If You Have a Comcast Xfinity Router, You Need to Install a VPN (Now)
If you lease an Xfinity router from internet service provider (ISP) Comcast, you need to install a VPN as soon as possible. According to security researchers Karan Saini and Ryan…
Cybersecurity
Your Cell Phone Carrier Is Selling Your Real-Time Location Data to Third Parties
All major cell phone carriers collect and sell their customers’ real-time location data to third-party advertisers, information disclosed in a recent court case has revealed. Krebs On Security even discovered…
Crypto backdoors are in the news again, and as bad for privacy as ever
VPNs are an indispensable part of online life, and they protect many aspects of privacy. But there's a class of threats that VPNs can't defend against: crypto backdoors, which allow…
Another day, another breach: At what point does storing passwords in plaintext become criminally negligent?
The third largest breach ever in Finland happened yesterday. Passwords were stored in plaintext. At T-Mobile Austria, they explain that of course they store the password in plaintext, but they…
Researchers detail new 4G LTE vulnerabilities allowing spoofing, tracking, and spamming
4G LTE isn't nearly as secure or private as you think it is. Mobile privacy and security are both at risk. Researchers from Purdue University and the University of Iowa…
Swedish Police website hacked to mine cryptocurrency
One of the sites hijacked to mine cryptocurrency in the recent script-replacement hack was the website of the Swedish Police Force. This merits a more discussion; a lot more. As…
The real Strava heatmap story is no threats to national security, but about privacy and de-anonymization
At the end of January, Nathan Ruser posted a tweet about Strava, a Website and mobile app used to track athletic activity via GPS coordinates. It concerned Strava's global heatmap:…
The latest threat to your online privacy: exfiltration of personal data by website session-replay scripts
Last week, Privacy News Online reported on a worrying trend of increased surveillance in the workplace. This kind of spying includes capturing every keystroke workers make. The practice is regarded…
Two ways to help preserve privacy in an age of massive leaks and deep hacks
We live in the golden age of leaks. That's not to say that leaks didn't happen before. But the move to digital data and the availability of high-speed Internet connections…
Welcome to the brave new world of workplace surveillance
Here on Privacy News Online, we write a lot about government surveillance and its impact on privacy. Sadly, constant spying has been normalized to such an extent that workplace surveillance…