3 out of 4 users don’t know Facebook categorizes them for ad targeting; with political and racial affinity being some labels: Pew Research
The Washington-based Pew Research Center released a report that shares the results of its survey based on Facebook user data, yesterday. The survey was conducted on a sample of Facebook users (963 U.S. Facebook users aged 18 years and above) who were asked to present their opinion on the data ... Read More
Hyatt Hotels launches public bug bounty program with HackerOne
Hyatt Hotels Corporation launched its bug bounty program with HackerOne, earlier this week. As part of the bug bounty program, ethical hackers are invited to test Hyatt websites and apps to spot potential vulnerabilities in them. “At Hyatt, protecting guest and customer information is our top priority and launching this ... Read More
EU shares guidelines to help organizations achieve GDPR compliance
The European Union (EU) launched an online resource site yesterday that offers complete compliance guide to General data protection regulation (GDPR) law by EU. GDPR is considered the toughest privacy and security law in the world. The law imposes obligations onto organizations that collect user’s personal data across Europe. The ... Read More
Researchers release unCaptcha2, a tool that uses Google’s speech-to-text API to bypass the reCAPTCHA audio challenge
A team of researchers at the University of Maryland released unCaptcha2 last week, an updated version of their tool Uncaptcha that defeated Google’s reCAPTCHA audio challenge with 85.15% accuracy in 2017. Google’s Audio challenge is aimed at solving reCAPTCHA’s accessibility problem for visually challenged people who can’t see where to ... Read More
Private International shares its findings on how popular Android apps send user data to Facebook without user consent
Privacy International, a UK registered charity firm that promotes the right to privacy, released a report last week, that shows how popular Android apps (Qibla Connect, Period Tracker Clue, Indeed, My talking tom, etc) share user data with Facebook, despite not having a Facebook account. The report raises questions about ... Read More
EU to sponsor bug bounty programs for 14 open source projects from January 2019
Julia Reda, EU member of the parliament, announced, last week, that EU will be funding the internet bug bounty programs for 14 out of the total 15 open source projects, starting January 2019. The Internet Bug Bounty programs are rewards for friendly hackers who actively search for security vulnerabilities and ... Read More
CenturyLink suffers a major outage; affects 911 services across several states in the US
CenturyLink, one of the largest American telecommunications provider, suffered a major outage that lasted for almost two days, affecting internet, television, and 911 services across the US. The outage started at 17:18 UTC on Thursday and got resolved at 19:49 UTC on Saturday, as per the Century Link’s status page ... Read More
IEEE Computer Society predicts top ten tech trends for 2019: assisted transportation, chatbots, and deep learning accelerators among others
IEEE Computer Society (IEEE-CS) released its annual tech future predictions, earlier this week, unveiling the top ten most likely to be adopted technology trends in 2019. “The Computer Society’s predictions are based on an in-depth analysis by a team of leading technology experts, identify top technologies that have substantial potential ... Read More
How IRA hacked American democracy using social media and meme warfare to promote disinformation and polarization: A new report to Senate Intelligence Committee
A new report prepared for the Senate Intelligence Committee by the cybersecurity firm, New Knowledge was released yesterday. The report titled “The Tactics & Tropes of theInternet Research Agency” provides an insight into how IRA a group of Russian agents used and continue to use social media to influence politics ... Read More
An SQLite “Magellan” RCE vulnerability exposes billions of apps, including all Chromium-based browsers
The Tencent Blade security team found a vulnerability in the SQLite database that exposes billions of desktop and web applications to hackers. This vulnerability classified as a remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability hasn’t received a CVE identification number yet and has been nicknamed as “Magellan” by the Tencent Blade Team ... Read More
