Privacy

Your fridge is getting so smart, security-software maker Kaspersky Lab thinks you probably shouldn’t trust it.

As makers of household appliances fill their machines with computer chips to make them smarter, consumers and privacy watchdogs should beware the data collected by these objects and how it’s used, Marco Preuss, a director on Kaspersky’s global research and analysis team in Europe, said at the IFA consumer electronics conference in Berlin.

Computers from a federal research network, a peak sporting body, a school and a local council are among tens of thousands of machines which have been hacked and had their login details put up for sale in a dark web marketplace, a Four Corners investigation has revealed.

Other major companies including Jetstar and Suzuki have systems suspected to have been compromised, but both companies deny being breached.

One of the many revelations from the Snowden files was that Canada's spy agency has been tracking people as they connect to WiFi in different public locations. And if Canada is doing it, you can be pretty sure the NSA and GCHQ are doing the same, since neither is known for being backward in using whatever means it can to snoop on huge numbers of people. Of course, you'd expect spy agencies to be up to these kinds of tricks, and you might also be unsurprised to learn that shops are also tracking you using your WiFi connection.

 The DEA -- along with several other law enforcement agencies -- has shown, over the years, that civil asset forfeiture is the tail wagging the dog. It may have been put in place to separate criminals from their cash, but is now used mainly to pad agency budgets and increase discretionary spending.

This attitude is summed up by the former DEA supervisor quoted in Brad Heath's (USA Today) investigation into the agency's forfeiture activities.

After receiving a deluge of obscene voicemails and text messages, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi informed her fellow Democrats on Saturday of "an electronic Watergate break-in" and warned them not to allow family members to answer their phones or read incoming texts.

University researchers have developed a new method to help forensic investigators extract data information from memory.

The tool, dubbed Retroscope, recovered data from up to the previous 11 screens displayed from up to 15 apps, with an average of five screens pulled from each.

Living in the Age of Information that we live in today brings great convenience and benefit along with great risks. On the one hand, humanity has access to basically the entirety of information and knowledge known in existence at the mere few clicks of a button; but on the other hand, this great power in the hands of a nefarious few can cause great destruction and misery if taken too far. In this article, I'll guide you through the possible steps to secure your private information online.

Anti-virus software is often used to mitigate all sorts of attacks levied against computers, but what about their displays? Turns out, those can be manipulated in much the same manner as a pair of security researchers have demonstrated.

A Dallas, Texas man accused of prostituting underage girls was secretly ordered by a federal judge to unlock his iPhone using his fingerprint, according to federal court documents that are now unsealed.

WikiLeaks committed another blunder over the weekend when the organization published 19,252 emails stolen and donated by a Russian hacker that contained among other things the sensitive information of Democratic Party donors.

The data, which is still online at the time of writing, three days after WikiLeaks dumped the files, contains sensitive information such as full names, Social Security numbers, passport IDs, addresses, phone numbers, and more.
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