Security, Spoken

In March 2017, the Android security team was feeling pleased with itself. The group had detected, analyzed, and neutralized a sophisticated botnet built on tainted apps that all worked together to power ad and SMS fraud. Dubbed "Chamois," the malware family had already cropped up in 2016, and was being distributed both through Google Play and third-party app stores. So the Android team started aggressively flagging and helping to uninstall Chamois until they were sure it was dead.

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Tech news you can use, in two minutes or less: Hackers found their way into Apple's ecosystem, and possibly your phone Cyber criminals have been directing users to download something called Exodus, an app that was actually malware. It allowed access to photos, videos, device IDs, audio recordings, and contacts, potentially tracking a victim's location and listening to their conversations through the microphone.

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What a week for Facebook. The news blitz began over the weekend, as the company responded to multiple recent controversies, from livestreaming to disappearing blog posts. Then on Wednesday, security researchers at UpGuard found that two different third-party apps left more than 540 million Facebook records unprotected in the cloud. On Friday, we reported that Facebook had been letting cybercrime groups operate in plain sight. It never ends.

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Years into the robocalling frenzy, your phone probably still rings off the hook with "important information about your account," updates from the "Chinese embassy," and every bogus sweepstakes offer imaginable. That's despite promises from the telecom industry and the US government that solutions would be coming. Much like the firehose of spam that made email almost unusable in the late 1990s, robocalls have made people in the US wary of picking up their cell phones and landlines.

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Facebook's failure to moderate bad behavior on the sprawling online world it created, from political trolls to extremist content to livestreamed acts of horrific violence, has received a torrent of criticism. But one group of researchers found that the social media giant is also failing to police a far more basic and decades-old internet problem among its users: plain old cybercrime.

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“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” the adage goes. But for the sunset of Patriot Act authorities later this year—including Section 215, a controversial provision that allows the National Security Agency to collect records, including those about Americans’ phone calls—the more applicable phrase may be “If it keeps breaking, throw it out.

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On Saturday afternoon, Yujing Zhang arrived at Mar-a-Lago and approached a Secret Service agent, seeking entry. She explained, according to court documents, that she was there to use the pool. What happened next illustrates just how hard it is to secure President Trump’s home away from the White House, and it joins a steadily growing number of concerning incidents.

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Tech news you can use, in two minutes or less: Facebook exposed your personal information ... again Researchers discovered hundreds of millions of Facebook users' data was left unprotected once again, this time on Amazon's servers. The information exposed was stuff like names, passwords, comments, interests, and likes. The tl;dr: Facebook doesn't seem to have much control over what third parties do with your data, basically ever, so you might want to lock down those privacy settings.

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Researchers at the cybersecurity firm Upguard have discovered two troves of unprotected Facebook user data sitting on Amazon’s servers, exposing hundreds of millions of records about users, including their names, passwords, comments, interests, and likes. The datasets had been uploaded to Amazon’s cloud system by two different Facebook app developers.

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In December, Mastercard announced that it was working to develop an international digital identity scheme which could be used as a flexible verifier for financial transactions, government interactions, or online services. The idea of a secure, decentralized, universal ID has become a sort of holy grail in the age of rapid digital interactions and rampant identity fraud. Mastercard's initial announcement was met with some skepticism from privacy-minded observers.

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