Taranfx - Your Gateway To Technology » privacy

170M Downloadable Facebook Profiles, Privacy #FAIL

admin — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 16:15:59 +0000

If you are on facebook, and believe that its is a safe place to share your Personal stuff, take this: User data for 171 Million Facebook profiles has been leaked on to Torrents.

Facebook recently announced 500 Million users, of which 100 Million are leaked and are fully available, uncesored, unaltered for download on PirateBay. Every 3rd profile is available, and if these not so lucky users had most stuff in “info” tab open to Public, congratulations, its all in there.

Background:

A researcher, Ron Bowes, has compiled a list of more than 170 million Facebook users and the Web address of their profile page on the site and released it on a BitTorrent site, meaning it is making it accessible to millions of web users. Initially, he wrote a script to download all Facebook profiles listed in the social network’s public profile directory, which only includes people who have configured their settings for Public Search Listings to be .. Read Further »

Facebook bug lets Hackers delete User’s Friendlist

admin — Sat, 22 May 2010 20:25:18 +0000

Everyone is complaining about Facebook’s privacy negligence: The configuration to control privacy is hard for most users to adjust, as a result of which, most users are unaware of the privacy hit everytime the post on Facebook.

Forget privacy, a newly discovered Bug in Facebook lets hackers delete Victim’s Facebook friends, without permission.

The flaw was reported by Steven Abbagnaro, a student in New York. But as of Saturday morning, Eastern time, it had still not been patched, based on tests conducted by one of the security analyst.

The Facebook Hack

Combined with spam, or a self-copying worm, a hacker to create a havoc on the Facebook social network. The hack captures publicly available data from .. Read Further »

Google StreetView WiFi Privacy Lapse

admin — Sun, 16 May 2010 17:51:56 +0000

The amazing street mapping service from Google: “Street view” has ruled 1000s of other Map services by provding superior Street details. They capture street images using dedicated vehicles which also happened to capture basic WiFi info like Mac Address, SSID and Location, which actually helps them locating users without use of GPS.

Apart from capturing the said data, Google has “mistakenly” collected payload data from “open” (un-encrypted) WiFi networks as its Street View cars drove around taking pictures. Google humbly said that they never used any of that data, and company has decided to completely stop collecting WiFi data from its Street View cars.

The data which was mistakenly collected had almost everything users were doing over Open wifi .. Read Further »

Reverse Phone Lookup – Weapon of Choice for Unsolicited Calls

admin — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 14:24:29 +0000

Technology always gives you a double-edged sword. The one that lets you cut through the gates, and the other side can cut the holding hand. Similar the story of Traceability and the privacy.

The number of spamming, phishing have taken a new Horizon. Leaving the web aside, apart from spamming, Phishing is common on phones too. Consider this, you get a call from a correspondent who pretends to be from your bank and with little “intelligently faked” information about you, (say some kind of your recent activity), would be enough for you to trust the other party. In fact, in 95% of the cases, users would fall for it without bearing a doubt in mind.

Honestly telling, its really hard to tell when you are wrong. Its hard to figure out who is calling you and your family. The right thing to do is Reverse Number Lookup. To start with you can look for any of the .. Read Further »

Browser Fingerprinting: Privacy is a Myth

admin — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 15:22:19 +0000

If you thought cookies reveal alot about your identity over the internet, probably you need to rethink. A new type of tracking is now considered to be way more powerful, and yet you don’t have a clue about it.

The method grabs a large amount of data about your browser, such as plug-ins, system fonts, and your operating system, screen resolution, etc. Each one when considered alone, they don’t identify you. But when collaborated, they’re a digital fingerprint: A Digital replica of you identity on the web.

It’s like describing a person. Just saying “blonde hair” won’t identify anyone. But add in “5 feet, 11 inches tall,” “mole on left little finger”, “versace glasses,” and so on, and soon you have enough information to pull someone out of a crowd, even without their name, .. Read Further »

GMail now Warns for Simultaneous Logins

admin — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 17:18:57 +0000

How many time did you login to your email account publicly and feared if someone might keylog you? Of course prevention is way better then the aftermath but Gmail has taken the next steps in protecting your account from simultaneous logins, preventing suspicious activities.

Now, if it looks like something unusual is going on with your account, Gmail will alert you by posting a warning message saying, “Warning: We believe your account was last accessed from…” along with the geographic region, as illustrated below:

In order to make this possible, .. Read Further »

IE Flaw Makes local Files Public

admin — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 19:08:30 +0000

The end of Internet Explorer is finally here. Series of events: Google Hacking, removal of support for Google apps, several other vulnerabilities are forcing users to move to alternates.

