Yahoo has the dubious honor of having been on the receiving end of the largest data breach in history. As a consequence, the company has recently agreed to pay $50 million in damages and provide free credit monitoring services to its impacted users. The company actually suffered a pair of breaches in 2013 and in 2014, although this information was not disclosed by the company until 2016. All of the company's 3 billion users were impacted, and more than 200 million of them saw losses arising … Read more
Google Finally Cracking Down On Manufacturer Device Updates
Security in the Android ecosystem is awful. There's just no other word to describe it. In large part, the blame for that can be placed at the feet of Google. Although they have succeeded in creating a wildly successful platform, their management of OEM devices (in particular, security updates for them) have been virtually nonexistent. This has led to a situation where many device manufacturers don't bother to push critical updates at all. It costs money to do so, and until now, there … Read more
Hackers Now Targeting Girl Scouts, Raising Privacy Concerns
As far as hackers are concerned, no target is safe. Not even the Girl Scouts. Recently, one of the Girl Scouts' official email accounts was accessed by an "unauthorized third party" and as a result, as many as 2,800 girl scouts in Orange County, California may have had their personal information compromised. Gaining access to the account naturally gave the hacker access to every email sent from that account that had not already been deleted. When the breach was discovered, the Girl … Read more
Some Tumblr Users May Have Had Their Data Breached
Do you use Tumblr? If so, be aware that your personal information may have been exposed. Tumblr recently added a feature called "Recommended Blogs" that presents you with a list of blogs you might enjoy based on your past viewing habits. It's a great idea in theory, but unfortunately, there were problems with the way the feature was implemented. Any blog on the recommended list was placed there in such a way that it left the blog owner's personal information exposed, including: IP … Read more
New Fake Antivirus Tech Support Scam Tricking Users
McAfee has long been a popular target of scammers, but recently, they've changed the nature of their game. In years past, they'd display a webpage informing you that any McAfee products on your computer are out of date and provide a link to the company's virtual storefront where you could renew. Unbeknownst to the people clicking on those links, they were being redirected by an affiliate link, so any purchases made would generate a commission for the site owners. It was an unscrupulous, … Read more
Uninstall Fake App Called “The Album by Google Photos”
If you take a lot of photos with your Android device, you're probably constantly on the lookout for a better way to organize them and access them. That's exactly what the authors of the malicious app called "The Album, by Google Photos" are hoping for. The app put in a brief appearance on the Microsoft store, where it claimed to be from Google but it's clearly not. Unfortunately, the authors have gone to great lengths to make it appear legitimate, and as such, it has been downloaded and … Read more
HIPAA Fines For Data Breaches Continue To Grow
Anthem is one of the largest insurance providers in the United States. Unfortunately in 2015, they had the dubious honor of suffering the largest health data breach in history. It left protected health information of nearly 79 million of their customers exposed. As a result, a division of the US Department of Health and Human Services called the Office for Civil Rights (OCR), levied the largest fine against the company in the agency's history. They were fined a staggering sixteen million … Read more
Data Breach Affects Federal Healthcare System
You probably haven't heard of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Systems. They're a low-profile division of the Department of Health and Human Services responsible for administering the Affordable Care Act. Recently, the company announced that they detected anomalous activity in the systems related to the healthcare.gov website that brokers and insurance agents use to assist people who apply for healthcare coverage. The abnormal activity was detected in the Federally Facilitated … Read more
New Encryption Will Help Secure Your Android Device
Google is taking additional steps to bolster user privacy and better secure the data of the company's legions of Android device owners. The company recently announced a change to the Android Backup Service that will encrypt all user backup data stored on its cloud servers, such that even Google itself can't read it. Google has long allowed Android users to back up their app data and phone settings to their Google account so when they upgrade their phones, the process of getting the new … Read more
Malicious Messages In PlayStation Can Cause It To Crash
Gamers take the games they play seriously. So seriously, in fact, that they're not above resorting to dirty tricks to score a win. Recently, social media has been abuzz with reports of a messaging app bug on Sony's PlayStation devices. Specifically, there's a bug in both the Android and iOS messaging apps that allow malicious gamers to send a poisoned character via group chat that will brick your gaming console. If you're in the middle of a tense death match, you lose by default, because … Read more
