The discovery of a flaw that would allow users’ phone numbers to be publicly available despite adjustments to contact info visibility hits Facebook where it hurts most: data privacy. Security researcher Suriya Prakash found that a conflict between two Facebook account privacy settings makes it possible to look random users up and associate their names with the phone numbers they provided as an authenticatio...

A hacking attack targeting the Philippines’ Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) came shortly after several other government websites were taken down due to the outrage over the new Filipino cybercrime law, reports the HackerNews. The defaced website was restored to normal operation within minutes. The DENR hit posed quite a lot of offline security issues in as much as it was likely to dis...

Just as all other pop-culture ephemerids, the Gangnam craze has caught us in its maze. College fresher statement video? Do it Gangnam style! Internet meme that’s bound to propel you to online social heaven? Gangnam, again. Tons of parodies for your own 15 minutes of fame? Gan-gnam, gan-gnam, gan-gnam. It’s THE thing to have, do, imitate, show or look at. So, what happens now in the Scammersmith family’s bac...

New warnings of suspected state-sponsored attacks have been issued by Google concerning “malicious attachments, links to malicious software downloads and links to fake websites [..] designed to steal your passwords and personal information,” reports nbcnews. A similar batch of messages was sent out in June. While Google states its “internal systems are not compromised” and these warnings are only a precauti...

The Philippines recently passed a cybercrime law that sparked controversy among freedom of speech promoters due to its broad approach to what might constitute online libel, according to Yahoo! News. The Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012 adopted by the Congress of Philippines aims to “define cybercrime, provide for the prevention, investigation, suppression and the imposition of penalties therefore and for o...

Reacting to the deal between Facebook and Datalogix, a company enabling “purchase-based audience targeting”, two independent online privacy monitoring agencies asked the FTC to investigate on suspicion of consumer trust breach, reports slashdot.org. The Facebook – Datalogix cooperation is basically supposed to measure Facebook ads’ efficiency by measuring how many of those exposed to the ads on the social p...

U.S. intelligence officials have just released information about a Chinese state-sponsored attack against, among other things, the White House Military Office’s nuclear commands system that took place earlier this month, reports freebeacon.com. “This is the most sensitive office in the U.S. government,” a former senior U.S. intelligence official told freebeacon.com. “A compromise there would cause grave str...

A Facebook post made to resemble a breaking news announcement about a Miley Cyrus sex tape brings tagjacking back into the social scam spotlight. The huge thumbnail propagating the scam displays a closeup of the singer, apparently in a state of rapture. The news crawler aims to hit it big with the leaked tape announcement by throwing in the “minor” detail of the “millions of men [having] called in sick afte...

The Irish Data Protection Commissioner (DPC) has released a positive assessment of Facebook’s efforts to bring its data and privacy protection policies in line with European legislation, reports techrunch.com.   One key improvement Facebook has made concerns the elimination of the “Tag Suggest” feature for EU users. “This feature has already been turned off for new users in the EU […] and templates for exis...

Iranian citizens are soon to have their online access restricted to their very own Internet in what the government calls an attempt to improve national cyber-security, reports Reuters. Iran said it will tighten its online security following the 2010 Stuxnet incident which saw the computer worm tamper with one of the country’s uranium enrichment facilities. "Control over the Internet should not be in the han...