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Apple presents itself as a white knight on the subject of privacy, but critics say its own advertising ambitions are built on anti-competitive practices.  Two developers going by the name ‘Mysk’ claimed last month that Apple was tracking users’ every tap on the App Store, with no way of disabling the function.  A class action lawsuit was subsequently filed in California, claiming that Apple’s “promises regarding privacy are utterly false”.  The company has not commented…

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FBI Director Chris Wray is raising national security concerns about TikTok, warning Friday that control of the popular video sharing app is in the hands of a Chinese government “that doesn’t share our values.” Wray said the FBI was concerned that the Chinese had the ability to control the app’s recommendation algorithm, “which allows them to manipulate content, and if they want to, to use it for influence operations.” He also asserted that China could…

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New York City-based passwordless authentication solutions provider Hypr announced on Thursday that it has raised $25 million in a Series C1 funding round. The previous funding round, the Series C, was announced in April 2021, when the company raised $35 million. The latest investment, which brings the total to $97 million, was led by Advent International, with participation from .406 Ventures, RRE Ventures, Top Tier Capital, and Comcast Ventures. The money will be used to…

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Qualys’ Threat Research Unit has shown how a new Linux vulnerability could be chained with two other apparently harmless flaws to gain full root privileges on an affected system. The new vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2022-3328, is a race condition in Snapd, a Canonical-developed tool used for the Snap software packaging and deployment system. Specifically, the flaw impacts the ‘snap-confine’ program used by Snapd to construct the execution environment for Snap applications. The affected program is…

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The hackers leaking stolen Australian health records to the dark web on Thursday appeared to end their extortion attempt by dumping a final batch of data online and declaring:”Case closed.” In November the hackers demanded health insurer Medibank pay US$9.7 million to keep the records off the internet — or one dollar for each of the company’s impacted customers, which included Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. Medibank refused to pay at the urging of the federal…

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The Black Basta ransomware group has taken credit for the recently disclosed attack on Canadian meat giant Maple Leaf Foods. The cybercriminals have made public several screenshots of technical documents, financial information and other corporate files to demonstrate that they gained access to Maple Leaf Foods systems. Maple Leaf Foods announced in early November that it was experiencing an outage as a result of a cyberattack. The Mississauga, Ontario-based packaged meats company said it took…

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Southampton County in Virginia last week started informing individuals that their personal information might have been compromised in a ransomware attack. The incident was identified in September, when a threat actor accessed a server at Southampton and encrypted the data that was stored on it. The county says that it took steps to contain the attack immediately after identifying it, and that it launched an investigation into the incident, to determine the type of data…

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US authorities announced a ban Friday on the import or sale of communications equipment deemed “an unacceptable risk to national security” — including gear from Chinese giants Huawei Technologies and ZTE. Both firms have been on a roster of companies listed as a threat by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and the new rules bar future authorizations of their equipment. The move is the latest in a series of actions to limit the access of…

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The European Parliament website was hit by a cyberattack claimed by pro-Russian hackers Wednesday shortly after lawmakers approved a resolution calling Moscow a “state sponsor of terrorism”. “The European Parliament is under a sophisticated cyberattack. A pro-Kremlin group has claimed responsibility,” the parliament’s president, Roberta Metsola, posted on Twitter.  “Our IT experts are pushing back against it and protecting our systems. This, after we proclaimed Russia as a State-sponsor of terrorism. My response: #SlavaUkraini (Glory…

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