Russia toughens penalties for data leaks

Russian President Vladimir Putin signed laws that toughen penalties for illegal gathering and distribution of personal data. Administrative liability New fines are introduced. In particular, they total up to 15 mln rubles ($141,000) for illegal transfer of personal information and Read More …

Pakistan tests secret China-like ‘firewall’ to tighten online surveillance

Pakistan’s government has deployed Chinese technology to build what some senior officials familiar with the project are calling a new, national internet “firewall” that will allow authorities to monitor online traffic and regulate the use of popular apps with greater Read More …

Inside Water Barghest’s Rapid Exploit-to-Market Strategy for IoT Devices

There is a big incentive for both espionage motivated actors and financially motivated actors to set up proxy botnets. These can serve as an anonymization layer, which can provide plausibly geolocated IP addresses to scrape contents of websites, access stolen Read More …

Hackers breach sensitive government and police data in Italy

Prosecutors in Milan have uncovered a network of hackers and former law enforcement officials accused of using malware and insider contacts to break into several government databases, including the Interior Ministry. The group allegedly accessed over 800,000 confidential records, even Read More …

China again claims Volt Typhoon cyber-attack crew was invented by the US to discredit it

Chinese authorities have published another set of allegations that assert the Volt Typhoon cyber-crew is an invention of the US and its allies, and not a crew run by Beijing. Published on Monday in five languages, a document titled “Lie Read More …

Modern TVs have “unprecedented capabilities for surveillance and manipulation”

Your television is debuting the latest, most captivating program: You. In a report titled “How TV Watches Us: Commercial Surveillance in the Streaming Era,” the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD) spotlighted a massive data-driven surveillance apparatus that ensnares the public Read More …

U.S. Wiretap Systems Targeted in China-Linked Hack

A cyberattack tied to the Chinese government penetrated the networks of a swath of U.S. broadband providers, potentially accessing information from systems the federal government uses for court-authorized network wiretapping requests. For months or longer, the hackers might have held Read More …

4 more nations sign on to US-led counter-spyware agreement

Austria, Estonia, Lithuania and the Netherlands on Sunday joined a U.S.-led pact designed to deter global spyware abuses, marking 21 nations signing onto the agreement after the alliance began with 11 participants in March of last year. The add-ins were Read More …

100 million+ US citizens have records leaked by background check service

A background check left a huge database unprotected online containing 2.2TB of people’s data, according to research by Cybernews. The database was left passwordless and easily accessible to anyone on the internet by background check firm MC2 Data. MC2 Data Read More …

What Is a Data Broker?

A data broker (also known as an information product company) is an organization that makes money by collecting your personal information, analyzing it, and licensing it out to be used by other companies for things like marketing purposes. Data providers Read More …