defense has dramatically restricted the number of countries to which cybersecurity firms in the country are allowed to sell offensive hacking and surveillance tools to, cutting off 65 nations from the export list. In curtailing the exports, the move effectively makes it harder for local cybersecurity firms to market their software to countries with totalitarian regimes or with a track record of perpetrating human abuses.

The Office of the Commissioner for Personal Data Protection in Cyprus has collected a $1 million fine from intelligence company WiSpear for gathering mobile data from various individuals arriving at the airport in Larnaca. While this is just an administrative fine under the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation, it is related to a scandal two years ago widely publicized as the "Spy van" case.

The US Supreme Court this week refused [PDF] to hear a case that would have forced the country's hush-hush Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to explain its justifications for giving the Feds the right to help themselves to bulk amounts of the public's data. In a blistering dissent filed on Monday [PDF], Justices Neil Gorsuch and Sonia Sotomayor asked why the court would decline to review a case with "Profound implications for Americans' privacy and their rights to speak and associate freely."

Accompanying documentation explained that the gateway can measure distance to the wristband. Since the alternative was to serve the quarantine in a cramped and expensive hotel room with my kids, I was prepared to allow the app the access it wanted.