Recently, at Black Hat DC conference, a security consultant (Jorge Luis Alvarez Medina) demoed how it’s possible to exploit a flaw in Internet Explorer browser that turns your personal computer into a public file server. In other words, attacker can remotely read files on the victim’s local drive.

There are a few ways to initiate the attack, which is somewhat complex because you have to “string alot of the features together to build an attack tool,” Medina said. One method involves enticing the victim to click a link to a malicious Web site.

.. Read Further »

SpyPhone App Steals Personal Data from ALL iPhones

admin — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 13:29:47 +0000

Who was that someone shouting loud that only Jailbreaking makes iPhone insecure? We now have a new App that makes even an UnModified/Virgin iPhone leak personal data like you have never seen before.

A Swiss iPhone developer has unveiled a new application that is capable of harvesting huge amounts of personal data from iPhones, including geolocation data, passwords, address book entries and email accounts information, images, Safari Browsing history, youtube, keyboard logger, etc. all this using just the public API exposed by Apple’s SDK.

In oder for this application, SpyPhone, to work, it does not need any exploits or any jailbreaking/firmware modification, attacks in order to access the iPhone’s data. Instead, SpyPhone relies on using the iPhone’s .. Read Further »

Facebook Revamps Privacy

admin — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 18:02:54 +0000

With over 350 Million users on Facebook and adding severall 100,000s everyday, the world had been truly holding their privacy at Facebook’s stake.

Often, Facebook `s apps been known for their scam activity. For those who don’t know, the most popular game FarmVille is nothing but ScamVille, and KoobFace is one worm that almost infected millions.

Everything that you now do on Facebook is configurable. Users can now designate content they post as being viewable to just friends, or friends of their friends, or everyone. Earlier, this wasn’t the case. For instance, Images posted on Walls are viewable by friends of friends providedone of the common friend comments on it.

The realization came after lots of allegations that stand against the Facebook:

.. Read Further »

Google DashBoard: Take Control over User-Privacy

admin — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:17:25 +0000

Google is God, and that is the reason why we fear it. It knows everything we do, monitors our email, contacts, IM, friends, search, web behavior, like n dislikes and what not. Earlier, like million others, we raised concerns over Googple Apps and Privacy, can we trust Google?

Finally, Google has taken a wise decision to counter the concern. The step is to comply with Data Liberation Front.

Starting Today, Google will give you the power to manage the Data that is exposed to Google. The user control comes through “Dashboard,” a tool for giving users of its services an all-in-one view of their personal information tied to the various Google services they use.

Dashboard lets users see info about their Web, email usage and .. Read Further »

Google Earth gets Augmented Animated Realtime activity: Will hurt Privacy in Future

admin — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 18:46:23 +0000

Since a while, Google has been monitoring People activity and traffic behavior in the most popular regions around the Globe. The purpose: to make a virtual replica of the real world.

Back in the days, it needed a undercover agent to spy on one person, Today all you need is Google Earth to do it on whole community. Using motion capture data the Google Earth has succeeded in mapping and animating the real time movements of cars, people and clouds. proper version the application is coming up next month. By that time, they are expected to add weather patterns, birds and river motions to that list.

Georgia Institute of Technology’s students are collaborating with Google to integrate all this in Google Earth. For this, they are using CCTV video to map actual vehicles and people. This is Scary.

The good thing at this moment is all the data displayed is anonymous, which makes it legal technology. What you get to see is the amazing stuff : watch a football .. Read Further »

Vulnerabilities in HTML 5 and Future

admin — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 09:34:46 +0000

HTML 5 comes with alot of promise for the web. It has lot of new features that could make Web Browsers and Apps much more powerful than they ever were.

Let’s go by an example. Try accessing Gmail on iPhone or Android phone, you will have notice some differences from what it used to be a month ago. The new thing worth noticing is the introduction of the offline access.

Gmail went down, offline in September, but credits to Gears, Gmail was still up and running with select Browsers. On the other side, iPhone Safari doesn’t have a Gears plugin, so how was it still running?

The answer lies with the HTML 5 standard, more .. Read Further »

Build Motion Sensor Security using Laptop

admin — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 22:22:38 +0000

Security and privacy is important. But most gadgets available int he market let you achieve this at couples of hundreds of Dollars. Not every one can afford it.
So here is a DIY Tutorial which doesn’t even need any special hardware.
Most notebooks come with WebCams or most people have it separately plugged-in via USB. If you don’t have it, not a big deal, they cost around $10-40.

We will use a free software accompanying your cam that will together make a Fool Proof motion detection system.

Highlight cam is a free software you can register online and start monitoring immediately and make your PC a security system and act as a silent security guard for your office, Home or any other space.

