data

Nearly 30 Android and Roku apps hijacked phones to defraud advertisers. Although users never saw the ads, they may have noticed increased data use and slowed performance. The scammers used the apps distributed in the official Google Play store to ... build up a network of almost a million compromised Android devices. The "PARETO" botnet then used the phones to issue bogus requests to advertisers while making the devices appear to be Smart TV sets. That was particularly appealing to advertisers because of the belief viewers are more likely to pay attention to an ad on a TV screen than on a phone. ... (view more)

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has urged the public to use its Internet speed testing app. As with Netflix's tool, it's not just for the benefit of users. The FCC Speed Test App, which works for both WiFi and mobile data connections, ... has the usual simple "one-tap" functionality of such tools. By default is measures upload and download speeds plus latency. That's a measure of how quickly data transmission starts, which can be important for services such as online gaming. (Source: theverge.com ) Speed Maps Boosted Users can also switch on settings to measure jitter and packet loss ... (view more)

A data leak has exposed the phone numbers of an estimated 500 million Facebook users. The data comes from a breach in 2019, but has just been made public. According to Facebook, the breach was "found and fixed" in 2019, which has raised some ... eyebrows given the company never warned users their details may have been compromised. It argues the data wasn't hacked but rather "scraped" from publicly accessible information through a bug in its feature that lets users find the Facebook accounts of people in their phone contacts. That may not be enough to satisfy data protection officials in several ... (view more)

Google believes it's found a way to replace privacy-breaching cookies while still letting advertisers find success. It's testing a way to effectively combine data from thousands of users to target ads. Cookies fall into two main types: first and ... third party. First-party cookies are generally uncontroversial as they simply identify a user on a website, including any previous activity such as website preferences. For example, a premium website could let somebody log in to an account and then use cookies so they don't have to log in again for a set period such as a week. Third-party cookies are ... (view more)

Ransomware infections used to be about forcing victims to pay to regain access to their files. Now it appears more and more scammers are treating it as an exercise in blackmail. A new cybersecurity report says 18 known ransomware gangs have switched ... their focus to threatening to publish stolen data unless the victim pays up. That's led to some businesses paying the ransom even though they had access to backups in order to restore their files. Traditionally ransomware has been about file encryptions. Scammers get access to a victim's computer or network through malware, then the infection " ... (view more)

World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee wants to rethink the way people control online data. He says his "pods" proposal would bring the online world closer to his original vision of the web. Berners-Lee has launched an open-source project and ... associated business to try to counter what he sees as the web's biggest problem: major companies collecting user data and exploiting it as a core part of their business. His new idea is "pods", or personal online data store. This would involve users having a space on a server that acted like a digital safe and contained a range of data. This could be ... (view more)

Google Chrome will now look for a secure version of a website first by default. It could mean a tiny delay accessing some sites, but should nudge more sites to increase security. The change to the browser involves how it handles cases where users ... simply type in the domain (such as infopackets.com) rather than the full website address (such as http://www.infopackets.com or https://www.infopackets.com ). The browser being able to convert one to the other makes it much quicker to type website addresses and allows browsers to use a single space for users to input both website addresses and search ... (view more)

If you lost all of the data on your PC, would you be devastated? According to a recent report, cyber crimes are booming thanks to the covid-19 pandemic . That's because cyber criminals are counting on the fact that most users are working remotely at ... home and/or retired, increasing their chances in converting a "sale". The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) said that in 2019, cyber criminals raked in $3.5 billion targeting individuals and businesses in the USA. Of that, $8.9 million was attributed to ransomware attacks, while scammers posing as fake technical support stole $54 ... (view more)

Microsoft is rewriting a "Productivity Score" feature that businesses could have used to monitor staff performance. The data will now be only available in aggregated form. The feature is designed for IT and network administrators in businesses that ... use Microsoft 365, the subscription version of what was once known as the Office suite. The idea is that the administrators can get a better idea of which features are being used most, which would show where IT administrators might need to focus support. Individual User Data Revealed The problem was that the feature showed these figures on an ... (view more)

Infopackets Reader Paula M. writes: " Dear Dennis, I own a small business that has 15 employees. We process upwards of 100 emails a day, many of which contain important contracts and attachments. We use MS Outlook 365 as our email client and ... OneDrive to share attachments between employees and devices (such as smartphones). The emails and documents are critical and I need a way to backup both Microsoft Outlook 365 emails and OneDrive files locally in case our workstations are compromised. Do you know of an Office 365 backup program that can backup Outlook as well as OneDrive? Much thanks! " My ... (view more)