Mobile

FTC Settles With Flashlight App Maker Over Geotracking

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced on Thursday that it settled with the maker of a popular Android mobile flashlight application over charges that the company used deceptive advertising to collect location and device information from Android owners. The FTC announced the settlement with Goldenshores Technologies, LLC of Moscow, Indiana, makers of the “Brightest Flashlight Free” Android application, saying that the company failed to disclose wanton harvesting and sharing of  customers’ location and mobile device identity with third parties. Brightest Flashlight Free is a top download from Google Play, the main Android marketplace. Statistics from the site indicate that it has been downloaded more than one million times with an overall rating of 4.8 out of 5 stars. The application, which is available for free, displays mobile advertisements on the devices that it is installed on. However, the device also harvested a wide range of data from Android phones which […]

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ThingWorx Says IoT Marketplace Will Speed Adoption

ThingWorx, the ‘platform as a service’ (PaaS) vendor, has made empowering the Internet of Things (or Internet of Everything) its rallying cry. Now the company says it is the first to market with an IoT “marketplace” that it claims will speed development of smart, connected products. The company announced ThingWorx Marketplace at Salesforce.com’s “Dreamforce” event in San Francisco on Monday. The new platform will allow ThingWorx and third party firms to offer “components and services” that are needed to build full-featured IoT applications. Those may be things like new kinds of sensors, widgets, device connectors, protocol adapters, hooks into device clouds or integrations with enterprise management platforms, according to a ThingWorx statement. The platform will be accessible by ThingWorx partners, independent hardware and software vendors, and third party developers, the company said.  Enterprises will be able to deploy private instances of the Marketplace to host internally developed applications, application templates, analytics, […]

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Hack Uses Phone’s Camera and Mic To Best Anti-Keylogger

Smart phones these days are bristling with sensors. Forget about the camera and microphone – there are accelerometers, Global Positioning System components, not to mention Bluetooth and NFC transmitters. All those remote sensors enable all kinds of cool features – from finding the nearest Starbucks to mobile payments. But they also pose a risk to the privacy of the phone’s owner – as malicious actors (and the occasional national government) look for ways to turn cameras and other sensors into powerful, cheap and convenient spying tools. Now researchers at The University of Cambridge have demonstrated one possible, new attack type: harnessing the built-in video camera and microphone on Android devices to spy on an owner’s movements and guess his or her password. The technique could be a way for cyber criminals to defeat anti-keylogging technology like secure “soft” keyboards used to enter banking PINs and other sensitive information. The work […]

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Gartner: Traditional IT Security Dead By End of Decade?

The analyst firm Gartner Inc. prides itself on its ability to identify emerging technology trends and talking up what’s next before it has even happened. The firm’s Hype Cycle maps the familiar path from promising new technology to ‘hot technology buzz word du jour,’ and (maybe) on to useful, less buzzy technology that’s actually being used. More important: the Gartner Magic Quadrant rates  technology companies (and their products) according to a set of criteria that includes how forward-looking (or “visionary”) the company is. Given the sway Gartner’s ratings have in companies’ willingness to invest in products, it’s a foregone conclusion that companies Gartner picks to ‘do well’ end up…umm…doing well. Gartner has an interest in finding the next big thing in every market – but also of preserving as much of the status quo as possible. (All those quadrants generate some serious cash!!) So I was interested to read about […]

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Exclusive: Apple Store Favorite IZON Cameras Riddled With Security Holes

It’s another day, another face-palm moment for the home surveillance camera industry. Just one month after the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) settled a complaint with the maker of SecurView, a line of poorly secured home surveillance cameras, a researcher at the firm Duo Security has found a slew of even more serious security holes in the IZON Camera – a popular product that is sold in Apple Stores and Best Buy, among others. A review by The Security Ledger found dozens of such systems accessible via the public Internet, in some cases allowing anyone to peer into the interiors of private residences and businesses. Mark Stanislav, the Security Evangelist at the firm Duo Security, presented the details of a security audit of the IZON camera at a security conference in New York on Tuesday. Stanislav documented troubling security lapses including a wide-open configuration with exposed ports for accessing the device […]

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