The acting head of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said the agency was assessing the cyber risk of smart TVs sold by the Chinese electronics giant TCL, following reports that the devices may give the company “back door” access to deployed sets.
In this episode of the Security Ledger Podcast (#188), sponsored* by LastPass, we take a look at the fast-expanding world of crowdsourced surveillance by doing a deep dive on Flock Safety, a start up that sells inexpensive license plate scanners to homeowners and police departments. Also: users know that password security is important…but they can’t seem to change their insecure behavior. In our second segment, We talk about why with Katie Petrillo of LogMeIn and LastPass.
An Israeli firm has exploited a flaw in the popular messaging mobile app WhatsApp to plant spyware on iPhones and Android. One phone call is all it takes for software developed by the Israeli firm NSO Group to install itself on a vulnerable iPhone or Android device, according to a published report in the FT Times. The publication broke the news, saying it potentially affects 1.5 billion users of the Facebook-owned WhatsApp messaging application, on Monday. WhatsApp quickly issued a fix for the exploit, described in an alert on the Facebook website as “a buffer overflow vulnerability in WhatsApp VOIP stack” that allows for “remote code execution via specially crafted series of SRTCP packets sent to a target phone number.” “WhatsApp encourages people to upgrade to the latest version of our app, as well as keep their mobile operating system up to date, to protect against potential targeted exploits designed […]
Human rights organization Amnesty International reports it’s been the target of a spyware campaign traced to a secretive Israel cyber-surveillance company and distributed through the chat application WhatsApp.
China has developed a Big Brother-like system of surveillance and big-data technology to monitor and incriminate ethnic minorities by using their personal information to deem them government threats.
