Pioneering computer scientist Fernando “Corby” Corbató, regarded as the inventor of the computer password and a key contributor in the development of time-sharing computer systems, died last Friday, July 12, in Newburyport, Massachusetts at the age of 93. Corbató’s Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS) allowed multiple users to work on a computer simultaneously, according to an…
Israeli data extraction firm Cellebrite announced the ability to break into any iPhone or Android device for law enforcement agencies near the same time Trump administration officials weighed the pros and cons of banning encryption law enforcement can’t break. Senior Trump officials met Wednesday to discuss whether to seek legislation that would crack down on…
The makers of the gay dating app Jack’d was fined $240,000 by the New York Attorney General’s Office for leaking private data and nude photos. Online Buddies, Inc. was charged with failure to protect private photos of users of its ‘Jack’d’ dating application, and the nude images of approximately 1,900 users in the gay, bisexual,…
Mozilla Firefox 69 is expected to launch a random password generator, similar to the one used in Chrome, this fall. The Firefox update is scheduled to release in early September, roughly a year following the release of Chrome 69. A random password generator is currently available in Firefox Nightly, the pilot version of Firefox used…
A federal jury last week awarded a Minneapolis policewoman $585,000 after determining that fellow city employees, including other law enforcement officers, repeatedly accessed her DMV records without any legal justification. Officer Amy Krekelberg originally filed suit in a Minnesota federal district court in 2013, alleging multiple violations of the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act from 2009…
Chrome will boost the security and privacy for extensions by reimagining the way a number of powerful APIs work with its new Declarative Net Request API. Instead of a user granting each extension access to all of their sensitive data, Google created a way for developers to request access to only the data needed to…
A year after being called out for a feature that exposed customers’ transactions, Venmo continues to leak hundreds of millions of transactions. Independent researcher Dan Salmon was able to scrape together millions of Venmo transactions over the course of six months and warned users to set their payments to private after privacy researchers warned the…
Millions of security cameras become equipped with “video analytics” and other AI-infused technologies that allow computers not only record but “understand” the objects they’re capturing, they could be used for both security and marketing purposes, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) warned in a recent report ,“The Dawn of Robot Surveillance.” As they become more…
Telegram pointed the finger at Chinese state-sanctioned actors yesterday after a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack overwhelmed its servers as protests were taking place in Hong Kong. “We’re currently experiencing a powerful DDoS attack, Telegram users in the Americas and some users from other countries may experience connection issues,” the encrypted messaging service said…
Researchers have spotted the MuddyWater, Fin8 and Platinum cybergangs all making an unwanted comeback following an observed increase in malicious activity over the last few weeks. Trend Micro came across several campaigns its researchers believe contain the hallmarks of MuddyWater. But this time around the group apparently deployed a new multi-stage PowerShell-based backdoor called POWERSTATS…
