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The Search Engine giant is not going to spare the Pirated content providing sites . Google is ready to fulfill its commitment to downgrade the search rankings of ' notorious ' piracy sites globally that often rank above legal and commercial sites. Google and the Copyright holders are, to some extent, enemies for years, but in Google's ongoing anti-piracy efforts, the company will fight copyright infringement and assure rights holders that their contents will be appeared at the top of its search results and that the search made up only a small portion of pirate traffic. DOWNGRADE PIRATED SITES Google is preparing major tweaks to its search engine, which you'll be able to see this week, to ensure that the 'notorious' piracy sites that enable the downloading or streaming of pirated contents are out of search results when people search for music, movies and other copyrighted content. The announcement of the algorithm update came as Google updated " How Google Fights ...

Apple's latest desktop operating system, known as Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite , sends location and search data of users without their knowledge to Apple's remote servers by default whenever a user queries the desktop search tool Spotlight, which questions users' privacy once again. The technology firm faced criticism on Monday when users came to know about the company's About Spotlight & Privacy which clearly states that anyone who uses the Spotlight feature in either Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite or its newly launched mobile operating system iOS 8 will have their location and search information passed back to Apple's servers to process. APPLE COLLECTS USERS' DATA AND FORWARDS IT TO MICROSOFT AS WELL On one hand, where Apple decided to enable hard drive encryption by default, despite the FBI requests not to do so. But on the other, the company is itself putting its users' privacy on risk. The same data Apple collects from the users' searched te...

Apple iCloud users in China are not safe from the hackers — believed to be working for Chinese government — who are trying to wiretap Apple customers in the country. Great Fire , a reputed non-profit organization that monitors Internet censorship in China, claimed that the Chinese authorities have launched a nationwide Man in the Middle (MITM) campaign against users of Apple's iCloud service, designed to steal users' login credentials and access private data. MAN-IN-THE-MIDDLE ATTACK The attacks on the iCloud service was first reported on Saturday and come as Apple begins the official rollout of its latest launched iPhone 6 and 6 Plus on the Chinese mainland. If we talk about less publicized but more danger, Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attack is the most common one. By attempting MitM attack, a potential attacker could intercept users' internet communication, steal sensitive information and even hijack sessions. ACCESS TO CREDENTIALS AND ALL PERSONAL DATA Usin...

After offering chocolate ( Kit-Kat ), now Google is ready to serve you Lollipops. Google on Wednesday finally revealed the official name of its next version Android L — Android 5.0 Lollipop . The newly released Android 5.0 Lollipop ships with the latest Motorola-made Nexus 6 smartphone and Nexus 9 tablet built by HTC, but the company did not make the Lollipop available for download to other users immediately. The older versions of Nexus devices will receive the Lollipop update in the coming weeks. Lollipop features some significant changes to the Android platform with a sleek new user interface, cross platform support and improved performance via the new ART runtime engine. The operating system also offers better battery life, improved notifications, OpenGL ES 3.1 and 64-bit support, among other features. Here are some most notable features of Android 5.0 Lollipop , along with some insight as to when you might be able to get your hands on it. Google describes Lolli...

Tor - Privacy oriented encrypted anonymizing service, has announced the launch of its next version of Tor Browser Bundle, Tor version 4.0 , which disables SSL3 to prevent POODLE attack and uses new transports that are intended to defeat the Great Firewall of China and other extremely restrictive firewalls. Tor is generally thought to be a place where users come online to hide their activities and remain anonymous. Tor is an encrypted anonymizing network considered to be one of the most privacy oriented service and is mostly used by activists, journalists to circumvent online censorship and surveillance efforts by various countries. The popularity of the tool can be estimated by the recent announcement of an Internet router called Anonabox which was the highest crowd funded project on Kickstarter this week, generating more than $500,000 in funding since its launch on Monday. Tor privacy router Anonabox is designed to make all your online activity anonymous and conceal yo...

