Security News
Researchers at the University of Hamburg in Germany have conducted a field experiment capturing hundreds of thousands of passersby's WiFi connection probe requests to determine the type of data transmitted without the device owners realizing it. WiFi probing is a standard process, part of the bilateral communication required between a smartphone and an access point to establish a connection.
Vodafone is piloting a new advertising ID system called TrustPid, which will work as a persistent user tracker at the mobile Internet Service Provider level. The mobile carrier plans to assign a fixed ID to each customer and associate all user activity with it.
US President Joe Biden has signed into law a bill that aims to improve how the federal government tracks and prosecutes cybercrime. The Better Cybercrime Metrics Act, which Biden signed late last week, requires the Department of Justice to work with the National Academy of Sciences to develop a taxonomy that law enforcement can use to categorize different types of cybercrime.
Meta's Facebook subsidiary has been collecting hashed personal data from students seeking US government financial aid, even from those without a Facebook account and those not logged into the student aid website, according to a research study published this week. News non-profit The Markup, working with Mozilla via its Rally data monitoring extension, found that the Meta pixel code has been gathering digital fingerprints representing the first name, last name, phone number, zip code, and email address of students filling out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA, on the US Department of Education's StudentAid.
Cybersecurity researchers have managed to build a clone of Apple Airtag that circumvents the anti-stalking protection technology built into its Find My Bluetooth-based tracking protocol. The result is a stealth AirTag that can successfully track an iPhone user for over five days without triggering a tracking notification, Positive Security's co-founder Fabian Bräunlein said in a deep-dive published last week.
An Apple AirTag is a Bluetooth-based device finder released in April 2021 that allows owners to track the device using Apple's 'Find My' service. Although Apple has implemented an intricate anti-stalking system to prevent cases of abuse, stealthy AirTag tracking continues to remain a problem.
An unauthenticated API call vulnerability in DPD Group's package tracking system could have been exploited to access the personally identifiable details of its clients. DPD Group is a parcel delivery service with a global presence, shipping around two billion parcels annually worldwide.
The rush to roll out remote healthcare has also unleashed a universe of wearable medical devices to collect sensitive data, which researchers say are widely vulnerable to attack. Analysts with Kaspersky Labs reported finding 33 vulnerabilities last year in the most widely used data transfer protocol for internet of things medical devices, known as MQTT - that's 10 more than the previous year.
A German activist is trying to track down a secret government intelligence agency. Wittmann says that everyone she spoke to denied being part of this intelligence agency.
Google on Tuesday announced that it is abandoning its controversial plans for replacing third-party cookies in favor of a new Privacy Sandbox proposal called Topics, which categorizes users' browsing habits into approximately 350 topics. Subsequently, when a user visits a participating site, the Topics selects three of the interests - one topic from each of the past three weeks - to share with the site and its advertising partners.