google tracking | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Do you own an Android smartphone? If yes, then you are one of those billions of users whose smartphone is secretly gathering location data and sending it back to Google. Google has been caught collecting location data on every Android device owner since the beginning of this year (that's for the past 11 months)—even when location services are entirely disabled, according to an investigation conducted by Quartz. This location-sharing practice doesn't want your Android smartphone to use any app, or turn on location services, or even have a SIM card inserted. All it wants is to have your Android device to be connected to the Internet. The investigation revealed that Android smartphones have been collecting the addresses of nearby cellular towers, and this data could be used for " Cell Tower Triangulation "—a technique widely used to identify the location of a phone/device using data from three or more nearby cell towers. Each time your Android device come...

If your smartphones, tablets, smart refrigerators, smart TVs and other smart devices are smart enough to make your life easier, their smart behavior could also be leveraged by hackers to steal data, invade your privacy or spy on you, if not secured properly. One such experiment has recently been performed by a team of student hackers, demonstrating a new attack method to turn smart devices into spying tools that could track your every move, including inferring sexual activity. Dubbed CovertBand , the attack has been developed by four researchers at the University of Washington's Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, and is so powerful that it can record what a person is doing through a wall. The CovertBand tracking system makes use of the built-in microphones and speakers—found in smartphones, laptops, tablets, smart assistant and other smart devices—as a receiver to pick up reflected sound waves, tracking the movements of anyone near the audio sourc...

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...

Google has been involved in several controversies including among the companies that was claimed to cooperate with US surveillance agencies on their global data-mining programmes, and just yesterday the popular Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch labeled Google worse than the NSA , saying " NSA privacy invasion bad, but nothing compared to Google. " Now another, but already known controversy over the Internet giant has raised many concerns over privacy of users who carry their smartphones with them. We all have sensors in our pockets that track us everywhere we go i.e. Smartphones. GOOGLE TRACKS YOU EVERYWHERE YOU GO - LOCATION HISTORY Today, with the help of these sensors, Google is tracking our every foot steps and placing a red dot on its map to keep track of users' records, Junkee.com reports. " You can yourself check your every move from here. You just need to log in with the same account you use on your Smartphone, that's it. The map will display all the records of everyw...