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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...

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...

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...

Webmasters can track all your activities on the Internet – even if you have already cleared your browsing history and deleted all saved cookies. A researcher demonstrated two unpatched flaws that can be exploited to track Millions of Internet users, allowing malicious website owners: List Building: To compile a list of visited domains by users, even if they have cleared their browsing history Tracking Cookies: To tag users with a tracking cookie that will persist even after they have deleted all cookies These two Browser Fingerprinting techniques abuse HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) and Content Security Policy – new security features already built into Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome, and expected to make their ways to other mainstream browsers in near future. WHAT IF, The Website owners turn these Security features against You? A security researcher has proved exactly the same last weekend at Toorcon security conference in San Diego. Yan Zhu...

Like Facebook and Google, Twitter will soon be collecting your smartphone data in order to provide a " more personal Twitter experience " by serving targeted advertisements. The popular microblogging service Twitter said Wednesday that it will start collecting information about the other applications its users have installed onto their smartphones or tablet in a bid to better target ads and content, which some users may consider as another threat to their online privacy. In the Security and Privacy section of its support site, Twitter says that it will be " collecting and occasionally updating the list of apps installed on your mobile device so we can deliver tailored content that you might be interested in ." The company has updated its app with this new feature for iOS platform on Wednesday, and Android will integrate this new feature in the next week. The app update is opt-out , which means Twitter will start collecting information from users aut...

Yesterday a new classified NSA document was leaked by Edward Snowden - titled ' Tor Stinks ' in which ideas were being kicked around for identifying Tor users or degrading the user experience to dissuade people from using the Tor browser. The NSA had a very hard time while tracking down all Tor  users and monitoring their traffic, especially since Tor servers are all over the world, but they make tracking easier by adopting  the following techniques: By running their own hostile Tor nodes Using zero-day vulnerability of Firefox browser By tracking user' browser Cookies Tor access node tracking is not new and the Document says that both the NSA and GCHQ run Tor nodes themselves. In order to trace traffic back to a particular Tor user the NSA needs to know the ' entry, relay and exit ' nodes in the anonymizer cloud between the user and the destination website. So for tracking purpose they used self-hosted nodes, that is able to trace a ver...