A suspected Iranian hacking group has been targeting aviation and energy companies in the United States, Saudi Arabia and South Korea since 2013, computer security company FireEye said in a report. The group seems largely to have engaged in stealth spying to give Iranian military and corporate interests information about possible enemies and competition.
The European Commission will outline different options for taxing digital companies as the 28-nation bloc seeks to raise money from an industry that it says provides less than it should to public coffers. The commission plan, a draft of which was obtained by Bloomberg, comes the week after European Union finance ministers discussed how to adjust levies for companies such as Amazon.com Inc. and Facebook Inc. in a way that better reflects their economic activity and ensures they pay their fair share.
Twitter said that its internal controls were allowing it to weed out accounts being used for the “promotion of terrorism” earlier rather than responding to government requests to close them down. U.S. and European governments have been pressuring social media companies including Twitter, Facebook and Alphabet’s Google to fight harder against online radicalization, particularly by violent Islamist groups.
The Senate Commerce Committee took up a controversial online sex-trafficking bill, hearing testimony from victims' families who urged lawmakers to act. The hearing room was silent as Yvonne Ambrose tearfully told the panel about how her daughter, Desiree Robinson, was trafficked online and later raped and murdered.
Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey filed a lawsuit against credit reporting firm Equifax Inc. following a breach that exposed the personal data of up to 143 million people, including 3 million in the state. Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, called the breach a “nightmare” and said credit reporting companies should not profit from monitoring or freezing credit arising from the hack.
The social media service Gab, which bills itself as Twitter for the alt-right, is on the verge of being booted from the Internet. Andrew Torba, CEO of the company, posted that “Gab's domain registrar has given us 5 days to transfer our domain or they will seize it.”
Google has offered to display rival comparison shopping sites via an auction, as it aims to stave off further EU antitrust fines, four people familiar with the matter said. Google is under pressure to come up with a big initiative to level the playing field in comparison shopping, but its proposal was roundly criticized by competitors as inadequate, the sources said.
The Internet has long had a reputation of being an anything-goes place that only a few nations have tried to tame — China in particular. But in recent years, events as varied as the Arab Spring, elections in France and confusion in Indonesia over the religion of the country’s president have awakened governments to how they have lost some control over online speech, commerce and politics on their home turf.
Users of Avast-owned security application CCleaner for Windows have been advised to update their software immediately, after researchers discovered criminal hackers had installed a backdoor in the tool. The tainted application allows for download of further malware, be it ransomware or keyloggers, with fears millions are affected.
British Prime Minister Theresa May said in an interview that she plans to raise the issue of the internet's role in terrorism this week at the United Nations. "One of the issues that we really need to be addressing, and I'll be raising this when I'm at the United Nations, is the question of the use of the internet by terrorists for terrorist planning," May told ABC's "This Week."
Hacking group OurMine early posted more than 3 Terabytes of internal files accessed during a breach of Vevo, a music video platform majority-controlled by Universal Music and Sony Music. In addition to "a wide variety of office documents, videos, and other promotional materials," other files included music charts, social media plans and "various details about the artists under the record companies’ management," Gizmodo said.
A pact underpinning billions of dollars of transatlantic data transfers will undergo its first annual review, with Europe seeking to ensure Washington has lived up to its promises to protect the data of European citizens stored on U.S. servers. Feted as a milestone in transatlantic relations, which had soured after revelations of mass U.S. surveillance four years ago, the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield data pact has been in place for just over a year.
Twitter said it fixed its advertising platform that allowed prospective marketers to target millions of users interested in derogatory words such as “n**ger” and “wetback.” The Daily Beast reported Friday that Twitter Ads returned 26.3 million users who may respond to the term “wetback,” 18.6 million to “Nazi,” and 14.5 million to “n**ger.”
Google, the world's biggest advertising platform, allows advertisers to specifically target ads to people typing racist and bigoted terms into its search bar, BuzzFeed News has discovered. Not only that, Google will suggest additional racist and bigoted terms once you type some into its ad-buying tool.
Special counsel Robert Mueller and his team are now in possession of Russian-linked ads run on Facebook during the presidential election, after they obtained a search warrant for the information. Facebook gave Mueller and his team copies of ads and related information it discovered on its site linked to a Russian troll farm, as well as detailed information about the accounts that bought the ads and the way the ads were targeted at American Facebook users, a source with knowledge of the matter told CNN.
The social media site Gab.ai is accusing Google of violating federal antitrust laws when the tech giant booted Gab from the Google Play Store, according to a lawsuit. The legal action is the latest salvo in an escalating battle between right-leaning technologists and leaders against Silicon Valley giants such as Facebook and Google.
South Dakota’s highest court ruled that companies selling wares over the Internet can’t be forced to collect the state’s 4.5 percent tax on purchases, laying the groundwork for a U.S. Supreme Court appeal that could change law across the country. A decision forcing online retailers to collect such taxes could be worth billions in revenue to state and local governments.
Read the article: Bloomberg
Google came up on the losing end of a previously-undisclosed third showdown with the federal government over demands for data stored overseas, a federal court in Washington has revealed. The disclosure of yet another court fight over the issue comes as the U.S. Supreme Court is preparing to decide as soon as next month whether to weigh in on the question of whether U.S. law permits authorities to use U.S. courts to obtain electronic records kept outside of the country.
Facebook allowed advertisements targeted at people who have expressed interest in anti-Semitic topics such as "jew hater," "how to burn jews" or "History of 'why jews ruin the world,'" Pro Publica reported. After the news organization contacted the giant social network, Facebook removed the anti-Semitic categories.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission said it was investigating Equifax Inc.’s massive data breach, a rare public confirmation, as a top Democrat suggested the credit-monitoring company’s corporate leaders might need to resign. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer also compared Equifax to Enron, a U.S. energy company that was consumed in scandal after revealing in 2001 that it engaged in widespread accounting fraud.
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