Hackers are weighing in on the Facebook privacy controversy with creations that help people strengthen privacy or empty profile pages at the world's leading social networking service.
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) technology fellow Chris Conley showed off an arsenal of such applications at the infamous DefCon gathering, which kicked off Friday in Las Vegas.
Remember that torrent yesterday that contained the personal information off of 100 million scraped Facebook profiles? I thought it was strange that the guy didn't sell this information, since many companies would be interested. Turns out they are interested.
Reader Clint discovered that all you had to do is use something like Peer Block, which grabs the IPs of the other users also downloading the torrent and identifies which company or university or organization they belong to. You can check this yourself by hopping on the torrent and doing the same thing.
The personal details of more than a fifth of Facebook’s estimated 500 million users have been “leaked” to the internet by campaigners highlighting its “terrifying” privacy fears.
The list, which has been published in a downloadable file, contains the URL of every searchable Facebook user’s profiles, their names and unique ID. Campaigners warned the list, published on “Pirate Bay”, the world's biggest filesharing website, affected more than 100 million users on the social networking site.
Radio-frequency I.D. (RFID) tags are a convenient way to track items and cut costs for companies. But this technology is increasingly being used to track other things, like security badges — or even people — giving it the potential to cause a horrific erosion of privacy. Tracking people with smart tags, their shopping preferences, their activities, and their personal belongings sounds like something from a sci-fi thriller.
Todd Davis is best known as the CEO of identity-theft protection company LifeLock who used his own Social Security number in his company's advertising as a sign of his confidence in the service. In May, it was widely reported that Davis's identity had been stolen at least 13 times. The controversy over LifeLock's advertising ultimately cost the company $12 million in fines.
THE US Federal Trade Commission has been telling senators how it would be a jolly good idea if it could enforce the way that companies look after their customers' privacy.
US House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection of the Committee on Energy and Commerce heard evidence from David Vladeck, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection.
Somebody peered electronically into a file server at the University of Texas at Arlington, leaving health data on 27,000 students, faculty and staff potentially exposed to snooping eyes, the school said Friday in a news release.
Security website Risky.Biz claims that Hell Pizza's online customer database has been compromised, resulting in the leak of customer names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses and even passwords.
The issue first surfaced on Geekzone back in August 2009 when forumgoers claimed that email addresses used only for Hell Pizza orders were receiving unrelated spam. However, the issue was denied at the time by a Hell Pizza spokesperson who blamed the spam instead on "brute force" attacks.
The Ministry of Defence has admitted that it has lost 340 laptops during a two year period from 2008 to 2010.
The news came to light in response to a Freedom of Information request by Lewis PR. The MoD said that 120 laptops at a cost of £1,800 each were stolen. Another 220 laptops were lost and only 25 were ever recovered. Less than half (157 laptops) had data which had been encrypted.
Name the vulnerability and thieves will use it to steal access to their electronically stored funds or to pose as their victims when they establish credit using purloined credentials.
