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Privacy

LivingSocial hacked: 50m accounts exposed

posted onApril 29, 2013
by l33tdawg

LivingSocial, the second-largest daily deal company behind Groupon, said it was hit by a cyber attack that may have affected more than 50 million customers.

The company said the attack on its computer systems resulted in unauthorised access to customer data, including names, email addresses, date of birth for some users and "encrypted" passwords.

Man accused of placing GPS device on victim's car before burglarizing her home

posted onApril 29, 2013
by l33tdawg

A burglary suspect currently on trial in Johnson County, Kansas allegedly put a GPS tracking device on a victim's car to determine whether anyone was home. The victim, an unnamed Overland Park woman, told her story to the Kansas City Star on Friday. Overland Park police, Leawood police, and Johnson County prosecutors declined to comment on the GPS allegation to the newspaper.

Israel Airport Security 'Allowed to Read Tourists' Email'

posted onApril 26, 2013
by l33tdawg

Israeli security officials at Ben Gurion airport are legally allowed to demand access to tourists' email accounts and deny them entry if they refuse, the country's top legal official said on Wednesday.

Details of the policy were laid out by Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein in a written response to the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), the group said in a statement.

FBI denied permission to spy on hacker through his webcam

posted onApril 25, 2013
by l33tdawg

A federal magistrate judge has denied (PDF) a request from the FBI to install sophisticated surveillance software to track someone suspected of attempting to conduct a “sizeable wire transfer from [John Doe’s] local bank [in Texas] to a foreign bank account.”

Back in March 2013, the FBI asked the judge to grant a month-long “Rule 41 search and seizure warrant” of a suspect’s computer “at premises unknown” as a way to find out more about this possible violations of “federal bank fraud, identity theft and computer security laws.”

DHS use of deep packet inspection technology in new net security system raises serious privacy questions

posted onApril 25, 2013
by l33tdawg

To protect the federal civilian agencies against cyberthreats, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is preparing to deploy a  more powerful version of its EINSTEIN intrusion-detection system thats supposed to detect attacks and malware, especially associated with e-mail. But since this version of EINSTEIN is acknowledged by DHS to be able to read electronic content, its raising privacy concerns.

Boston bombings: How facial recognition can cut investigation time to seconds

posted onApril 19, 2013
by l33tdawg

After the Boston Marathon bombings, police in the city made a plea for people with cell phone video and pictures to turn over their footage, adding to the hours of surveillance video from nearby businesses. But what would normally take investigators hundreds of hours to review can now take minutes or even seconds, thanks to technology like facial recognition. The software, which can help pick a person out of crowd, looks for differentiating features -- from the shape of a mouth to the ridge on a nose to the distance between a pair of eyes.

Hackers turn a Canon EOS-1D X camera into a remote surveillance tool

posted onApril 15, 2013
by l33tdawg

The high-end Canon EOS-1D X camera can be hacked for use as a remote surveillance tool, with images remotely downloaded, erased and uploaded, a researcher said during the Hack in the Box security conference in Amsterdam on Wednesday.

The digital SLR camera has a Ethernet port and also supports wireless connection via a WLAN adapter. That connectivity is particularly useful for photojournalists who can quickly upload the photos to a FTP server or a tablet, according to German security researcher Daniel Mende of ERNW.

Hacks to turn your wireless IP surveillance cameras against you

posted onApril 15, 2013
by l33tdawg

L33tdawg: Presentation slides from Sergey and Artem's #HITB2013AMS presentation is here.

Sergey Shekyan and Artem Harutyunyan, researchers from the security firm Qualys, said the search engine Shodan shows about 100,000 wireless IP cameras that have "little or no emphasis on security." At the recent Hack in the Box security conference in Amsterdam, the researchers presented,

Hackers breach The War Z personal-info databases

posted onApril 3, 2013
by l33tdawg

Beleaguered open-world zombie shooter The War Z is in more trouble as publisher OP Productions admits hackers exposed players’ personal information.

In response to the attack, OP Productions shut down The War Z’s servers and its message boards. In an open letter, the publisher confirmed that the hackers gained access to user email addresses and passwords. Payment information, such as credit-card numbers, remain secure with a third-party company.

From OP Productions’ letter: