Privacy

When Adam Savage, host of the popular science program "MythBusters," posted a picture on Twitter of his automobile parked in front of his house, he let his fans know much more than that he drove a Toyota Land Cruiser.

Embedded in the image was a geotag, a bit of data providing the longitude and latitude of where the photo was taken. Hence, he revealed exactly where he lived. And since the accompanying text was "Now it's off to work," potential thieves knew he would not be at home.

According to the security investigators at AVG an anti-virus vendor, a fresh variant of Zeus botnet has stolen over 60GB of sensitive, private data out of 55,000 PCs it compromised and controlled. The new Zeus botnet named 'Mumba' is very small but deploys crimeware and phishing websites in bulk.

A report from the Anti-Phishing Working Group a few months back in 2010 states that the infamous Avalanche Group, which was behind 66% of the total phishing assaults during July-December 2009, carried out the data-theft activity.

If you’re concerned about your child or employee’s activities on the Internet and want to go beyond standard site-blocking software, monitoring software might be your key to peace of mind—assuming you have no moral qualms with spying on your family or employees.

A leaked Google "vision statement" has revealed the search giant's agonising over just how far to go in profiting from the vast array of data is holds on the world's Internet users.

The seven-page document seen by the Wall Street Journal, stamped 'Internal Confidential', was compiled in late 2008 by Aitan Weinberg, now a senior product manager for interest-based advertising at Google.

The private browsing options provided by the four major Web browser publishers aren't as anonymous and secure as most users might think, researchers at Stanford University's Computer Science Security Lab said in a new paper to be published next week at the Usenix Security Symposium.

Confidential details of a French government consultation on how to secure Internet access for 3-strikes/graduated response measures, have leaked. The consultation is run by the Hadopi, the new public authority set up to oversee the French government's graduated response / 3-strikes law for copyright enforcement. The measures target peer-to-peer file-sharing in particular.

One visit to a booby-trapped website could direct attackers to a person's home, a security expert has shown. The attack, thought up by hacker Samy Kamkar, exploits shortcomings in many routers to find out a key identification number.

It uses this number and widely available net tools to find out where a router is located. Demonstrating the attack, Mr Kamkar located one router to within nine metres of its real world position.

A Czech government institute mistakenly posted the names of hundreds of former military intelligence agents online.

The Security Services Archive of the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes published in March a database of thousands of communist-era agents.

But 380 of them continued to work for military intelligence after the 1989 collapse of communism. The database, which was available online until June, was not supposed to contain their details. The institute admitted its mistake and the archive director, Ladislav Bukovszky, was fired.

An extremely naive American woman who contacted Dell’s tech support helpline reportedly got more than she bargained for, after some very personal photos were swiped from her computer.

News10 reported last week that Sacramento, California resident Tara Fitzgerald, 48, had allowed Riyaz Shaikh - an employee of Sitel India, which has an outsourcing contract with Dell - to access her PC remotely.

The built-in mechanism that lets many Internet providers tap communications for law enforcement agencies is susceptible to abuse by insiders who work for the ISPs, Black Hat 2010 was told.

The result could be eavesdropping on communications by parties who don't have court approval to do so, says Tom Cross, the research director for IBM's X-Force Research.