Security News for the Week Ending December 11, 2020
Researchers Hack Apple Successfully
Between July and October, good-guy hackers worked on a side project to hack Apple. The results were impressive – if you are not Apple. 55 vulnerabilities found, 11 critical and 29 high. Apple paid the team a bug bounty of $288,000. The compromise would have exposed a lot of Apple’s internal systems and data. Several of the reported bugs were fixed by Apple in hours. Credit: Sam Curry
Hackers offer 250,000 MySQL Databases For Sale on the Dark Web
A hacker set up a dark web site to offer 250,000 MySQL databases stolen from 83,000 breached servers. He wants 0.03 Bitcoin for each database (about $500). The data comes from brute force attacks that resulted in the hacker stealing the data and then deleting off the victim’s server, just leaving a ransom note. Credit: bleepingcomputer.com
Now That Google has Won the Browser War, they Are Working to Kill Off Privacy
Now that all major browsers are based on Chromium, except for Firefox, Google doesn’t have to worry about competition. Google currently allows browser extensions to do way too many things, many of which are dangerous. As a result, they are redesigning the interface that extensions use, called Manifest, which, in concept, is not a bad idea. Purely coincidentally, these changes kill the ad blockers in all Chromium based browsers. Pure coincidence. It has nothing to do with the fact that Google makes most of its money selling ads. There is one ad blocker that will continue to work, Adblock Plus. Adblock Plus is paid by Google to allow their ads to pass freely through their ad blocker. Credit: The Register
Deadline for Sale of TikTok Passed and. Nothing
Trump issued an executive order months ago requiring the sale of TikTok or it would be shut down in the United States. But politics makes people make strange choices. Politicians do not relish ticking off 100 million voters by shutting down their entertainment during a pandemic, so they have kept moving the goal posts. But after moving the “deadline” time after time with no results to show, they just let the last deadline pass. Of course that doesn’t mean this is over, but it does question the government’s intentions. Credit: MSN
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