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Microsoft has agreed to pay a penalty of $20 million to settle U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) charges that the company illegally collected and retained the data of children who signed up to use its Xbox video game console without their parents' knowledge or consent. "Our proposed order makes it easier for parents to protect their children's privacy on Xbox, and limits what information Microsoft can collect and retain about kids," FTC's Samuel Levine  said . "This action should also make it abundantly clear that kids' avatars, biometric data, and health information are not exempt from  COPPA ." As part of the proposed settlement, which is pending court approval, Redmond has been ordered to update its account creation process for children to prevent the collection and storage of data, including obtaining parental consent and deleting said information within two weeks if approval is not obtained. The privacy protections also extend to third-par...

The FBI just saved the Christmas. The U.S. Justice Department announced earlier today that the FBI has seized domains of 15 "DDoS-for-hire" websites and charged three individuals running some of these services. DDoS-for-hire , or "Booter" or "Stresser," services rent out access to a network of infected devices, which then can be used by anyone, even the least tech-savvy individual, to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against any website and disrupt its access. In recent years, multiple hacking groups ruined Christmas Day for millions of gamers by taking down PlayStation, Xbox networks and other gaming servers using massive DDoS attacks. "Booter services such as those named in this action allegedly cause attacks on a wide array of victims in the United States and abroad, including financial institutions, universities, internet service providers, government systems, and various gaming platforms," the DoJ said. ...

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Windows 10 here, Windows 10 there, and it is everywhere. This is exactly what Microsoft dreamed of, and it seems like the company is actively working to reach its One Billion goal by the end of 2017 or mid-2018. Proudly announcing its first huge success, Microsoft reported that its newest Windows 10 operating system is now officially installed on more than 200 Million devices worldwide since its launch five months ago. Windows 10 is the latest as well as the greatest operating system from Microsoft that took less than six months to hit 200 Million milestone. The growth is really impressive, and Microsoft's Corporate Vice President of Windows and Devices Yusuf Mehdi outlined other milestones for Windows 10 in a blog post on Monday. Here's the list: Windows 10's adoption is growing 140% faster than Windows 7 and over 400% faster than Windows 8. More than 40% of the new Windows 10 devices were activated since Black Friday. Over 11 Billion hours have b...

Yes, you heard it right. A gamer drugged his girlfriend to avoid interruption while playing on his Microsoft's Xbox Live . The 23-year-old German man, who has not been named, was fined EUR€500 (approx USD$555) by a judge in a Castrop-Rauxel district court, German website The Local reports . The man admitted in front of judge that he put between four and five drops of a sedative in his girlfriend's tea to make her fall asleep, so he could keep playing the video game on his console. His girlfriend fell asleep for more than 12 hours and wake up midday on the next day, but even after waking up she felt constantly drowsy.  "Then I got up and drove to work although I was nodding off again and again," the victim told. Girlfriends Broke-Up with her Boyfriend The offender's girlfriend, 24, broke up with her now-ex-boyfriend after he did this to her. Sentencing the man, the court judge said: "Your girlfriend slept long and deeply, wh...

It was the sad Christmas day for gamers all around the world!! A lot of people get new PlayStations and Xboxes on Christmas, but this Christmas they bought the game, popped it into the console for online gaming, and what they found? Oh Crap! I can't log on . It was the notorious hacker group " Lizard Squad " who claimed the responsibility for taking down PlayStation Network, saying it has made unavailable both networks with apparent Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks — intentionally overloading servers by sending a flood of bogus web traffic, which made logging into the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live difficult for most users. Now Anonymous has declared war against Lizard Group, warning that " now you are all going down. " Recently, in response to Lizard Squad launching DDoS attacks on the Tor network , the international activist group Anonymous has leaked the personal details of one of the group's alleged members, warning the hacke...

A 5-year-old San Diego boy managed to hack one of the most popular gaming systems in the world, Xbox and has now been acknowledged as a security researcher by Microsoft. Kristoffer Von Hassel uncovered a vulnerability in Xbox Live's password system, that would allow someone to log into a Xbox player's account without their password. Kristoffer's parents noticed he was logging into his father's Xbox Live account simply by tapping the space bar. YES, BACKDOOR ENTRY WITH JUST SPACE-BAR His father noticed that Kristoffer logged in as his Xbox Live account to play video games that he wasn't meant to be playing and asked how he had done it.  Kristoffer revealed that by typing in the wrong password and then by pressing the spacebar, he bypassed the password verification through a backdoor, and it was pretty simple! HIS FEELING, "was like yeah!" 5-year-old gamer actually hacked the authentication system of a multi-billion dollar company,...

It could be the worst day ever for Microsoft's patch management and Incident response team. A group of pro-Syrian  hackers ' Syrian Electronic Army ' has successfully compromised the official Twitter account of the Microsoft News ( @MSFTNews ), Xbox Support. They also defaced the Microsoft's TechNet blog ( blogs.technet.com ), and posted deface not over the blog. Microsoft says the situation is under control and no customer data was compromised. It seems that hackers have more internal access to the mailer system of the Microsoft, as they shared a screenshots of the internal communications between Microsoft's Public relations team and Steve Clayton, who is the manager in charge of Microsoft's corporate media platforms.  Last week, the SEA hacked Skype's blog and official twitter page, to spread the information about the NSA spying i.e. " Hacked by Syrian Electronic Army.. Stop Spying! " and today we have seen similar tweets from the Microsoft's N...

FBI agents this week raided the home of a Australian hacker who recently leaked a slew of details about Microsoft's next release of Xbox console. " They just took all my computers my hard drives, all of my technology, they took my bank cards, credit cards, bank statements ," he said. He had claimed to know about the next Xbox and PlayStation, claimed to really have two prototype versions of the next Xbox. The suspect, identified as  Dan Henry a.k.a SuperDaE  and he tweeted about the raid on his twitter and  uploaded a warrant copy. Last year he reportedly sold a next-gen Xbox development kit on eBay for $20,100. A development kit is what Microsoft sends to companies so they can develop Xbox games. The warrant revealed that there are many companies behind the charges filed, including Microsoft, eBay, and Paypal. The photo was removed after it was thought to be a hoax but developers later confirmed that the pictures were in fact accurate of ...