Welcome back to ‘This Week in Getting Hacked’—the world’s greatest cybersecurity-related link dump! Each week, we bring you the best news stories from the cybersecurity field, letting you know who’s getting hacked, who’s hacking, what data is leaking, and about what you should take with caution. So strap in, change your password, and let’s find out who’s getting hacked this week!
On to the links…
Believe it or not the world-famous Geek Squad is in CAHOOTS with the FBI. No. Way.
The Best Buy owned electronics repair company has been “secretly” parsing computers for information the FBI might want to know about.
Th evidence is as follows: the FBI’s Cyber Working Group toured Geek Squad’s repair facility in Kentucky and they have been working so close, that they actually developed a process for reporting suspicious content. This is mostly is cases for child pornography and things nature, but we find the fact that this is “outrageous” as pretty funny.
Remember Facebook’s VPN, “Onavo,” from a few weeks back? Well, apparently it’s still doing the dubious even while disabled.
I feel like at this point, we’re never going to escape the giant Internet companies like Facebook, Google, etc. They’re always doing something that we kind of like. So we’ll use it. Then we find out they’re selling all of our information to advertisers and we get upset. But we don’t stop using their services.
And they know they kind of upset us, so they make things that we’ll think for a brief second is useful, until we find out it’s just a way for them to make money. It’s a vicious cycle and I need more friends….
Speaking of Internet Giants—Researchers have found a way to bypass Windows Passwords using Cortana. You know, the thing that’s supposed to be YOUR assistant.
The Halo-named Microsoft assistant can be exploited to do all sorts of things, like tell you your commute, what the weather will be, and to install malware once it’s gotten past your password.
Wait, what?
That’s it for this week, folks. Please change your passwords and disable Cortana when not in use. People are smart. You are not.
