Items tagged with spying
Earlier this week, we covered leaked details regarding a government contractor that demonstrated its ability to track billions of phones all over the world by spying on CIA and NSA agents’ activity. Government contractors are able to provide surveillance services by purchasing user data from third parties. However, US...
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There are a number of underground online marketplaces where stolen user data is illegally bought and sold by cybercriminals. Government authorities recently seized and shutdown RaidForums, one of the most notable hubs for such illicit transactions. Meanwhile, there is an entire aboveground industry that specializes in...
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Everyone who uses an Android phone has probably had some security-conscious acquaintance ask, "don't you know how much data your phone is harvesting?" Most of us shrug it off as one of the unavoidable circumstances of modern life: you want a smartphone, you deal with data harvesting. Still, some folks aren't so...
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The U.S. Government always has an eye on its citizens, as we learned from the 2013 Snowden scandal. Since then, the government has come up with craftier ways of surveilling Americans, which is made easy by the data we give away using our mobile devices. With this in mind, Oregon senator Ron Wyden is accusing the...
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A report has surfaced that claims the United States government plans to permanently stop its civilian drone program. The reason cited by the report is that the drones used are at least partly made in China, and the United States government fears potential Chinese spying. Currently, the US Department of the Interior...
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Chinese tech giant Huawei and the U.S. government aren’t exactly on friendly terms these days. The U.S. has long claimed that Huawei represents a security risk to governmental agencies and consumers alike, while at the same time torpedoing the company’s efforts to expand its presence Stateside with wireless carriers...
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There was once a time when the thought of someone vying for anonymity online may have seemed a little silly. Some may have even accused those folks of being conspiracy theorists or perhaps a card-carrying member of the "Tinfoil Hat" brigade. However, time and the march of technology sure has a way of changing opinions, especially when it comes
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The growing consensus is that the U.S. government is overstepping its bounds and trampling on people's right to privacy. Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the government's vast spying program, and while that was an eye opener for the country (and world) at large, the full extent of its efforts...
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Is this real life or an Orwellian nightmare? You might want to think twice before purchasing a MyFriend Cayla or i-Que Robot. The smart toys have been accused of sending information to the Massachusetts-based company Nuance Communication. The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), the Campaign for a...
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There are steps you can take to reclaim your privacy, such as putting a piece of black tape over your laptop's webcam, but unless you're willing to disconnect completely, total privacy might be a myth. Case in point, researchers at Israel's Ben Gurion University recently demonstrated how easy it is to hack a system so...
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If you follow WikiLeaks on Twitter, you may have noticed a series of cryptic tweets consisting of strings of numbers and letters. These are hashes or keys of sorts, some of which are calling "dead man's keys." Regardless, they appear to be related to another WikiLeak post on Twitter claiming its co-founder, Julian...
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You know a story is going to be good when it involves Facebook, its creator Mark Zuckerberg, and the word "privacy". It used to be that Google was considered the biggest, baddest people data-fetcher, but over time, that crown has been passed to Facebook, a service that doesn't even need to try to get information from...
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Last week, we learned about the company teaming up with others, such as Microsoft and Yahoo, to make SMTP 'Strict Transport Security' a reality, a protocol that would make it even harder for malicious users to gain access to our email. In a new blog post, the company draws our attention to SMTP STS as well as a couple...
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Could your smartphone be listening in on your life? If you download mobile apps without much care for their permissions requests, you might not ever know. The privacy threat is so significant though, that the Federal Trade Commission has stepped in and warned us to be aware of it.
On Thursday, the FTC sent a letter...
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If you thought that United States intelligence and law enforcement agencies around the country were incredibly adamant about spying on its citizens (going to extreme lengths to do so), you haven’t seen anything yet. Across the pond, the Campaigners Privacy International filed a formal complaint against the UK’s GCHQ...
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The term "IoT" has been floating around for a while and many who care about privacy have been put on high alert. "Internet of Things" devices can help make our lives better. They can allow us to change the temperature with our smartphones or even unlock doors. They could help us track vital stats during a workout...
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The NSA’s practice of collecting the phone records of Americans is illegal, a Federal appeals court ruled today. The new decision in the case brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) effectively kills the NSA’s position that its data collection practice was authorized by section 215 of the Patriot...
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It was revealed several months ago that the U.S. Marshal Service secretly uses spy planes equipped with devices that mimic cell towers to scan for and harvest cellphone information on a mass scale. Now it's being reported that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) played a key role in helping the Justice Department...
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Symantec made the unsettling announcement today that it has discovered sophisticated malware that has been operating successfully on and off since 2008. Named Regin, the malware launches in a series of stages and is designed to avoid detection at each stage. Symantec hasn’t identified the organization that created...
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We already know that Uncle Sam is keeping tabs on us, or at least those of us who might trigger a red flag for one reason or another. The question is, to what degree? We might never know the full answer to that, though we can parse together bits and pieces to get an idea. For example, Google's latest transparency...
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The Edward Snowden revelations have faded a bit from public view in light of other, more recent political activities, but a new report regarding the NSA and Yahoo has people talking about it once more. Reportedly, the United States government threatened to fine Yahoo a quarter of a million dollars <i>per...
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Big trouble in China? We're not sure, though reports are surfacing that Chinese government officials have been making unannounced visits to Microsoft's offices in China. Microsoft is keeping mum on the visits, and so is China's State Administration for Industry & Commerce, which Chinese media reports had made...
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