Earlier this week, Yahoo! announced a plan to try to leverage its Yahoo! Mail users’ contacts into a social network of friends who will receive your Yahoo! Updates. Once the most visited website in the world, Yahoo! now ranks fourth worldwide, reaching about a quarter of all Internet users each day. Like Google Buzz’s ill-fated launch using Gmail contacts, Yahoo! wants to jump start its social networking plans with the hundreds of millions of people who already use its email and messenger services.
Full Article (EFF - eff.org)
Yesterday while some of us in the USA were enjoying a day off Google made the news with this article in the Financial Times stating that they are moving away from Microsoft Windows due to security concerns. My first reaction was to question why a company with as many smart brains as Google would make such a misguided decision. That was, of course, before I actually read the entire article.
Full Article (Random Things From Dark Places - hellnbak.wordpress.com)
WikiLeaks, the controversial whistleblowing site that exposes secrets of governments and corporations, bootstrapped itself with a cache of documents obtained through an internet eavesdropping operation by one of its activists, according to a new profile of the organization’s founder. The activist siphoned more than a million documents as they traveled across the internet through Tor, also known as “The Onion Router,” a sophisticated privacy tool that lets users navigate and send documents through the internet anonymously.
Full Article (Threat Level - wired.com)
Per article in Financial Times, Google is not deploying user systems with a Microsoft operating system without very high level clearance. The statement (not seemingly from an official spokesperson) is that they were tightening up security after the recent Aurora incident. Let me make just a few observations:
Full Article (Noodle On This… - noodleonthis.com)
Worried about the NSA, the FBI, criminals or cyberspies electronically eavedropping on your private phone calls? There may be an untappable app for that. On Tuesday, an independent hacker and security researcher who goes by the handle Moxie Marlinspike and his Pittsburgh-based startup Whisper Systems launched free public betas for two new privacy-focused programs on Google’s Android mobile platform: RedPhone, a voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) program that encrypts phone calls, and TextSecure, an app for sending and receiving encrypted text messages and scrambling the messages stored in their inbox.
Full Article (The Firewall - forbes.com)
Investing in penny stocks is not for the faint of heart. As such, accredited investors and bulletin board traders are typically aware of the risk of making bets on less established companies. If the company “makes it,” the rewards can be immense, and chasing this dream drives the market. Investment in firms like LIGATT Security International (LGTT.PK) comes with a heavy dose of caveat emptor, and the lack of transparency into company operations often leaves the investor to perform their own research and make decisions without a complete representation of the company’s true worth. The following information has been culled from publicly available sources such as filings with the SEC, OTCMarkets and state regulatory bodies, as well as web activity, forum posts and LIGATT’s own press releases. While this article is based on a considerable amount of research, many items have not been fully addressed in an effort to avoid undue speculation. If you have insights or comments, please send your thoughts via email to errata[at]attrition.org.
Full Article (Attrition - attrition.org)
A consortium of independent film producers is hitting a stumbling block in its plan to simultaneously sue thousands of BitTorrent users for allegedly downloading pirated movies. Time Warner Cable is refusing to look up and turn over the identities of about a thousand of its customers targeted in the lawsuits, on the grounds that the effort would require three months of full-time work by its staff.
Full Article (Threat Level - wired.com)
Google is facing scrutiny and investigation around the world following revelations that it has been capturing and archiving wi-fi data collected by its Google Street View vehicles that drive around capturing the image data used by the Street View service. It is questionable whether Google should have done that, but what is not questionable is whether or not Google should have any data from your wi-fi network.
Full Article (PC World - pcworld.com)
Most Internet users know to watch for the telltale signs of a traditional phishing attack: An e-mail that asks you to click on a link and enter your e-mail or banking credentials at the resulting Web site. But a new phishing concept that exploits user inattention and trust in browser tabs is likely to fool even the most security-conscious Web surfers.
Full Article - (Krebs on Security - krebsonsecurity.com)
Google is offering a way for web users to opt out of being tracked around the web by its popular Google Analytics tool used by publishers to track traffic and trends on their websites. Publishers like Wired.com insert a simple line of Google Analytics Javascript on their site and then can see on a dashboard which pages are popular and what search terms lead users to their site. But Google also gets much of that user information in aggregate, so it has a bird’s eye of the internet, thanks to all the sites reporting back to it. It knows more about a user’s activities across multiple sites than any individual site knows. It uses that data to improve its own services.
Full Article (Threat Level - wired.com)
The controversy over Facebook’s privacy policy is helping those developing alternatives to the social network. Funding and users are flowing to services that claim to put members in charge of their personal data. The rivals range from start-ups to more established firms working on the specifications for an ecosystem of open social networks.
Full Article (BBC News - news.bbc.co.uk)
Last week’s news that Google’s Street View cars collected the content of messages flowing over open wireless networks while mapping the location of those access points is a privacy wake-up call to the company and wireless users alike.
Full Article (Electronic Frontier Foundation - eff.org)
If you’ve been watching the slow motion train wreck that is Facebook.com’s recent effort to revamp its privacy promises, you may be wondering where to start making sense of the dizzying array of privacy options offered by the world’s largest online social network. Fortunately, developers are starting to release free new tools so that you don’t need to read a statement longer than the U.S. Constitution or earn a masters degree in Facebook privacy in order to get started.
Full Article (Krebs on Security - krebsonsecurity.com)
Carders.cc, a German online forum dedicated to helping criminals trade and sell financial data stolen through hacking, has itself been hacked. The once-guarded contents of its servers are now being traded on public file-sharing networks, leading to the exposure of potentially identifying information on the forum’s users as well as countless passwords and credit card accounts swiped from unsuspecting victims.
Full Article (Krebs on Security - krebsonsecurity.com)
