The U.S. has arrested 74 people including nearly 30 in Nigeria, as part of an effort to combat email scam artists. It said the arrests reflect a coordinated crackdown on people who convince correspondents to wire them money for fraudulent activities.
Australia has established a security task force to guard against cyber attacks and interference in elections, the government said, amid concerns foreign powers are meddling in domestic affairs and ahead of five elections next month. The newly-created Electoral Integrity Task Force will identify and address risks to Australia’s electoral process, a Department of Home Affairs spokesperson told Reuters by email.
South Korean cryptocurrency exchange Coinrail said it was hacked over the weekend, prompting an extended sell-off of bitcoin to a 2-month low amid growing concerns about security at small- to mid-sized virtual currency exchanges. In a statement on its website, Coinrail said its system was under “cyber intrusion,” causing a loss for about 30 percent of the coins traded on the exchange.
Customers who use social media to vent frustration at their banks when services go down are inadvertently making themselves targets for fraudsters, law enforcement officials and industry insiders said. That was the case for customers of Britain’s TSB, many of whom took to social media to complain after a computer systems migration by the bank left thousands of users locked out of their accounts.
Chinese government hackers have compromised the computers of a Navy contractor, stealing massive amounts of highly sensitive data related to undersea warfare — including secret plans to develop a supersonic anti-ship missile for use on U.S. submarines by 2020, according to American officials. The hackers targeted a contractor who works for the Naval Undersea Warfare Center, a military organization headquartered in Newport, R.I., that conducts research and development for submarines and underwater weaponry.
Spies are increasingly hacking into the smartphones of political opponents and dissidents around the world, security researchers say, giving them access to data far more sensitive than what most people keep on personal computers. The increase is being driven by the proliferation both of low-cost smartphones and of companies selling spyware and hacking tools to access them, said Claudio Guarnieri, a security researcher with the human-rights group Amnesty International.
A Facebook bug that was live for four days in May set millions of users’ default sharing settings to public, the company revealed. Facebook said it would be notifying the 14 million users who had posted publicly between May 18 and 22.
Google faces fines for hindering competition with its Android mobile phone system as European Union antitrust watchdogs get ready to add to last year’s record 2.4 billion-euro ($2.8 billion) penalty against the U.S. tech giant, according to people familiar with the case. The EU is in the final stages of the Android probe and could issue a fine as soon as July, according to the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the process isn’t public.
A U.S. senator is seeking responses from Google parent Alphabet Inc. and Twitter Inc. on whether the U.S. companies have any data sharing agreements with Chinese vendors, following a disclosure from Facebook Inc. Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat who is vice chairman of the Intelligence Committee, said in a statement he has written letters to the companies for information on data sharing agreements, noting that since 2012 “the relationship between the Chinese Communist Party and equipment makers like Huawei and ZTE has been an area of national security concern.”
An interesting ruling by Europe’s top court could have some major implications for data mining tech giants like Facebook and Google, along with anyone who administers pages that allow platforms to collect and process their visitors’ personal data — such as a Facebook fan page or even potentially a site running Google Analytics. Passing judgement on a series of legal questions referred to it, the CJEU has held that the administrator of a fan page on Facebook is jointly responsible with Facebook for the processing of the data of visitors to the page — aligning with the the Advocate General’s opinion to the court.
Facebook admitted that it allowed Huawei, a Chinese telecom company with alleged ties to the country’s government, to have special access to data about the social site’s users, an arrangement that could stoke fears that consumers’ personal information is at risk. The relationship between Facebook and Huawei was one of the special agreements brokered between the social giant and device makers over the past decade that sought to make it easier for Facebook users to access site services on a wide array of technologies.
The head of the Securities and Exchange Commission made it clear that the agency won't bend the rules for cryptocurrency when it comes to defining what is or what isn't a security. "We are not going to do any violence to the traditional definition of a security that has worked for a long time," U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Jay Clayton said.
Facebook users will no longer have their uploaded videos with copyrighted background music taken down thanks to a slew of deals with all the major record labels plus many indies. When users upload videos with music with the new rules in effect, they’ll be quickly notified if that song is allowed via the deals and fine to share, or if their video will be muted unless they submit a dispute to the copyright holder who then okays it through Facebook’s Rights Manager tool.
The state of Washington said it had sued Facebook Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google for allegedly violating state campaign finance law by failing to maintain information about who buys election ads. The state's attorney general, Bob Ferguson, said he was seeking penalties against the companies and an injunction for failing to disclose ad spending in state elections since 2013.
One of the world's leading DNA-testing companies recently disclosed that a researcher had found on a private server the email addresses and hashed passwords of every customer that had signed up for its service. MyHeritage said in a blog post that the breach involved roughly 92 million user accounts that were created through October of last year.
A top Democrat in Congress is calling on the U.S. government to investigate Google, the latest sign that some of the party's lawmakers are ready to challenge the tech industry after befriending it in the past. In a letter to the Federal Trade Commission dated May 31, Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison urged the watchdog agency to take a closer look at Google and its parent company, Alphabet, given that European regulators recently found that the search giant harmed its rivals and fined it $2.7 billion.
Facebook Inc. is disputing a New York Times report about how it shares data with device makers from Apple and Amazon to Samsung. But U.S. lawmakers were skeptical and demanded more accountability for Facebook’s frequent privacy lapses.
U.S. chipmaker Qualcomm has asked Europe’s second-highest court to throw out a 997 million euro ($1.2 billion) fine levied by European Union antitrust regulators, citing numerous errors in the EU decision. The European Commission penalized the company in January for paying Apple to use only its chips in its iPhones and iPads, giving rival Intel no chance of getting a share of the market.
Finance ministers of the European Union’s three Nordic countries have urged their partners to shelve a plan to tax large corporations for their digital turnover, saying it could damage the European economy. The call could further weaken the plan proposed by the European Commission in March. It has already attracted criticism from smaller EU states and a lukewarm response from Germany’s new government.
Consumers are now paying to hand over their genetic code -- their most sensitive individual identifier -- to Ancestry LLC and other DNA testing companies, that could monetize it far into the future. But a three-month review by McClatchy, including visits to Ancestry’s headquarters and a main testing lab, reveals a pattern of breached promises to customers, security concerns and inflated marketing pledges that could give consumers some pause.
Read the article: McClatchy
About : Legal Services | Doug Isenberg | Cases & Clients | Firm News
Resources : YouTube Channel | Daily News | Blog | Masterclass | Domain Dispute Digest
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.