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Have you ever suspected that Facebook is listening to your conversations through Microphone?

Have you ever suspected that Facebook is listening to your conversations through Microphone?

Jun 03, 2016
Have you ever felt Facebook is showing you very relevant ads about topics you're only discussing around your phone? If yes, then you may find this news worth reading. Communications Professor Kelli Burns from the University of South Florida claims that Facebook is listening to all conversations people have while its app is open to serve more relevant ads for products related to what they are talking about. However, the social networking giant responds  it does listen to audio and collect information from users, but does not record or use sounds heard around people for targeted ads. " Facebook does not use microphone audio to inform advertising or News Feed stories in any way ," a Facebook spokesperson said. " Businesses are able to serve relevant ads based on people's interests and other demographic information, but not through audio collection. " Facebook rolled out a feature in May of 2014 when the company said that it might target ads " in t
Top Websites Using Audio Fingerprinting to Secretly Track Web Users

Top Websites Using Audio Fingerprinting to Secretly Track Web Users

May 21, 2016
Despite browsing incognito, blocking advertisements, or hiding your tracks, some websites monitor and track your every move online using a new web-tracking technique called Audio Fingerprinting . This new fingerprinting technique can be utilized by technology and marketing companies to deliver targeted advertisements as well as by law enforcement to unmask VPN or Anonymous users, without even decrypting the traffic. Researchers at Princeton University have conducted a massive privacy survey and discovered that Google, through its multiple domains, is tracking users on nearly 80 percent of all Top 1 Million Domains using the variety of tracking and identification techniques. Out of them, the newest tracking technology unearthed by the researchers is the one based on fingerprinting a machine's audio stack through the AudioContext API . "All of the top five third-parties, as well as 12 of the top 20, are Google-owned domains," the researchers note. "In fact, Goog
Making Sense of Operational Technology Attacks: The Past, Present, and Future

Making Sense of Operational Technology Attacks: The Past, Present, and Future

Mar 21, 2024Operational Technology / SCADA Security
When you read reports about cyber-attacks affecting operational technology (OT), it's easy to get caught up in the hype and assume every single one is sophisticated. But are OT environments all over the world really besieged by a constant barrage of complex cyber-attacks? Answering that would require breaking down the different types of OT cyber-attacks and then looking back on all the historical attacks to see how those types compare.  The Types of OT Cyber-Attacks Over the past few decades, there has been a growing awareness of the need for improved cybersecurity practices in IT's lesser-known counterpart, OT. In fact, the lines of what constitutes a cyber-attack on OT have never been well defined, and if anything, they have further blurred over time. Therefore, we'd like to begin this post with a discussion around the ways in which cyber-attacks can either target or just simply impact OT, and why it might be important for us to make the distinction going forward. Figure 1 The Pu
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