A group of researchers discovered a rare instance of malicious computer software cleverly designed to mask the disruption of an industrial machine that's being used, for instance, at an energy or chemical plant. The team from FireEye, a cybersecurity firm, stumbled across the malware last year while researching viruses that attack industrial control systems. They dubbed it Irongate.
As part of its effort to combat fake reviews on its platform, Amazon sued three of its sellers for using sock puppet accounts to post fake reviews about their products. Amazon has been aggressively pursuing reviewers it does not consider genuine over the last year, often using lawsuits to discourage the buying and selling of reviews, but this is the first time it has sued the sellers themselves.
The Newspaper Association of America, the industry association representing 2,000 newspapers, filed a federal complaint against the ad-blocking industry, alleging that software companies which enable users to block ads are misleading the public. The complaint asks the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, the government agency that oversees trade practices, to investigate ad blockers that offer “paid whitelisting,” – a service which charges advertisers to bypass ad-blocking software – along with services that substitute ad blockers’ own advertising for blocked ads or get around publishers’ subscription pages.
Microsoft inadvertently opened the spam floodgates for users of its Outlook.com email service for nearly 17 hours before fixing the problem. "Some users may have been receiving excessive spam mail," Microsoft said dryly of the problem on its service portal.
The U.S. Federal Reserve detected more than 50 cyber breaches between 2011 and 2015, with several incidents described internally as "espionage," according to Fed records. The central bank's staff suspected hackers or spies in many of the incidents, the records show.
European Union governments should not ban services like home-rental site Airbnb or ride-hailing app Uber except as a last resort, the EU says in new guidelines, seeking to rein in a crackdown on the "sharing economy." In guidelines seen by Reuters, the European Commission said any restrictions by EU member states on these new online services should be justified and proportionate to the public interest at stake.
Turkey has been making moves to bring tech business in the country under more localized control, and today big U.S. online payments company PayPal became the latest casualty. The company announced that it is suspending business operations in Turkey effective June 6, after failing to obtain a new license for its services.
In a suit filed with the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, Caltech claims that Apple has infringed four of its patents for improved data transmission rates and performance over Wi-Fi. These patents were awarded between 2006 and 2012, and cover technology implemented in the most recent 802.11n and 802.11ac Wi-Fi standards.
Russia's state competition watchdog has again postponed a decision on a possible fine on Alphabet Inc.'s Google, the agency said. The watchdog, FAS, had been expected to discuss the fine postponing a decision in early May but again put off the decision following a request from the company, it said on its Twitter account.
Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Microsoft have agreed to work with European officials to crack down on hateful speech published on their respective platforms. Each company has agreed to review potentially problematic posts and remove offending content within 24 hours. “The recent terror attacks have reminded us of the urgent need to address illegal online hate speech,” Vĕra Jourová, EU Commissioner for Justice, Consumers and Gender Equality, said in a joint statement from the European Commission and the participating companies.
Jurors are set to convene to hear opening arguments in a five-year legal battle that centers on Oracle Corp.’s alleged role in the decline of one of the former Hewlett-Packard Co.’s most lucrative products. The lawsuit seeks $3 billion in damages from the database kingpin.
Iran has given foreign messaging apps a year to move data they hold about Iranian users onto servers inside the country, prompting privacy and security concerns on social media. Iran has some of the strictest controls on internet access in the world and blocks access to social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, although many users are able to access them through widely available software.
These days, nearly all kinds of countries, be they small, oil-rich nations like the Emirates, or poor but populous countries like Ethiopia, are buying commercial spyware or hiring and training programmers to develop their own hacking and surveillance tools. The barriers to join the global surveillance apparatus have never been lower.
Google won a jury verdict that kills Oracle Corp.’s claim to a $9 billion slice of the search giant’s Android phone business. Oracle contended that Google needed a license to use its Java programming language to develop Android, the operating system in 80 percent of the world’s mobile devices.
The malware that was used to steal $81 million from Bangladesh's central bank has been linked to another cyber attack, this time on a bank in the Philippines, cyber security company Symantec Corp said in a blog post. The company said it had identified three pieces of malware that were used in limited targeted attacks against financial institutions in South-East Asia.
Spanish police seized six bitcoin mining centers and arrested 30 people accused of using bitcoin mining in a money laundering scheme, Reuters reports. The money laundering was part of a broader plot to to illegally decode and distribute pay-TV content, which the Spanish police investigated with Spain's tax office.
India has said Apple Inc. must meet a rule obliging foreign retailers to sell at least 30 percent locally sourced goods if it wishes to open stores in the country, a senior government official told Reuters. Apple is hoping to expand its retail presence in India, one of the world's fastest-growing smartphone markets, at a time when sales in the United States and China have slowed.
Data transfers to the United States by companies such as Facebook and Google face a renewed legal threat after the Irish privacy watchdog said it would refer Facebook's data transfer mechanisms to the top EU court. The move follows an Irish investigation into Facebook's transfer of European Union users' data to the United States to ensure that personal privacy is properly protected from U.S. government surveillance.
An investigation by House lawmakers turned up “significant shortfalls” in a U.S. bank regulator’s cybersecurity policies, leaving it susceptible to stolen private information and regulatory data, House Republicans said. Following a subcommittee hearing on seven cybersecurity breaches at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., new information obtained by the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology indicates the agency may have misrepresented cybersecurity policies, hid information from lawmakers, and has a culture of obstructing whistleblowers.
Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. said it has filed lawsuits against Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. claiming infringement of smartphone patents, in the first such case by the Chinese firm against the world's biggest mobile maker. Huawei has filed lawsuits in the United States and China seeking compensation for what it said was unlicensed use of fourth-generation (4G) cellular communications technology, operating systems and user interface software in Samsung phones.
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