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Amazon Alexa Recordings, Facebook Malware Campaign, Top 3 Tips to Stay Private on Vacation
This is your Shared Security Weekly Blaze for July 8th 2019 with your host, Tom Eston. In this week’s episode: Amazon confirms that Alexa recordings are kept forever, details about one of the largest Facebook malware campaigns, and my top three tips for staying private on vacation.
Summer is upon us and that means it’s time for some much needed vacation time with friends and family. Summer also means that you need to be aware of data privacy and how to protect your laptops, smartphones and key fobs while traveling. Airports, concert venues, festivals, beaches, and other public areas can often be targeted by attackers looking to gain access to your devices through their wireless signals. Instead of worrying about disabling or turning off wireless functions on these devices it’s so much easier to place them in a Faraday bag when they’re not being used. And if you want the best protection you can get; you want to be using Silent Pocket’s premium faraday bag product line that blocks all wireless signals keeping your devices secure from attackers. This summer, get your devices the protection they require before you head out on your vacation. Use discount code “sharedsecurity” and receive 15% off your order during checkout right now at silentpocket.com.
In this week’s surprising but not so surprising news, Amazon has confirmed that Alexa voice recordings are kept by Amazon forever unless you manually delete each one. Apparently this revelation was noted in a letter from Amazon to US Senator Chris Coons who had asked Amazon about their data handling and privacy practices around Alexa recordings. Amazon stated that they keep transcripts and voice recordings indefinitely, and only removes them if they’re manually deleted by users. The letter went on to say that even if people manually delete their recordings some records and conversations may still remain on Amazon storage systems. Amazon is apparently conducting an ongoing effort to ensure deleted recordings are removed from various internal systems.
Amazon and other tech companies have been under increasing pressure to take the privacy of user data more seriously due to the EU’s enforcement of GDPR and the fact that all of this new technology seems to always increase the demand for more and more of our private data. So will this latest revelation make you think twice before talking to Alexa? I think manually deleting each individual recording is a very poor solution and hopefully they take the approach of changing the retention policy on this data or allowing users to delete everything with one single action. But until that day comes (if it ever does) Amazon is going to hold our data indefinitely.
Malware distribution has always been a problem on Facebook and this goes way back to the beginnings of the social network. In this most recent example, a malware campaign called “Operation Tripoli” was found that targeted tens of thousands of users in Libya but also had the side effect of impacting users in North America. The most interesting aspect of this particular campaign was that it was started by someone creating a Facebook page impersonating Khalifa Haftar who is the commander of the Libyan National Army. This Facebook page had over 11,000 followers and had links to various types of propaganda that when clicked on, let to the download of various remote access trojans and other spyware. According to researchers from Check Point Software who discovered this campaign, this looks to be the largest seen by the researchers. In fact, this particular campaign may have started all the way back in 2014 and the individual behind this
Published on 6 years, 5 months ago