Your smart phone does double and triple duty: letting you do banking, buy a cup of coffee, board a plane or access a sensitive online account. But that doesn’t mean that your phone number is equally as trustworthy. In this Spotlight Podcast, we speak with Flashpoint* head of research Allison Nixon about how a recent rash of SIM swapping attacks highlights a looming crisis in online identity.
The FBI has mislead Congress and the public about the extent to which encrypted cellphones are hampering federal investigations by preventing authorities from accessing the devices–presumably to support the agency’s own agenda to gain backdoor access to them.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is asking the Library of Congress to give owners of voice assistant devices like Amazon’s Echo, Google Home and other voice assistants the right to “jailbreak” the devices: freeing them from content control features designed to prevent users from running unauthorized code on those platforms.
A team of researchers from Princeton has demonstrated that they can track the location of smartphone users even when location services like GPS and WiFi are turned off.
In-brief: organizations need to better understand mobile risks if they want to protect critical data, writes Aaron Cockerill of the firm Lookout.
