Category: Tech

The Colorado Department of Higher Education (CDHE) discloses a massive data breach impacting students, past students, and teachers after suffering a ransomware attack in June. In a ‘Notice of Data Incident’ published on the CDHE website, the Department says they suffered a ransomware attack on June 19th, 2023. “On June 19, 2023, CDHE became aware it was the victim of…

As information started to leak out from the… everywhere about NSO Group’s secondhand contribution to surveillance abuses all over the world, the world (except for the worst of NSO’s customers) began taking action. Even the government that facilitated many of NSO’s sales to human rights violators decided it might be time to toss a few restrictions on the Israel-based malware…

Two Linux vulnerabilities introduced recently into the Ubuntu kernel create the potential for unprivileged local users to gain elevated privileges on a massive number of devices. Ubuntu is one of the most widely used Linux distributions, especially popular in the U.S., having an approximate user base of over 40 million. Two recent flaws tracked as CVE-2023-32629 and CVE-2023-2640 discovered by Wiz’s…

NATO has confirmed that its IT team is investigating claims about an alleged data-theft hack on the Communities of Interest (COI) Cooperation Portal by a hacking group known as SiegedSec. The COI Cooperation Portal (dnbl.ncia.nato.int) is the military alliance’s unclassified information-sharing and collaboration environment, dedicated to supporting NATO organizations and member nations. Yesterday, the hacking group ‘SiegedSec’ posted on Telegram…

Ilya Sachkov who helped found one of Russia’s most prominent cybersecurity firms was accused of passing information to foreign spies. A Russian court has jailed for 14 years a top cybersecurity executive for treason in a case which centred on allegations he had passed classified information to foreign spies. Following a closed-door trial, the AFP news agency quoted Judge Alexander…

U.S. prosecutors have accused FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried of witness tampering and asked a federal judge to issue an order that would bar the former billionaire and other parties from making public statements likely to interfere with a fair trial. The prosecutors wrote to U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan on Thursday referencing a New York Times article titled “Inside the…

In just the last five years, the “right to repair” movement has shifted from nerdy niche to the mainstream, thanks in part to significant support from the Biden FTC and efforts in states like Minnesota and New York to pass new right to repair laws, making it easier and less expensive for consumers and independent repair shops to gain affordable access…

The U.S. Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced that Amazon has agreed to pay a $25 million fine to settle alleged children’s privacy laws violations related to the company’s Alexa voice assistant service. Amazon has offered Alexa voice-activated products and services targeted at children under 13 years old since May 2018. In May 2023, the Federal Trade…

SINGAPORE – DBS Bank has agreed to sell a 77.8 per cent stake in electronic payment services provider AXS to Tower Capital Asia, a private equity firm based in Singapore. The bank will retain a minority stake of 9.9 per cent in AXS, it said on Tuesday. It did not disclose the stake’s sale price. The deal is slated to…

A threat actor referred to as ‘RomCom’ has been targeting organizations supporting Ukraine and guests of the upcoming NATO Summit set to start tomorrow in Vilnius, Lithuania. BlackBerry’s research and intelligence team recently discovered two malicious documents that impersonated the Ukranian World Congress organization and topics related to the NATO Summit to lure selected targets. The attackers used a replica of the…

Here we go again. It was only a month ago that Karl Bode wrote about Disney’s absolutely and totally cool process of removing a bunch of content from its Disney Plus streaming platform not because the content sucks and nobody liked it, but because it gets to play accounting tricks as to its assets in order to receive giant tax…

As you’ll recall, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman whined about what he called the “landed gentry” among moderators of subreddits that were protesting his ridiculous extractive API changes. He insisted that perhaps things should be more democratic. In response, many subreddits took a vote on how subscribers to those subreddits wanted the mods to handle things, and many urged the moderators…

Nearly 70 IT security and privacy academics have added to the clamour of alarm over the damage the UK’s Online Safety Bill could wreak to, er, online safety unless it’s amended to ensure it does not undermine strong encryption. Writing in an open letter, 68 UK-affiliated security and privacy researchers have warned the draft legislation poses a stark risk to…

The Swedish Authority for Privacy Protection (Integritetsskyddsmyndigheten – IMY) has fined two companies with 12.3 million SEK (€1 million/$1.1 million) for using Google Analytics and warned two others about the same practice. In a decision published yesterday, the agency explains that by using Google Analytics to generate web statistics the firms were breaching European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)….

Microsoft has denied the claims of the so-called hacktivists “Anonymous Sudan” that they breached the company’s servers and stole credentials for 30 million customer accounts. Anonymous Sudan is known for debilitating distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against Western entities in recent months. The group has confirmed their affiliation with pro-Russian hacktivists like Killnet. Last month, Microsoft admitted that Anonymous Sudan was responsible…

Sweden’s data protection watchdog has issued a couple of fines in relation to exports of European users’ data via Google Analytics which it found breach the bloc’s privacy rulebook owing to risks posed by US government surveillance. It has also warned other companies against use of Google’s tool. The fines — just over $1.1 million for Swedish telco Tele2 and…