Privacy

About 1,000 federal and provincial officials were victimized by December's vast cyber-theft of five million emails and other customer data from a private U.S. global intelligence firm, according to a federal memo obtained by Bloomberg News. 

Almost 900 federal workers and 109 Ontario government officials were affected when computers owned by Texas-based Strategic Forecasting Inc. were hacked, says the Jan. 9 Public Safety Canada memo obtained under Access to Information.

Recently released documents detail the federal government's inability to pursue cybercriminals shrouded by the tricky anonymity tools used by the Silk Road marketplace and other darknet sites - tools which are funded in part by the federal government itself. In this particular case, a citizen reported stumbling upon a cache of child pornography while browsing the anonymous Tor network's hidden sites, which are viewable with specialized, but readily available, tools and the special .onion domain.

Hackers have attacked the servers of Riot Games, makers of the popular free-to-play League of Legends title game forces players (and their NPC armies) to square off in corridor-based killing fields. Here's the good news: "No payment or billing information of any kind was included in the breach," according to Riot Games president Marc Merrill and CEO Brandon Beck. 

Online dating site eHarmony has confirmed that a massive list of passwords posted online included those used by its members.

In response to widespread reports of a massive data breach at LinkedIn, the company Wednesday confirmed that passwords belonging to "some" of its members have been compromised.

In a carefully worded blog post, LinkedIn director Vicente Silveira said the company has confirmed that an unspecified number of hashed passwords posted publicly on a Russian hacker forum earlier this week, "correspond to LinkedIn accounts." Silveira made no mention of how the passwords may have ended up on the forums but noted that LinkedIn is continuing to investigate. 

Another malicious Android Trojan has been spotted hiding in a fake Gmail app to spy and steal from those tricked into downloading it.

Discovered by the security firm NQ Mobile, the fake app hides "DDSpy," a piece of malware that, unbeknownst to the phone user, sneaks onto the device and receives commands from a remote server. Those commands, sent via text, include siphoning the victim's call log, text messages and voicemails, data that is sent to the server in an email.

LinkedIn's iOS app is collecting information from calendar entries, including passwords and meeting notes, and transmitting it back to the company's servers without their knowledge, according two mobile security researchers.

Anonymous hacktivists are in the midst of a campaign to name and shame suspected pedophiles who allegedly use Twitter to prey on and harass underage children.

Named #TwitterPedoRing, the operation began yesterday (June 4), and has already seen data dumps of hundreds of Twitter accounts that Anonymous followers believe belong to pedophiles.

Content distribution network CloudFlare reset all its customer API keys over the weekend after its CEO’s personal and corporate Gmail was breached in an “elaborate” attack on one customer, which appears to have been the 4Chan message board. 

According to CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince, "a hacker" last Friday exploited a “subtle flaw” in Google App’s Gmail password recovery process, allowing them to break into his personal account, breach his CloudFlare.com Gmail address, bypass Gmail’s two-factor authentication (TFA), and redirect one customer’s website.

Twitter will be implementing the Do Not Track feature in the Mozilla Firefox browser, as announced Thursday by Ed Felten, chief technology officer for the Federal Trade Commission at a New York Internet Week privacy panel. Twitter confirmed the FTC's announcement, appropriately enough, in a tweet.

Carolyn Penner, a spokeswoman for Twitter, said, "We applaud the FTC’s leadership on Do Not Track, and are excited to provide the benefits of Do Not Track."