Tag Archives: privacy

That groan you hear is users’ reaction to Recall going back into Windows

Security and privacy advocates are girding themselves for another uphill battle against Recall, the AI tool rolling out in Windows 11 that will screenshot, index, and store everything a user does every three seconds. When Recall was first introduced in May 2024, security practitioners roundly castigated it for creating a gold mine for malicious insiders,… Read More »

DeepSeek iOS app sends data unencrypted to ByteDance-controlled servers

Thomas Reed, staff product manager for Mac endpoint detection and response at security firm Huntress, and an expert in iOS security, said he found NowSecure’s findings concerning. “ATS being disabled is generally a bad idea,” he wrote in an online interview. “That essentially allows the app to communicate via insecure protocols, like HTTP. Apple does… Read More »

Time to check if you ran any of these 33 malicious Chrome extensions

Screenshot showing the phishing email sent to Cyberhaven extension developers. Credit: Amit Assaraf A link in the email led to a Google consent screen requesting access permission for an OAuth application named Privacy Policy Extension. A Cyberhaven developer granted the permission and, in the process, unknowingly gave the attacker the ability to upload new versions… Read More »

Neo-Nazis head to encrypted SimpleX Chat app, bail on Telegram

“SimpleX, at its core, is designed to be truly distributed with no central server. This allows for enormous scalability at low cost, and also makes it virtually impossible to snoop on the network graph,” Poberezkin wrote in a company blog post published in 2022. SimpleX’s policies expressly prohibit “sending illegal communications” and outline how SimpleX… Read More »

Meta pays the price for storing hundreds of millions of passwords in plaintext

Getty Images reader comments 90 Officials in Ireland have fined Meta $101 million for storing hundreds of millions of user passwords in plaintext and making them broadly available to company employees. Meta disclosed the lapse in early 2019. The company said that apps for connecting to various Meta-owned social networks had logged user passwords in… Read More »

Tails OS joins forces with Tor Project in merger

The Tor Project reader comments 27 The Tor Project, the nonprofit that maintains software for the Tor anonymity network, is joining forces with Tails, the maker of a portable operating system that uses Tor. Both organizations seek to pool resources, lower overhead, and collaborate more closely on their mission of online anonymity. Tails and the… Read More »

Hacker plants false memories in ChatGPT to steal user data in perpetuity

Getty Images reader comments 37 When security researcher Johann Rehberger recently reported a vulnerability in ChatGPT that allowed attackers to store false information and malicious instructions in a user’s long-term memory settings, OpenAI summarily closed the inquiry, labeling the flaw a safety issue, not, technically speaking, a security concern. So Rehberger did what all good… Read More »

Proton is taking its privacy-first apps to a nonprofit foundation model

Getty Images reader comments 53 Proton, the secure-minded email and productivity suite, is becoming a nonprofit foundation, but it doesn’t want you to think about it in the way you think about other notable privacy and web foundations. “We believe that if we want to bring about large-scale change, Proton can’t be billionaire-subsidized (like Signal),… Read More »

Hackers can read private AI assistant chats even though they’re encrypted

Aurich Lawson | Getty Images reader comments 22 AI assistants have been widely available for a little more than a year, and they already have access to our most private thoughts and business secrets. People ask them about becoming pregnant or terminating or preventing pregnancy, consult them when considering a divorce, seek information about drug… Read More »