Credit to Author: Mike Elgan| Date: Sat, 11 Mar 2017 04:00:00 -0800
Everybody’s freaking out over the Wikileaks revelations that the Central Intelligence Agency can hack Apple and Android smartphones, major PC operating systems — and even TV sets.
The news is causing ripples in international relations and got companies like Google and Apple to patch holes and issue fixes.
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Credit to Author: William Tsing| Date: Thu, 23 Feb 2017 14:00:07 +0000
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| Quitting social media entirely can be unrealistic, or at least seriously unfun. So it’s important to take a moment to check out account settings before you start, to make absolutely sure you’re okay with the service’s default settings. Categories: Tags: how toInstagramLinkedInphishphishingprivacysocial mediaspamtwitter |
Credit to Author: Mike Elgan| Date: Sat, 11 Feb 2017 04:01:00 -0800
Twitter is trying to curb harassment. Again.
Twitter VP of Engineering Ed Ho this week announced three changes that Twitter believes will end its reputation as a haven for trolls, haters, spammers, misogynists, racists and idiots.
Two years ago, Twitter’s then-CEO Dick Costolo was quoted in a leaked memo saying that “We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we’ve sucked at it for years.”
Twitter’s reputation may be hurting its bottom line. The company this week reported its slowest quarter for revenue growth since the company went public. Twitter consistently loses about $100 million per quarter. Advertising is weak. Revenue is down. User growth is flat.
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Forgot your password? Well, Facebook wants to help you recover your internet account.
The company is releasing an open source protocol that will let third-party sites recover user accounts through Facebook.
Typically, when people forget their password to a site, they’re forced to answer a security question or send a password reset request to their email. But these methods of account recovery can be vulnerable to hacking, said Facebook security engineer Brad Hill.
He recalled a time when he was granted permission to break into an online bank account. To do so, he took advantage of the password reset questions.
“It asked me what my favorite color was, and it let me guess as many times as I wanted,” he said Monday, during a presentation at the USENIX Enigma 2017 security conference.
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WhatsApp’s privacy policy change allowing Facebook to target advertising at its users has landed the company in a German court.
The Federation of German Consumer Organizations (VZBZ) has filed suit against WhatsApp in the Berlin regional court, alleging that the company collects and stores data illegally and passes it on to Facebook, the federation said Monday.
Facebook acquired WhatsApp in October 2014, but it wasn’t until August 2016 that WhatsApp said it would modify its privacy policy to allow it to share lists of users’ contacts with Facebook. The move made it possible to match WhatsApp accounts with Facebook ones where users had registered a phone number, giving the parent company more data with which to make new friend suggestions and another way to target advertising.
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Several recent incidents involving U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration can teach users something about IT security — particularly about Twitter and what not to do with it.
It turns out that several White House-related Twitter accounts — including the president’s official account, @POTUS — until recently were revealing sensitive information that hackers might be able to exploit.
The problem revolves around the service’s password reset function. If the account holder doesn’t take certain steps to secure it, Twitter exposes information that anyone with the right skills can use to uncover what email address — in redacted form — was used to secure a Twitter account.
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Two instances of tweets from U.S. National Park Service accounts that became political hot potatoes in the last few days were the result of bad password management, according to officials.
The first incident took place on inauguration day when the main National Park Service account retweeted images from a CNN reporter that compared unfavorably the crowd size at President Donald Trump’s inauguration with that of President Barack Obama’s in 2009.
When Trump began to openly dispute the images and smaller crowd sizes, the National Park Service deleted the retweet and apologized.
“We regret the mistaken RTs from our account yesterday and look forward to continuing to share the beauty and history of our parks with you,” it said Saturday.
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You don’t see news about the U.S. Secret Service every day, but here are a couple examples which should serve as reminders that law enforcement is monitoring social media.
While this is not a suggestion to chill down your First Amendment rights, although those rights might be getting chilled ever more even as you read this, you must be wise about what you say online. It’s not private. If you start making what could be conceived as threats against President Trump, or even one of his top advisors such as Kellyanne Conway, then you might as well expect to be hearing from the Secret Service.
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