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Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, VK, Google's Picasa and Youtube were handing over user data access to a Chicago-based Startup — the developer of a social media monitoring tool — which then sold this data to law enforcement agencies for surveillance purposes, the ACLU disclosed Tuesday. Government records obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) revealed that the big technology corporations gave "special access" to Geofeedia. Geofeedia is a controversial social media monitoring tool that pulls social media feeds via APIs and other means of access and then makes it searchable and accessible to its clients, who can search by location or keyword to quickly find recently posted and publicly available contents. The company has marketed its services to 500 law enforcement and public safety agencies as a tool to track racial protests in Ferguson, Missouri, involving the 2014 police shooting death of Mike Brown. With the help of a public records request, the...

Microsoft has released its monthly Patch Tuesday update including a total of 10 security bulletin, and you are required to apply the whole package of patches altogether, whether you like it or not. That's because the company is kicking off a controversial new all-or-nothing patch model this month by packaging all security updates into a single payload, removing your ability to pick and choose which individual patches to install. October's patch bundle includes fixes for at least 5 separate dangerous zero-day vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer, Edge, Windows and Office products that attackers were already exploiting in the wild before the patch release. The patches for these zero-day flaws are included in MS16-118, MS16-119, MS16-120, MS16-121 and MS16-126. All the zero-days are being exploited in the wild, allowing attackers to execute a remote command on victim's system. Although none of the zero-day flaws were publicly disclosed prior to Tuesday, the company wa...

Over the past few years, Internet users globally have grown increasingly aware of online privacy and security issues due to mass monitoring and surveillance by government agencies, making them adopt encryption software and services. But it turns out that hackers are taking advantage of this opportunity by creating and distributing fake versions of encryption tools in order to infect as many victims as possible. Kaspersky Lab has revealed an advanced persistent threat (APT) group, nicknamed StrongPity , which has put a lot of efforts in targeting users of software designed for encrypting data and communications. The StrongPity APT group has been using watering-hole attacks, infected installers, and malware for many years to target users of encryption software by compromising legitimate sites or setting up their own malicious copycat sites. Watering hole attacks are designed to lure specific groups of users to their interest-based sites that typically house malicious files or...

Yahoo! has disabled automatic email forwarding -- a feature that lets its users forward a copy of incoming emails from one account to another. The company has faced lots of bad news regarding its email service in past few weeks. Last month, the company admitted a massive 2014 data breach that exposed account details of over 500 Million Yahoo users. If this wasn't enough for users to quit the service, another shocking revelation came last week that the company scanned the emails of hundreds of millions of its users at the request of a U.S. intelligence service last year. That's enough for making a loyal Yahoo Mail user to switch for other rival alternatives, like Google Gmail, or Microsoft's Outlook. Yahoo Mail Disables Auto-Forwarding; Making It Hard to Leave But as Yahoo Mail users are trying to leave the email service, the company is making it more difficult for them to transition to another email service. That's because since the beginning of Octob...

If you are concerned about the insecurity of Internet of Things, have good hands at programming and know how to hack smart devices, then you can grab an opportunity to earn $50,000 in prize money for discovering the non-traditional ways to secure IoT devices. Internet of Things (IoT) market is going to expand rapidly over the next decade. We already have 6.5 billion to 8 billion IoT devices connected to the Internet worldwide, and the number is expected to reach 50 billion by 2020. While IoT is going to improve life for many, the number of security risks due to lack of stringent security measures and encryption mechanisms in the devices have increased exponentially. This rise in the number of security risks would continue to widen the attack surface, giving hackers a large number of entry points to affect you some or the other way. Recently, we saw a record-breaking DDoS attack (Distributed Denial of Service) against the France-based hosting provider OVH that reached over...