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In this digital era, the success of almost every marketing, advertising, and analytics company drives through tracking users across the Internet to identify them and learn their interests to provide targeted ads. Most of these solutions rely on 3rd-party cookies, a cookie set on a domain other than the one you are browsing, which allows companies including Google and Facebook to fingerprint you in order to track your every move across multiple sites. However, if you're using Kaspersky Antivirus, a vulnerability in the security software had exposed a unique identifier associated with you to every website you visited in the past 4 years, which might have allowed those sites and other third-party services to track you across the web even if you have blocked or erased third-party cookies timely. The vulnerability, identified as CVE-2019-8286 and discovered by independent security researcher Ronald Eikenberg, resides in the way a URL scanning module integrated into the antivir...

As promised, Mozilla has finally enabled "Enhanced Tracking Protection" feature on its Firefox browser by default, which from now onwards would automatically block all third-party tracking cookies that allow advertisers and websites to track you across the web. Tracking cookies, also known as third-party cookies, allows advertisers to monitor your online behavior and interests, using which they display relevant advertisements, content, and promotions on the websites you visit. Which makes sense as no one likes to waste time in watching advertisements and offers that are not of one's interest. However, since tracking cookies gather way more information without requiring users' explicit permissions and there is no control over how companies would use it, the technique also poses a massive threat to users' online privacy. To limit this extensive tracking, Mozilla included the "Enhanced Tracking Protection" option as an experimental feature in Octo...

Vulnerability Management (VM) has long been a cornerstone of organizational cybersecurity. Nearly as old as the discipline of cybersecurity itself, it aims to help organizations identify and address potential security issues before they become serious problems. Yet, in recent years, the limitations of this approach have become increasingly evident.  At its core, Vulnerability Management processes remain essential for identifying and addressing weaknesses. But as time marches on and attack avenues evolve, this approach is beginning to show its age. In a recent report, How to Grow Vulnerability Management into Exposure Management (Gartner, How to Grow Vulnerability Management Into Exposure Management, 8 November 2024, Mitchell Schneider Et Al.), we believe Gartner® addresses this point precisely and demonstrates how organizations can – and must – shift from a vulnerability-centric strategy to a broader Exposure Management (EM) framework. We feel it's more than a worthwhile read an...

If the death of online privacy rules wasn't enough for Internet Service Providers and advertisers to celebrate, Verizon has planned to pre-install spyware on customers' Android devices in order to collect their personal data. The telecom giant has partnered with Evie Launcher to bring a new application called ' AppFlash ' — a universal search bar that will come pre-installed on the home screens of all Verizon Android handsets for quickly finding apps and web content. AppFlash is simply a Google search bar replacement, but instead of collecting and sending telemetry data including what you search, handset, apps and other online activities to Google, it will send to Verizon. What's worse? Just like other pre-installed bloatware apps, Android users can't uninstall AppFlash quickly, unless they have rooted their phone. AppFlash allows you to search inside apps or browse through listings of nearby restaurants and entertainment. The built-in Google Search ...

Nothing comes for Free, as "Free" is just a relative term used by companies to develop a strong user base and then use it for their own benefits. The same has been done by the secure messaging app WhatsApp, which has now made it crystal clear that the popular messaging service will begin sharing its users' data with its parent company, Facebook. However, WhatsApp is offering a partial opt-out for Facebook targeted ads and product related purposes, which I will let you know later in this article, but completely opting out of the data-sharing does not seem to be possible. Let's know what the company has decided to do with your data. Of course, Facebook is willing to use your data to sell more targeted advertisements. WhatsApp introduced some significant changes to its privacy policy and T&Cs today which, if accepted once, gives it permission to connect users' Facebook accounts to WhatsApp accounts for the first time, giving Facebook more data about us...

Is my smartphone battery leaking details about me? Unfortunately, YES! Forget about supercookies, apps, and malware; your smartphone battery status is enough to monitor your online activity, according to a new report. In 2015, researchers from Stanford University demonstrated a way to track users' locations – with up to 90 percent accuracy – by measuring the battery usage of the phone over a certain time. The latest threat is much worse. Two security researchers, Steve Engelhard and Arvind Narayanan, from Princeton University, have published a paper describing how phone's battery status has already been used to track users across different websites. The issue is due to the Battery Status API (application programming interface). How Does Battery Status API Help Advertisers Track You? The battery status API was first introduced in HTML5 and had already shipped in browsers including Firefox, Chrome, and Opera by August last year. The API is intended to allo...

8th February 2016 would be considered as a cursed day in the history of Facebook. You might have known that just yesterday India bans Facebook's Free Basic Internet in the country. Now, Zuckerberg had got another bombshell in the form of a French Order from the European Data Protection Authority, who ordered Facebook to stop tracking non-users' online activity and to stop data transfers of personal data to the US servers. Facebook Is Following You Everywhere Do you know: Facebook can still track you, even if you log out, with the help of its tracking cookies and plugins ( like, share buttons ) placed on any 3rd-party website. Facebook knows what sites you are visiting, and by " you ," I mean specifically your account, not an anonymous Facebook user . As per the French Order, Facebook is not legalized to track the web browsing habits of all European citizens, even those without a Facebook account. The French Government had also provided a tim...

A New York-based online ad network company AppNexus, that provides a platform specializing in real-time online advertising, has again been spotted as the origin of a recent "malvertising" campaign that makes use of the Angler Exploit Kit to redirect visitors to malicious websites hosting the Asprox malware. AppNexus servers process 16 billion ad buys per day, making it the biggest reach on the open web after Google. Back in May, AppNexus was serving malicious ads targeting Microsoft's Silverlight platform. The world's largest Internet Video Subscription service Netflix runs on Silverlight, and because of its popularity, hackers have been loading exploit kits with Silverlight. As part of this campaign, users of several high-profile websites including Java.com, Deviantart.com, TMZ.com, Photobucket.com, IBTimes.com, eBay.ie, Kapaza.be and TVgids.nl , last week were redirected to websites serving malicious advertisements that infected visitors by installing botnet ma...