Security News
Twitter will not be allowed to disclose more information on national security requests after the U.S. government convinced a judge that the disclosure of such information could harm national security. In 2014, companies were given permission to disclose some information on the national security requests they receive, including FISA court orders and national security letters.
This means that if you accessed Twitter from a shared or public computer via Mozilla Firefox and took actions like downloading your Twitter data archive or sending or receiving media via Direct Message, this information may have been stored in the browser's cache even after you logged out of Twitter. We started Firefox with a totally empty cache, browsed to twitter.com, and then grabbed a copy of the files Firefox had chosen to keep for later in its cache directory.
Twitter informed users on Thursday that their personal information may have been exposed due to the way the Firefox web browser stores cached data. "We recently learned that the way Mozilla Firefox stores cached data may have resulted in non-public information being inadvertently stored in the browser's cache," Twitter explained.
If you used Firefox on a shared PC to, for example, send or receive media in private Twitter messages, or download an archive of your profile that contained non-public information, be aware this data was inadvertently cached on the computer. Twitter did not specify what exactly caused private data to collect in the browser cache, though it appears a HTTP header was not used as expected, causing Firefox to retain media files and downloaded data for up to seven days.
As of Tuesday, hijacked Twitter accounts were spewing out hundreds of tweets hawking a dodgy looking face mask/toilet paper/digital forehead thermometer online store, according to Motherboard's Vice. On Tuesday, the journalist confirmed on Twitter that his account had been hijacked and used to send out direct messages, purportedly about face masks.
Just ahead of its Champion's League Round of 16 appearance next week, FC Barcelona's official Twitter account was hacked in an apparent credential-stuffing attack. "FC Barcelona's Twitter accounts have been hacked, which is why messages from outside our club have appeared, and which have been reported and deleted," the team announced on Twitter once it regained control of its social-media presence.
That AI still needed a set of - ahem - images to train itself on, which Bressler requested via Twitter. Bressler told Naked Security that it will also block pictures of female genitals although no tests of its effectiveness at doing this have yet been made public.
A court in Moscow fined Twitter and Facebook 4 million rubles each Thursday for refusing to store the personal data of Russian citizens on servers in Russia, the largest penalties imposed on Western technology companies under internet use laws. Russia's internet regulator, Roskomnadzor, has tried unsuccessfully for several years to force large companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google to move Russian user data to Russia.
Last Friday, in full glare of the world, Facebook admins suddenly found themselves in an unseemly struggle to wrestle back control of the company's Twitter accounts from attackers that had defaced them. Well even Facebook is hackable but at least their security better than Twitter.