FYI - Facebook has been using contact information that users explicitly provided for security purposes—or that users never provided at all—for targeted advertising.

(and)
Facebook is also grabbing your contact information from your friends
This means that, even if you never directly handed a particular phone number over to Facebook, advertisers may nevertheless be able to associate it with your account based on your friends’ phone books

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/09/you-gave-facebook-your-number-security-they-used-it-ads

Data security - Boring idea but,data have become a new form and flow of currency. How much have we adapted to this idea?

Customer data, market data, intellectual property, resource consumption data, productivity data, and dozens of other categories are a new form and flow of currency in the data-driven enterprise. However, as data flow has achieved parity with cash flow, the CISO or the CSO has not achieved parity with the CFO.

• Rather than using application names or table or column names, group data at the lowest level into buckets like "high-sensitivity personally identifiable information" or "customer payment information."
• 
  
• Too often companies focus on the relationship between users and application access. This is important, but it doesn't take into account which applications have access to what data, and therefore ignores the direct relationship between users and data
• 
  
• Through new technologies like blockchain, data flows can be recorded directly as they happen, making the resulting audit trail immutable and virtually impossible for the record to be manipulated.

https://www.darkreading.com/analytics/managing-data-the-way-we-manage-money/a/d-id/1332896

If you are using KODI media player then you should know that it could be used as a malware distribution platform for cybercriminals.

Researchers from ESET said that malware can spread through Kodi in three different ways. 

1. They could add the URL of a malicious repository to their Kodi installation, which would download add-ons whenever they update their Kodi installations 
2. They could install a ready-made Kodi build that includes the URL of a malicious repository. 
3. Users could install a ready-made Kodi build that contains a malicious add-on but no link to a repository for updates.

“Cybercriminals are increasingly abusing add-ons and scripting functionalities in response to the tightening of security measures for operating systems

The top five countries affected by the threat, according to ESET’s telemetry, are the United States, Israel, Greece, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.

https://threatpost.com/cybercriminals-target-kodi-media-player-for-malware-distribution/137670/

Say "NO" to Free VPN because organizations are intentionally setting them up as a way to gather user data.

While many VPN service providers would want you to believe that they have charitable aims in offering VPN access for free, the reality is that most free VPN services are glorified data farms.

Hotspot Shield, in particular, is a major culprit.
Hotspot Shield hijacks and redirects user traffic from top e-commerce websites to that of its affiliate partners and also uses more than five different third-party tracking libraries to enable it serve targeted ads to its users

Very few of the users know that Hotspot Shield intentionally allows third parties to gather data from users of their VPN service.

Here’s it straight from their privacy policy page: “Our ad partners may also receive information independently from you or your device.” Data Hotspot Shield’s “ad partners” are allowed to gather may include your device’s advertising ID, IMEI, MAC address, and wireless carrier information

HOLA - A team of researchers even set up a website to expose some of the flaws in Hola — including serving as an exit node and allowing code to be executed on computers using the Hola software

Betternet - Does this by allowing its advertisers the kind of access that makes it possible for them to gather data from devices of their users



VPN services have been set up solely for the purpose of acquiring and trading with user data. How else would you explain the fact that a big data company, Talking Data, is behind some of the popular VPN apps in the Google Play store including GO VPN and Eagle VPN 

Those who do not gather these data directly give advertisers freewill to do it in order to deflect responsibility, but that is much worse. Even worse, some of the data gathered are transmitted over insecure data connections, compromising user privacy


https://www.hackread.com/almost-every-major-free-vpn-service-is-a-glorified-data-farm/

How to freeze your (more importantly, you children's) credit for free (in USA)

Everything you need in a single BLOG

Get it here:
https://www.techsupportalert.com/content/how-freeze-your-credit-free.htm

Can you rely on video surveillance recording if it could be remotely tampered by a Hacker?

Hundreds of thousands of security cameras are believed to be vulnerable (dubbed "PeekaBoo") to a zero-day vulnerability that could allow hackers to spy on feeds and even tamper with video surveillance recordings.



The vulnerability, dubbed “Peekaboo”, exists in NUUO’s Network Video Recorder software and aside from allowing remote hackers to snoop on and even alter CCTV footage, can even be abused to steal data such as credentials for all connected security cameras, IP addresses, and other data related to the devices.

First, NUUO is a leading member of the video surveillance industry.
According to some estimates there might be anything between 180,000 and 800,000 CCTV cameras in public usage that are vulnerable to “Peekaboo”

Secondly, hackers could exploit the root access they gain on vulnerable devices to disconnect live video feeds, or even tamper with security footage.

The good news is that NUUO is believed to be working on a patch. The bad news is that each camera is likely to need to be updated manually once a patch is made available.

https://www.bitdefender.com/box/blog/iot-news/peekaboo-zero-day-lets-hackers-view-alter-surveillance-camera-footage/

Welcome to the new generation of All-In-One Malware "XBash" which includes Ransomware,Bot and a worm.

It can infect both Linux and Windows. It deletes databases and creates ‘PLEASE_READ_ME_XYZ.’ .

As usual we have two choices,we can buy an expensive gadget  that has an flashy dashboard or you could simply patch your systems.

Readers are instructed to deposit 0.02 bitcoin to the address mentioned by the attacker to recover the lost data otherwise the contents will be leaked on the internet. But this is a false promise because the data simply cannot be recovered by the malware



https://www.hackread.com/linux-windows-disk-wiper-ransomware-cryptomining-xbash-malware/