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Facebook’s Bad Week, Stalkerware, Tax Season Scams
This is your Shared Security Weekly Blaze for April 8th 2019 with your host, Tom Eston. In this week’s episode: Facebook’s very bad week, Stalkerware on the rise, and tax season scams.
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Hi everyone, welcome to the Shared Security Weekly Blaze where we update you on the top 3 cybersecurity and privacy topics from the week. These podcasts are published every Monday and are 15 minutes or less quickly giving you “news that you can use”.
I know you’ll be shocked to hear this but Facebook had yet another painful week of data breaches and controversy. First was the announcement that over 540 million Facebook user records and associated data was found unsecured on two Amazon AWS servers discovered earlier in the year by cybersecurity firm, UpGuard. The first server, belonging to a company called Cultura Colectiva, which is a Mexico based media platform, had the majority of the exposed data containing usernames, Facebook IDs, comments, likes, and other data that may have been used for social media analytics. The second server had data from a Facebook game called “At the Pool” which had details such as Facebook ID, friends list, likes, photos, groups, checkins, user interests, and of course 22,000 passwords. The passwords were apparently only for the game account and not the Facebook login, however, we all know that most people reuse passwords across the same sites and services that they use. Both servers are now locked down after quite the ordeal noted by UpGuard in their incident report which we’ll have linked in our show notes. This particular breach shows one of the many problems that Facebook has had with all the data that third-party app developers have been collecting over the years. Just like the Cambridge Analytica scandal, it’s nearly impossible for Facebook to oversee and regulate the security of user data that leaves the Facebook Platform.
The second Facebook story that made the news last week was how Facebook is asking some new users to provide the password to their email account. Apparently, if you happen to use an email account from some email service providers like Yandex and GMX, you’ll be prompted to enter your email account password to confirm your email address. Once you do that, a pop-up appears stating that Facebook is importing your email contacts without any authorization by the user to do so. According to the report from Business Insider, Facebook stated that this “feature” is being discontinued but in the meantime, it’s set off groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation which said that this “feature” is indistinguishable to a phishing attack which will also ask you to enter in passwords to verify who you say you are.
According to anti-virus company Kaspersky over 58,000 Android users had “stalkerware” installed on their phones last year. 35,000 out of this number had no idea that they had stalkerware installed on their device until they installed Kaspersky’s mobile antivirus product.
Stalkerware or also known as spouseware or legal spyware, is sold by various companies under the guise of an easy way to monitor your child’s activities or tracking employee devic
Published on 6 years, 8 months ago