Online search giant Google has filed an appeal at the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal (NCLAT) against a judgment from India’s competition watchdog that found it guilty of “search bias”, two sources aware of the matter told Reuters. In February, the Competition Commission of India (CCI) imposed a 1.36 billion rupees ($20.95 million) fine on Google, saying it was abusing its dominance in online web search and online search advertising markets.
In a series of tweets from its public policy account, Twitter announced its decision to back the Honest Ads Act, a piece of legislation introduced last year as a response to mounting evidence that Russia leveraged domestic social media platforms in an attempt to influence U.S. politics during the 2016 presidential election. After initially avoiding a commitment to the bill, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg endorsed the proposal last week.
Seven top officials of the website Backpage.com, long accused of facilitating child sex trafficking, have been arrested after a grand jury in Phoenix issued a 93-count indictment alleging conspiracy and money laundering, and the government seized all of Backpage’s websites around the world. The indictment accuses Backpage of facilitating prostitution committed by those posting ads on the site, specifically citing 17 victims trafficked on Backpage, some as young as 14.
A coalition of 20 child advocacy, privacy and consumer groups filed a complaint asking the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to investigate the Google-owned video site for alleged violations of children's online privacy laws. The groups -- which include Common Sense Media, the Center for Digital Democracy and Parents Across America -- allege that YouTube violates COPPA, a federal law that regulates user data collection from sites with users who are under 13 years old.
Congress has released Mark Zuckerberg's prepared testimony ahead of a hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. "It's clear now that we didn't do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well," according to Zuckerberg's prepared remarks.
Hackers have attacked networks in a number of countries including data centers in Iran where they left the image of a U.S. flag on screens along with a warning: “Don’t mess with our elections”, the Iranian IT ministry said. The statement said the attack, which hit internet service providers and cut off web access for subscribers, was made possible by a vulnerability in routers from Cisco which had earlier issued a warning and provided a patch that some firms had failed to install over the Iranian new year holiday.
Facebook’s disclosure that its search tools were used to collect data on most of its 2.2 billion users could potentially trigger record fines and create new legal vulnerability for not having prevented risks to user data, three former federal officials said. The three former officials, all of whom were at the Federal Trade Commission during the privacy investigation that led to a 2011 consent decree with Facebook, said the company’s latest mishap may violate the decree’s provisions requiring the implementation of a privacy program.
Michigan governor Rick Snyder has signed legislation that criminalizes the possession of ransomware, malicious software that locks you out of your data and demands money to get access to that data back. The law makes the possession of ransomware a felony, punishable by up to three years in prison, according to a statement on the governor’s website.
Backpage.com, the popular classified ads website, appeared to be offline, posting a message that it had been seized and disabled by the federal government. Visitors to backpage.com and backpage.ca — known for personal adult ads — were met with a message that stated, "backpage.com and affiliated websites have been seized as part of an enforcement action by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, and the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation Division."
Russia’s state communications watchdog said it had filed a lawsuit to limit access to the Telegram messaging app after the company refused to give Russian state security services access to its users’ secret messages. Ranked as the world’s ninth most popular mobile messaging app, Telegram is widely used in countries across the former Soviet Union and Middle East.
Three years after Chinese hackers stole security clearance files and other sensitive personal information of some 22 million U.S. federal employees, cyber-defenses at the Department of Interior, which hosted White House Office of Personnel Management (OPM) servers targeted in the theft, were still unable to detect “some of the most basic threats” inside Interior’s computer networks — including malware actively trying to make contact with Russia.
Read the article: Fox News
The Kremlin said Facebook’s removal of accounts controlled by various Russian media was a hostile move that smacked of censorship. Facebook said it had deleted hundreds of Russian accounts and pages associated with a “troll factory” indicted by U.S. prosecutors for fake activist and political posts in the 2016 U.S. election campaign.
Twitter suspended more than 1.2 million accounts that were promoting terrorism over a two-year stretch, the company announced, including more than 274,000 accounts in the last six months of 2017.
Delta Air Lines says customers' payment information may have been breached in a cyberattack last fall. The airline said the incident involved (24)7.ai, a chat-services provider used by Delta and other companies.
The head of the Food and Drug Administration called on Internet providers to help rid the Web of illegal offers of prescription opioids and illicit drugs such as fentanyl that have contributed to the nation's drug crisis. Noting that Internet providers and others have taken action when the government required them to help control the spread of child pornography, FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said it is time for a similar, but voluntary, response to opioids.
Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg will testify before a key House committee next week, the panel said Wednesday, the first of three potential hearings in which Zuckerberg could face questions about Facebook’s data privacy practices. The hearing — set before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on the morning of April 11 — could result in an uncomfortable grilling from Democrats and Republicans who believe the social giant is responsible for everything from fake news to online extremism.
Facebook Inc. said information on most of its 2 billion users could have been accessed improperly, giving fresh evidence of the ways the social-media giant failed to protect people’s privacy while generating billions of dollars in revenue from the information.The company said it removed a tool that let users enter phone numbers or email addresses into Facebook’s search tool to find other people.
In the latest episode of how badly some branches of government are at cybersecurity, a new study by the cybersecurity outfit Global Cyber Alliance indicates that 95 percent of the email domains managed by the Executive Office of the President could be spoofed and potentially used in phishing attacks. Of the domains that are managed by the Office of the President, only the max.gov email address has fully implemented the highest level of defense against spoofing and phishing emails.
Facebook Inc. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said the social network had no immediate plans to apply a strict new European Union law on data privacy in its entirety to the rest of the world, as the company reels from a scandal over its handling of personal information of millions of its users. Zuckerberg told Reuters in a phone interview that Facebook already complies with many parts of the law ahead of its implementation in May.
For the first time, the U.S. government has publicly acknowledged the existence in Washington of what appear to be rogue devices that foreign spies and criminals could be using to track individual cellphones and intercept calls and messages.The use of what are known as cellphone-site simulators by foreign powers has long been a concern, but American intelligence and law enforcement agencies — which use such eavesdropping equipment themselves — have been silent on the issue until now.
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