After successful in launching reflection and amplification Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks by abusing various protocols such as DNS, NTP and SMTP, hackers are now abusing Simple Service Discovery Protocol (SSDP) – part of the UPnP protocol standard – to target home and office devices, researchers warned. SSDP is a network protocol based on the Internet Protocol Suite that comes enabled on millions of networked devices, such as computers, printers, Internet gateways, Router / Wi-Fi access points, mobile devices, webcams, smart TVs and gaming consoles, to discover each other and automatically establish working configurations that enable data sharing, media streaming, media playback control and other services. FLAW IN UPnP USED IN AMPLIFICATION DDoS ATTACK Prolexic Security Engineering & Response Team (PLXsert) at Akamai Technologies have issued a warning that the devices use in residential or small office environments are being co-opted into reflection ...

Smart devices are growing at an exponential pace with the increase in connecting devices embedded in cars, retail systems, refrigerators, televisions and countless other things people use in their everyday life, but security and privacy are the key issues for such applications, which still face some enormous number of challenges. Millions of Network-connected electricity meters or Smart meters used in Spain are susceptible to cyberattack by hackers due to lack of basic and essential security controls that could put Millions of homes at risk, according to studies carried out by a pair of security researcher. HACKERS TO CAUSE BLACKOUT AND BILL FRAUD The security vulnerabilities found in the electricity meters could allow an intruder to carry out billing fraud or even shut down electric power to homes and cause blackouts. Poorly protected credentials inside the devices could let attackers take control over the gadgets, warn the researchers. The utility that deployed the...

Facebook is moving a step ahead from others and making its social media service as an information sharing platform in serious situations as well. The social networking giant has announced a new tool, which lets users notify their family and friends that they are safe during or after natural disasters. The tool, named " Safety Check, " will soon be available globally to over 1.32 billion Facebook users on Android, iOS, feature phones and the desktops. The tool is designed to be activated after a natural disaster and by using either the city you lived in or your last location - if you have checked in on " Nearby Friends ", it let's you alert your friends and family that you are safe, while also tracking the status of others. " In times of disaster or crisis, people turn to Facebook to check on loved ones and get updates, " wrote the company in a blog post about the feature. " It is in these moments that communication is most critical both for people in the affected ...

As part of monthly patch update, Microsoft released eight security bulletins on Tuesday that address dozens of vulnerabilities including a zero-day flaw reportedly being exploited by Russian hackers to target NATO computers and a pair of zero-day Windows vulnerabilities that attackers have been exploiting to penetrate major corporations' networks. Just a day before yesterday, our team reported you about a Zero-day vulnerability discovered by the cyber intelligence firm iSight Partners affecting all supported versions of Microsoft Windows and is being exploited in a five-year old cyber-espionage campaign against the Ukrainian government and U.S organisations. Researchers at FireEye found two zero-day flaws, used in separate, unrelated attacks involving exploitation of Windows kernel, just a day after iSight partners disclosed zero-day in Windows. The pair of zero-day vulnerabilities could allow an attacker to access a victim's entire system. According to the res...

Another Heartbleed-like vulnerability has been discovered in the decade old but still widely used Secure Sockets Layer ( SSL ) 3.0 cryptographic protocol that could allow an attacker to decrypt contents of encrypted connections to websites. Google's Security Team revealed on Tuesday that the most widely used web encryption standard SSL 3.0 has a major security vulnerability that could be exploited to steal sensitive data. The flaw affects any product that follows the Secure layer version 3, including Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer. Researchers dubbed the attack as " POODLE ," stands for Padding Oracle On Downgraded Legacy Encryption , which allows an attacker to perform a man-in-the-middle attack in order to decrypt HTTP cookies. The POODLE attack can force a connection to "fallback" to SSL 3.0, where it is then possible to steal cookies, which are meant to store personal data, website preferences or even passwords. Three Google security engineers - Bodo Möll...

Internet users have faced a number of major privacy breaches in last two months. Major in the list are The Fappening , The Snappening and now the latest privacy breach in Dropbox security has gained everybody's attention across the world. Dropbox , the popular online locker service, appears to have been hacked by an unnamed hacker group. It is still unclear how the account details of so many users were accessed and, indeed, if they are actually legitimate or not. However, the group claims to have accessed details from nearly 7 million individual accounts and are threatening to release users' photos, videos and other files. HACKERS CLAIMED TO RELEASE 7 MILLION USERS' PERSONAL DATA A thread surfaced on Reddit today that include links to files containing hundreds of usernames and passwords for Dropbox accounts in plain text. Also a series of posts with hundreds of alleged usernames and passwords for Dropbox accounts have been made to Pastebin, an anonymous information-sha...