Microsoft has released a statement warning users to stay vigilant of phishing emails, as a malicious campaign has been detected which tricks users into downloading an Excel sheet containing harmful software. The criminals responsible are taking advantage of the confusion around Covid-19, as many others have been doing lately, to convince users that the emails are genuine and to enable macros within Excel once the file has been downloaded to their computer.
Data transfer between the EU and US had come under fire in the Irish courts, due to a dispute in the clause Facebook Ireland uses to send data back to its international parent, Facebook US. EU data protection and privacy laws are among the strongest in the world, and as such, any data pertaining to EU citizens cannot be transferred outside Europe without strong assurances in place that the data will be processed under EU-compliant terms. While the US data protection laws are considered inadequate for European data, many international tech companies circumvent this using a model known as “standard contractual clauses”, whereby the parent company (Facebook US, in this example) enters into a contract with their EU subsidiary (Facebook Ireland) which pledges to meet the EU’s strict rules. Ireland is home to the European headquarters of 9 out of 10 of the of the world’s largest social media companies, and standard contractual clauses have been considered legally acceptable by the EU since 2001.
Yahoo Hackers prove they don’t need your online passwords as they can forge your browser cookies to access your online data.
Yahoo in December 2016 quietly revealed to its users, in the form of a security update, that their user accounts may have been compromised as recently as last year, after an ongoing cyber security investigation found evidence that hackers managed to create forged cookies to gain access to Yahoo user accounts. Read more
New Cross-Browsing Fingerprinting technique can now track online activity across multiple browsers. Coming soon to a browser near you.
You might be aware of websites, banks, retailers, and advertisers tracking your online activities using different Web “fingerprinting” techniques even in incognito/private mode, but now sites can track you anywhere online — even if you switch browsers.
A team of researchers has recently developed a cross-browser fingerprinting technique — the first reliable technique to accurately track users across multiple browsers based on information like extensions, plugins, time zone and whether or not an ad blocker is installed. Read more