“It’s True. Your Devices Are Listening to You,” stated the title for a sales pitch on the website of a major media conglomerate; however, the statement wasn’t a warning about the invasive eavesdropping practice that many suspect that tech companies undertake, but instead it was a boast: media company Cox Mediaread more
Over the past week, the African country of Liberia has been the target of a series of high-bandwidth directed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, nearly crippling the nation’s fledgling internet service.
The attacks originated from a network called Mirai botnet #14, intermittently flooding Libera’s networks with traffic of over 500 gigabits per second in bandwidth during each attack. Botnets consist of a network of thousands of "zombie computers", typically home computers that, unknown to their individual owners, have viruses or other malware that send out data when commended to by the controller of the malware.
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The director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, James Comey, is advising computer users to protect themselves from having potential hackers spy on them using their webcams, by simply putting a piece of tape over the lens.
Comey says that this is standard procedure in government offices, and that it would be prudent for normal citizens to follow the same practice. He began covering the camera on his personal computer after seeing the issue covered in the news. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is also known to cover his webcam up, too.
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An analysis done by Baneki Privacy Labs, a group of internet security researchers Cryptocloud has uncovered a JavaScript exploit that targets Firefox Long-Term Support version 17 which was included in the Tor Project browser bundle until June. But the Tor Project Firefox configuration doesn’t include automatic updates, so Tor users would not be protected unless they manually upgrade their Firefox browser.
The address that the exploit pointed to was defense contractor SAIC, which provides information technology to the US Department of Defense. Further analysis found that the address was part of a block of addresses allocated by SAIC to the National Security Agency.
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