Google is planning to overhaul its main privacy policy in an effort to make the document more readable and usable for normal people. In addition, Google also is eliminating privacy policies for some of its individual products and services, which it deemed redundant.
This advice can be extended to general online activity, not just social
networks, and most importantly, not just Twitter. You should care at
least as much for the security of your e-mail account, especially if it
was used to register your Twitter or Facebook accounts. Basically, a
compromised email account opens op new ways for the bad guys to get into
your other accounts: the password reset function usually sends a link
to your email address for confirmation.
The heyday of faxing may have passed twenty years ago, but scam artists haven’t given up on the old technology, especially when it comes to wheedling personally identifiable information out of unsuspecting office workers. Now a leading anti-phishing group is tackling the problem of fax based phishing scams.
Join Dennis Fisher, Ryan Naraine and their special guests, Oliver Day, Andy Ellis, and Robert Hansen as they take a look at the rising sophistication of real-world, web-based cyber attacks from the offensive, defensive and end-user perspective.
A former senior database administrator for GEXA Energy in Houston was
sentenced to 12 months in prison for hacking into his former employer’s
computer network. Read the full article. [Help Net Security]
A Bank of America call center employee has pleaded guilty to charges
that he stole sensitive client information and then tried to sell it for
cash. Read the full article. [IDG News Service]
Scammers and phishers are continuing to adapt their recruitment tactics, now going so far as to create special Facebook groups for their work-at-home scams.
The current raft of stories about privacy problems on Facebook and other high-profile sites is leading to a renewed consideration in some circles of whether there’s a need for tighter government regulation of sites’ privacy policies and user notifications. Regulation, experts say, may be the only real way to force sites to respect users’ privacy.
One of the more trite and oft-repeated maxims in the software industry goes something like this: We’re not focusing on security because our customers aren’t asking for it. They want features and functionality. When they ask for security, then we’ll worry about it. Not only is this philosophy doomed to failure, it’s now being repeated in the realm of privacy, with potentially disastrous effects.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin says the company “screwed up” when it
equipped its world-roving Street View cars with software code that spent
three years capturing personal data from open Wi-Fi networks.
“Let me just say: We screwed up,” Brin told a room full of reporters
this afternoon at the company’s annual developer conference in San
Francisco. “I’m not going to make excuses about this.” Read the full article. [The Register]
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