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Security News for the Week Ending July 19, 2019

FTC Approves $5 Billion Fine for Facebook The FTC commissioners reportedly approved an approximately $5 billion fine of Facebook for violating the 2011 consent decree in conjunction with the Cambridge Analytica mess. To put that in perspective, Facebook’s revenue just for 4th quarter of last year was $16.9 billion and their profit for that quarter […]

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Phone Apps Collect User Data Even If You Deny Permissions

All smartphones are data collection machines; hopefully everyone understands that.  There are an amazing number of sensors on the device and many apps just ask for everything.  If the user grants that, then the app can harvest all that data and likely sell it, either individually or in the aggregate. Researchers took a tiny sample […]

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Welcome to the Surveillance State

Let me first say that there is nothing illegal about what follows.  You may not like it, but it is not illegal. Using a public records request, Motherboard obtained a user manual for the Palantir surveillance system called Gotham. The system is used by law enforcement around country (including, for example, New York, New Orleans, […]

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Security News for the Week Ending July 12, 2019

FBI and DHS Raid State Driver’s License Database Photos The FBI and DHS/ICE have been obtaining millions of photos from state DMV driver’s license databases.  The FBI and DHS have do not feel that they have ask permission to do this. The FBI conducts 4,000  facial recognition searches a  month.  While the searches might be […]

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Mozilla (Firefox) Named Internet Villain for Supporting Privacy

Okay, this is going to take a little bit of explaining so bear with me, but it is important. Everyone knows about the padlock in their browser with says that the traffic to that web site is encrypted using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption, which has now been upgraded to Transport Layer Security (TLS).  The […]

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Self Inflicted Cyber Breaches Still Huge Problem Along with Third Party Risk

And it continues to be a major issue for some reason. This week researchers found 85 gigabytes of security log data (talk about a nightmare for a business to expose that) in an elastic search database. The server was discovered on May 27th and the data goes back to April 19th, so that might be […]

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