 Google recently generated a flurry of coverage about its supposed privacy pivot, including an op-ed in The New York Times by chief executive Sundar Pichai. “We feel privileged that billions of people trust products like Search, Chrome, Maps, and Android to help them every day,” Pichai wrote. It’s not that we necessarily trust Google. It’s that, as a near monopoly, we have no choice. In fact, the crisis of trust — after a year of data breaches and congressional appearances — has led all the major tech companies to launch public relations campaigns around privacy. This is a smokescreen to satisfy regulators and pacify consumers while continuing their data exploitation activities. While some of the changes they have made are positive, they have no intention to give up their lucrative business model of ads powered by surveillance, which is fundamentally at odds with privacy. There was a time when we had meaningful privacy on the Internet. In the early days, dot-com barons weren’t interested in surveillance and data mining. The business model was subscriptions, led by companies like America Online, which dominated the space. As more users moved away from proprietary portals like America Online toward the open Internet, browsers and search replaced subscriber services as the gateway to the web. Clicks and user data seeded the beginnings of what is now called surveillance capitalism. By the end of the decade, a science project at Stanford was on pace to supplant “search” as a verb. Ironically, Google is an ad-funded doppelganger of the subscriber services it replaced. Instead of charging users for access, it simply spies on their online activity, location history, and behaviors to give advertisers (their true customers) unprecedented power to manipulate consumer behavior. For more navigate to OUR FORUM. An extortion scam is being distributed that claims a Remote Access Trojan, or RAT, was installed on your computer using the EternalBlue exploit. The scammers then go on to say that they used the RAT to take videos of you on adult web sites and that you must pay a ransom or they will send it to all of your contacts. EternalBlue is an exploit allegedly created by the NSA that targets a vulnerability in the SMBv1 protocol. This vulnerability allows attackers to execute commands on a vulnerable computer that can be used to install malware. The extortion emails being distributed have a subject of "Security Alert. Your account was compromised. Password must be changed" and spins a tale that while visiting a porn site, the EternalBlue exploit was triggered to install a Remote Access Trojan on your computer. This Trojan was then allegedly used to take videos of you, steal your contacts, and your passwords. It goes on to say if you do not pay a $600 extortion demand, the attacker will send your video to all of your contacts. The reality is that this is just a scam and the senders have not utilized any exploits on your computer, there is no RAT installed, and there are no videos of you while using an adult web site. Any passwords or email addresses listed in the email are simply from data breaches where your account info was publicly disclosed. While you now know this is a scam, unfortunately not everyone else does and some people actually pay the extortion demand. Visit OUR FORUM for more.  An Android horror game with over 50,000 installs was found to exhibit malicious behavior, stealing the gamers' Google and Facebook credentials, and siphoning their data after logging into their accounts. The game is called Scary Granny ZOMBYE Mod: The Horror Game 2019 (Scary Granny) and it is designed to bank on the success of another Android game dubbed Granny that currently has over 100 million installs. While Scary Granny is a fully functional game which would actually keep gamers playing it to avoid any suspicion and raising any red flags, it was removed on June 27 from Google's Play Store after the researchers who unearthed its phishing and data siphoning abilities reported it to Google. To hide its actual "horror" side, the game would delay exhibiting any malicious activity for up to two days after being installed as Wandera's research team discovered. The app would also only turn on its data-stealing modules only if it was being used on older Android versions, with users of newer devices running up to date operating systems not being impacted. When being installed, the Scary Granny game gains persistence on the devices by asking for permissions to launch itself after the smartphone or tablet is restarted. This allows it to show full-screen phishing overlays even after the Android users reboot their devices, by first displaying "a notification telling the user to update Google security services. When the user hits ‘update’, a fake Google login page is presented, which is very convincing other than the fact ‘sign in’ is spelled incorrectly." Learn more by visiting OUR FORUM. |
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