As Facebook sought to become the world’s dominant social media service, it struck agreements allowing phone and other device makers access to vast amounts of its users’ personal information. Facebook has reached data-sharing partnerships with at least 60 device makers — including Apple, Amazon, BlackBerry, Microsoft and Samsung — over the last decade, starting before Facebook apps were widely available on smartphones, company officials said.
Apple has approved an updated version of the Telegram messaging service, a day after Telegram complained that it had been prevented from getting software improvements into the hands of iPhone owners worldwide. Telegram Chief Executive Pavel Durov announced the turnabout on Twitter, thanking Apple and CEO Tim Cook for getting the latest Telegram version “to millions of users, despite the recent setbacks.”
In a blog post, Spotify wrote that it doesn't "aim to play judge and jury" and is "moving away from implementing a policy around artist conduct." Bloomberg News reported that some previously removed artists would be placed back on the platform's playlists, while others (R. Kelly, specifically) would not be.
The hacking threat to critical infrastructure in the United States and beyond is growing larger, with nation states and other malicious actors looking to gain a foothold in sensitive technologies to conduct espionage and potentially stage disruptive or destructive attacks. Dragos, a firm that specializes in industrial cybersecurity, has released new research asserting that a hacker group responsible for deploying highly sophisticated, destructive malware to an industrial plant in the Middle East last year has begun to expand its operations beyond its initial targets.
AT&T has given up its years-long quest to cripple the Federal Trade Commission's authority to regulate broadband providers. Just weeks ago, AT&T said it intended to appeal its loss in the case to the U.S. Supreme Court before a deadline of May 29. But today, AT&T informed court officials that it has decided not to file a petition to the Supreme Court and did not ask for a deadline extension.
Global domain name system overlord ICANN’s latest attempt to deal with compliance with European data protection law has been dealt a blow after a German court rejected its request to force a registrar to keep gathering people’s information. The DNS overseer filed a lawsuit in Bonn against German domain registrar EPGA the day the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into force.
A U.S. federal judge dismissed two lawsuits by Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab that sought to overturn bans on the use of the security software maker’s products in U.S. government networks. The company said it would seek to appeal the decision, which leaves in place prohibitions included in a funding bill passed by Congress and an order from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Malicious actors are exploiting the upcoming 2018 FIFA World Cup to conduct phishing attacks only two weeks before the tournament kicks off. Researchers at cyber security company Kaspersky Lab have detected a spike in the number of phishing pages appearing during match ticket sales, alongside a general rise in the number of football-related spam and World Cup-themed attacks.
The Trump administration issued a fresh warning about malicious North Korean cyber activity, as that nation’s leader dispatched a top adviser to New York to prepare for a possible summit on its nuclear arsenal. The technical alert from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security highlighted two pieces of malware said to have been used to target U.S. infrastructure and aerospace, financial and media companies for at least nine years to steal information and remotely manipulate networks.
A fight over private information and the Internet's domain name system is heading to a German court, in a proxy battle between European legislators and American intellectual property lawyers. On the same day that new European GDPR privacy legislation took effect, DNS overseer and U.S. corporation ICANN filed a lawsuit against German domain registrar EPGA in Bonn, asking that it be forced to keep gathering private information on people who buy web addresses.
A young computer hacker who prosecutors say unwittingly worked with a Russian spy agency was sentenced to five years in prison for using data stolen in a massive Yahoo data breach to gain access to private emails. U.S. Judge Vince Chhabria also fined Karim Baratov $250,000 during a sentencing hearing in San Francisco.
Russia is asking Apple to remove Telegram from its app store after the messaging app refused requests to give the government backdoor access to its platform. Russia had tried to ban Telegram earlier this year but is reportedly having a difficult time completely blocking the app within its borders.
President Trump said that he would proceed with tariffs on $50 billion in Chinese imports and introduce new limits on Chinese investment in U.S. high-tech industries as part of a broad campaign to crack down on Chinese acquisition of U.S. technology. “The United States will implement specific investment restrictions and enhanced export controls for Chinese people and entities related to the acquisition of industrially significant technology,” the White House said in a brief statement.
The Papua New Guinean government will ban Facebook for a month in a bid to crack down on “fake users” and study the effects the website is having on the population.The communication minister, Sam Basil, said the shutdown would allow his department’s analysts to carry out research and analysis on who was using the platform, and how they were using it, admits rising concerns about social well-being, security and productivity.
Two Canadian banks reported their customer accounts may have been breached. Bank of Montreal said some personal and financial information for fewer than 50,000 customers may have been stolen. Simplii Financial, an online-bank unit of Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, reported that information for roughly 40,000 customers may have been stolen.
Egypt’s top administrative court ruled that regulators must block the video file-sharing site YouTube for one month over a video that denigrates the Prophet Mohammad, a lawyer who filed the case told Reuters. A lower administrative court had ordered that the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology block YouTube, owned by Google, in 2013 over the video, but the case was appealed and its ruling stayed during the appeal process.
Search engines like Google and Microsoft’s Bing could be made to pay for showing snippets of news articles under draft copyright rules endorsed by European Union ambassadors. The measure, which is not yet final, would allow press publishers to ask search engines to pay them for showing their articles for up to one year after publication.
The new European data privacy legislation is so stringent that it could kill off data-driven online services and chill innovations like driverless cars, tech industry groups warn. These industry alarms are not over the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, a tough privacy law that just went into effect in the European Union; instead, the cause is an even stricter privacy law that’s pending called the ePrivacy Regulation, and it specifically protects the confidentiality of electronic communications.
U.S. tech companies would be forced to disclose if they allowed American adversaries, like Russia and China, to examine the inner workings of software sold to the U.S. military under proposed legislation, Senate staff told Reuters. The bill, approved by the Senate Armed Services Committee, comes after a year-long Reuters investigation found software makers allowed a Russian defense agency to hunt for vulnerabilities in software that was already deeply embedded in some of the most sensitive parts of the U.S. government, including the Pentagon, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and intelligence agencies.
Criminals have stolen about $1.2 billion in cryptocurrencies since the beginning of 2017, as bitcoin’s popularity and the emergence of more than 1,500 digital tokens have put the spotlight on the unregulated sector, according to estimates from the Anti-Phishing Working Group. The estimates were part of the non-profit group’s research on cryptocurrency and include reported and unreported theft.
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The GigaLaw Firm helps companies of all sizes protect their brands online, using domain name dispute policies – such as the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) – and other legal tools available to copyright and trademark owners on the Internet.