Josh Gerstein reports: Cutting-edge data-gathering techniques may have grabbed the spotlight lately, but it turns out the government has been playing fast and loose with a more old-school surveillance method: snail-mail snooping. The U.S. Postal Service failed to observe key safeguards on a mail surveillance program with a history of civil liberties abuses, according to…
Category: Breaches
Columbia Engineering Team Finds Thousands of Secret Keys in Android Apps
The Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science at Columbia University issued the following press release yesterday: In a paper presented—and awarded the prestigious Ken Sevcik Outstanding Student Paper Award—at the ACM SIGMETRICS conference on June 18, Jason Nieh, professor of computer science at Columbia Engineering, and PhD candidate Nicolas Viennot reported that they have discovered a crucial security problem…
Ca: Henry v Bell Mobility: Another Federal Court case shows PIPEDA damages are hardly worth pursuing absent evidence of actual harm
Canadian privacy lawyer David T.S. Fraser writes: The Federal Court, in the recently issued decision in Henry v Bell Mobility 2014 FC 555 (not yet on CanLII or the Court’s site) has awarded a very modest sum of damages to a customer of Bell Mobility whose phone account was accessed by an impostor. At the hearing before…
eBay pulls plug on Chinese-made devices with pre-installed spyware
Michael Hatamoto reports: Auction house eBay has banned the sale of smartphones from Chinese manufacturer Star, as the company’s N9500 cheap Google Android-powered device ships with the Usupay.D Trojan malware pre-installed. The device tracks phone user activity and cybercriminals can remotely control and manipulate the phone, if necessary. Read more on TweakTown.