The Stories behind the Coolest Retrofitted Data Centers
February 9, 2017
This Week in Getting Hacked: Digital Geneva Convention Edition
February 16, 2017Welcome 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…
If you’ve used a Vizio smart TV in the past few years, chances are it’s been spying on what you’ve been watching. Vizio just agreed to pay $2.2 million USD as part of a settlement due to selling customer information gathered from these smart TV’s, unbeknownst to the user.
My favorite part is that, even with a ruling and upcoming settlement, Vizio still doesn’t acknowledge they did it:
Today, the FTC has made clear that all smart-TV makers should get people’s consent before collecting and sharing television viewing information, and Vizio now is leading the way,” Vizio’s general counsel, Jerry Huang, said of the settlement.
Hey, do you remember that security firm that helped the FBI break into that iPhone that was owned by the San Bernardino shooter? Remember that whole thing about whether Apple should let the FBI have a backdoor, and the legal case and all that? Remember that company that stepped up and said they had the tools to be able to crack the iPhone’s security and get into the device? Yeah, they got hacked and that tool got leaked online.
The Department of Homeland Security is considering asking foreign travelers for their social media passwords which totally doesn’t sound alarming or controversial or anything that would be considered not only unconstitutional, but an egregious invasion of privacy.
Nothing to see here!
The United States House of Representatives passed a bill that would require search warrants to look through old emails. That’s a pretty cool policy, and should be the standard for most data and information contained primarily on the Internet. Just because it’s on the web doesn’t mean you can just go up and grab it because you feel like it. It would require law enforcement to get a warrant to look at emails that are more than 180 days old, as the current law only requires a subpoena and not a full warrant.
And finally…
–The hacking group Anonymous has successfully hacked and shut down over 10,000 dark web portals that contained child porn, botnets, fraud websites and more devious stuff.
That’s a lot like Dexter being a serial killer than only kills other serial killers, I guess.
See you next week!
