- Pakistan to launch home-grown messaging app amid internet disruptions
July 30, 2024
The Pakistani government is set to roll out “Beep Pakistan”, a communication application designed for federal officials and employees. Shaza Fatima Khwaja, the state minister for information technology and telecommunication, said that the application was currently undergoing trial runs within her ministry and would be launched “soon” among other government departments. “We have developed an application ...
- US senators ask FTC to investigate car makers’ privacy practices
July 29, 2024
An ongoing US Senate investigation indicated that connected car makers violate consumer privacy by sharing and selling drivers’ data, including their location, on a vast scale, and that the same car makers often obtain consumer consent through deception. Based on this investigation, senators have urged the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate automakers’ disclosure of millions ...
- Mandrake spyware sneaks onto Google Play again, flying under the radar for two years
July 29, 2024
In April 2024, Kaspersky researchers discovered a suspicious sample that appeared to be a new version of Mandrake. Ensuing analysis revealed as many as five Mandrake applications, which had been available on Google Play from 2022 to 2024 with more than 32,000 installs in total, while staying undetected by any other vendor. The new samples included ...
- US border agents must get warrant before cell phone searches, federal court rules
July 29, 2024
A federal district court in New York has ruled that U.S. border agents must obtain a warrant before searching the electronic devices of Americans and international travelers crossing the U.S. border. The ruling on July 24 is the latest court opinion to upend the U.S. government’s long-standing legal argument, which asserts that federal border agents should ...
- UK: 48 cyber breaches of utility companies recorded last year, a 586% increase on 2022
July 29, 2024
The number of successful cyber attacks against UK utility companies has risen to 48 in 2023, a 586% increase on the seven cases in 2022, says global specialty (re)insurance group Chaucer. So far these cyber attacks have been largely restricted to the theft of data or ransomware attacks. There have been concerns that cyber attacks designed ...
- Intruders at HealthEquity rifled through storage, stole 4.3M people’s data
July 29, 2024
HealthEquity, a US fintech firm for the healthcare sector, admits that a “data security event” it discovered at the end of June hit the data of a substantial 4.3 million individuals. Stolen details include addresses, telephone numbers and payment data.… The incident began in March but was only detected in June. The company said in a ...
- U.N. cybercrime treaty faces new scrutiny
July 29, 2024
U.N. member states meet Monday seeking to finalize an international treaty on the fight against cybercrime, a text strongly opposed by an unlikely alliance of human rights groups and big technology companies. The “United Nations Convention Against Cybercrime” originated in 2017 when Russian diplomats sent the world body’s secretary-general a letter outlining the initiative. Two years ...
- Millions more victims exposed in debt collection agency data breach
July 29, 2024
It seems that the data breach at the debt collection agency Financial Business and Consumer Solutions (FBCS) was a lot bigger than initially thought. After first reporting some 1.9 million victims, the company now says that more than 4.2 million were actually affected. In late April, it was reported that FBCS suffered a cyberattack two months ...
- Elon Musk’s X accused of AI data grab in ‘blatant breach of law’
July 29, 2024
Privacy organisation Open Rights Group has branded a move by social network X (formerly Twitter) to use user data to train its Grok AI as a “blatant breach of GDPR”. The GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) is an EU law protecting people’s data, and is implemented in the UK as part of the Data Protection Act ...
- Georgia: Columbus hit by data breach, officials say not considered ransomware incident
July 29, 2024
Columbus experienced a data breach last Wednesday, the same day as an internet outage, city officials say. The only information believed to have been accessed are employees’ names, work emails and passwords, according to Mike Richardson, the city’s director of security and risk. He said no employee’s personal financial information was compromised. All employee passwords were ...