Features:

* Motion alert notifications sent via Email
* Off-site backup in case the intruder takes the computer

How to Setup:

It’s damn easy. Follow the link and Register and plugin your camera and then you’ll be asked to take a still recording of your .. Read Further »

iPhone Privacy – Is your iPhone Spying on you? How to Fix it

admin — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 19:35:25 +0000

Recently, there had been privacy concerns over Palm Pre. Palm Pre secretly stored user activity and data which can be pulled by the service provider or a potential hacker.

Joey Hess discovered the Pre’s smartphone OS was sending users’ GPS locations back to Palm on a daily basis. According to Joey “ I’ve been taking a closer look at the WebOS side of my Palm Pre tonight, and I noticed that it periodically uploads information to Palm, Inc. The first thing sent is intended to be my GPS location. It’s the same location I get if I open the map app on the Pre. Not very accurate in this case, but I’ve seen it be accurate enough to find my house before. “ Yeah, it’s allowed by the EULA that you must accept to use the Palm Pre. In case of Apple EULA they don’t forces you to accept such kind of agreements. But some analytics services like Pinch Media tracks many of your information and you don’t even knows about that.

But what about iPhone? Does it also store your activity?

Yes it does.

Saurik, lead developer of .. Read Further »

Biggest Identity Theft EVER – 130 Million Credit Card Numbers Stolen

admin — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 15:34:59 +0000

How big can a theft be? 100s of credit card no.s and total amount of millions? Wrong. Today, this theft is much bigger than any one has ever seen. 130 Million Credit card numbers, a total theft that when mis-used can lead to multi-billion theft.

A Miami based person and two Russian guys are being indicted to be guilty for stealing 130 million credit card numbers, the largest identity theft in history. That’s alot — like, one for every housing unit in the United States. How did they do it?

The theft had been living over years of work. This historic theft involved five corporate data hackings, between 2006 and 2008, including Heartland, Hannaford, 7-Eleven and two unnamed companies, according to Channel Web. US investigators say the team scanned lists of Fortune 500 companies and learned about their checkout counter machines (also known as point-of-sale (POS) systems).

Then to take the hack further, they wrote specific codes to corrupt their data systems and launch a virus from computers in the United States and Europe to pull hundreds and thousands of credit card .. Read Further »

Cloud Security still the Biggest Concern/Hurdle for Google, Microsoft, Verizon.

admin — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 19:28:54 +0000

Cloud has brought us unlimited and unmatched processing power that we could never think of a decade ago.

Earlier, I wrote how cloud computing was actually a Dark (Cloud) Knight. And the joker was successful in showing the Gotham that even the best among us could fall. This finds a corollary in the cloud computing world.

A Look back at the Benefits: Cloud storage offers some exciting advantages. It offers “pay as you go”, .. Read Further »

Google is Watching You. Is there Privacy?

admin — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 20:00:10 +0000

It starts from whatever you search on the internet and ends at what health problems you have today.

Today, you are being watched, the people you interact with, Your business, Entertainment, sources of income, browsing habits, Location, Interests, Voice calls, and what not. Google knows too much about you already. And soon with Chrome Os, Everything you do!
Do you fear Google? Do you trust Google?

If you use its multiple google online services on a daily basis you might and you should, but is that assumption wise enough to blame Google? Its all two fold.

For some, Google is a great company with a broad selection of useful online tools that make life easier, but for others Google is a nightmare, unregulated monster just waiting for the moment to drop the ‘don’t’ from the company’s unofficial motto, “Don’t be evil.”

Recently, WNYC talk .. Read Further »

You hate Bing? Microsoft might be Watching you

admin — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 18:47:48 +0000

Microsoft is insanely serious on getting into search game. This is quiet justified due to phenomenal reasons. Being a search giant you get the royalty for everthing on the web. Take google for instance, they are the GOD of the Web. And, they sell the ads the way no one else can.

Previously, when I made post on “Why Bing sucks“, I was hit with large amount of traffic, which made me conclude that I wasn’t alone. I did some analytics to study the behavior of visitors that were keen in such blogs. They were somehow related with “Microsoft Hatred”. From there, I found something really interesting which made me blog this.

I observed a reckless pattern of visitors. Some were one timers, few were half readers, most were multiple , and a chain of those who were visiting blog almost everyday to check back the updates. Such cases would go for someone who “cares” about a particular topic. Who can it be, who would observe it so closely? Take the example of Real life, who is the person most .. Read Further »

Taranfx - Your Gateway To Technology » privacy

170M Downloadable Facebook Profiles, Privacy #FAIL

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