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Amazon and Ring are now defendants in a class-action security lawsuit filed last week. The lawsuit alleges that Amazon could have done more to protect Ring customers from security breaches. The lawsuit is spearheaded by plaintiff John Orange, who hails from Alabama. Ring, a video security system founded by CEO Jamie Siminoff in 2013 and acquired by Amazon last year, provides customers with economic indoor and outdoor camera surveillance. That security was compromised, as evidenced by several widely-publicized instances of hackers communicating with startled children through home video systems. Orange’s family fell prey to one of these hacks. The lawsuit accuses Amazon and Ring of privacy violations and breach of contract , among other offenses. It also suggests that Ring could have safeguarded against attacks by offering multi-factor authentication, a security method requiring users to verify authenticity by providing more than one unique method of proving identity. While Ring has...
Dec 31, 2019
United States’ Customs and Border Protection (CBP) gathers a trove of information on people coming in and out of the country. Recently, CPB has started testing facial recognition at airports . Plus, the Trump administration now requires social media information from Visa applicants. All of this information is extremely sensitive, so a leak is the last thing anyone wants. Unfortunately, CBP confirmed that a data breach exposed the photos of travelers and license plate images according to TechCrunch . It seems that a subcontractor is responsible for the information leaking. According to TechCrunch, CBP said in a statement: “CBP learned that a subcontractor, in violation of CBP policies and without CBP’s authorization or knowledge, had transferred copies of license plate images and traveler images collected by CBP to the subcontractor’s company network.” A spokesperson told the outlet that the breach has impacted “fewer than 100,000 people” through a “few specific lanes at a single...
Jun 11, 2019
Good afternoon and happy Valentine’s Day! If you’re looking to hop on dating apps to find the love of your life today, you should probably chill for a bit. This morning, Coffee Meets Bagel–a popular dating app–announced a data breach to its users via email. It’s not clear how many accounts were impacted and the company says hackers only gained information from users who were on the app before May 2018. Only users’ names and emails were compromised. Financial information or passwords weren’t hacked since the company doesn’t store those details on its users. In an awkwardly timed announcement, the company didn’t go into extreme detail about the particulars of the breach, but it did lay out a plan to protect its users’ information moving forward and said it will seek the efforts of “forensic security experts” to take a look at the nuts and bolts of the company’s infrastructure. It’s also monitoring for more suspicious activity on the platform. Pro tip: Coffee Meets Bagel should send...
Feb 14, 2019
(Cues Rockwell’s “Somebody’s Watching Me”) AT&T and other phone companies are restructuring their policies on selling customers’ location data to third-parties after a report by Motherboard found the information was being misused by law enforcement agencies and bounty hunters. AT&T said it would completely stop selling users’ location data, even to firms that had clear, helpful uses for the information. Last year, the company said it would stop selling the information to third parties after it was revealed that location data was being used to track people by law enforcement. “This is outrageous. I didn’t sign up for this when I signed up for wireless service and I bet neither did you,” FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel said to CBS. “It turns out that they’re selling that information to companies called location aggregators who in turn are selling that to shady middlemen who for a few hundred dollars will sell to anyone, your location within a few hundred meters. I think that is a...
Jan 11, 2019