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.
Technologies
Smartphone Users Tracked Even with GPS, WiFi Turned Off
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.
For YouTube Stars, Influencers: More Risk of Hacks after Octoly Breach
Octoly, the Paris-based agency for online “influencers” apologized following the leak of sensitive and personally identifying information on 12,000 clients. But clients were furious they were not informed by the company first and researchers warn that those exposed could face increased risks of both online and offline harm.
Episode 81: Hacking IoT with Physics, Poor Grades for Safety Wearables and Peak Ransomware
In this week’s podcast: researcher Kevin Fu of University of Michigan discusses his work on attacks that use physics to manipulate connected devices. Also: Mark Loveless of DUO discusses his research into how poor implementation of wireless protocols make personal security trackers a privacy risk. And have we seen peak ransomware? Adam Kujawa of the firm Malwarebytes joins us to talk about the findings of that company’s State of Malware Report.
Episode 79: Hackable Nukes and Dissecting Naughty Toys
In this week’s Security Ledger Podcast episode, the UK -based policy think tank Chatham House warned last week that aging nuclear weapons systems in the U.S., the U.K. and other nations are vulnerable to cyber attacks that could be used to start a global conflagration. We talk with Eddie Habbibi of PAS Global about what can be done to secure hackable nukes. Also: with CES raging in Las Vegas last week, we go deep with security researcher Jay Harris on flaws in connected toys being sold to children.