"According to a report by Sophos, malware and spam are on the rise on social networks such as Twitter, MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn. In the last year, 57% of users report they have been spammed via social networking sites, an increase of 70.6% compared to last year. Furthermore, 36% of users claim they've been sent malware via social networking sites, which is a rise of 69.8% from last year. On the other hand, CEOs of companies are concerned that their employees' usage of social networks is posing a security risk for their company. Sophos has surveyed more than 500 organizations, discovering that 72% of them think social networks are a danger for their companys, with 60% of them tagging Facebook as the biggest security risk, followed by MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn. Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos, says that Facebook is the biggest threat because it's the biggest social network out there, but he also places some of the blame on Facebook's own privacy rules. "When Facebook rolled-out its new recommended privacy settings late last year, it was a backwards step, encouraging many users to share their information with everybody on the internet," he says. Interestingly enough (and contrasted to some of the reports we've seen lately), Cluley thinks that simply barring access to Facebook is not the solution. "Social networks can be an essential part of the business mix today," he says, "and the answer is not to bar staff from participating in them but to apply some 'social security' instead.""
"The single biggest known British political advertiser on Facebook is a mysterious pro-Brexit campaign group pushing for a no-deal exit from the EU. The revelation about Britain's Future, which has never disclosed the source of its funding or organisational structure, has raised concerns about the influence of "dark money" in British politics."
"JBS, the world's biggest meat processor, has paid an $11m (£7.8m) ransom after a cyber-attack shut down operations, including abattoirs in the US, Australia and Canada.
While most of its operations have been restored, the Brazilian-headquartered company said it hoped the payment would head off any further complications including data theft."
"In the 20 years since the birth of social media, child sexual exploitation has become one of the biggest challenges facing tech companies. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the internet is used by human traffickers as "digital hunting fields", allowing them access to both customers and potential victims, with children being targeted by traffickers on social media platforms. The biggest of these, Facebook, is owned by Meta, the tech giant whose platforms, which also include Instagram, are used by more than 3 billion people worldwide. In 2020, according to a report by US-based not-for-profit the Human Trafficking Institute, Facebook was the platform most used to groom and recruit children by sex traffickers (65%), based on an analysis of 105 federal child sex trafficking cases that year. The HTI analysis ranked Instagram second most prevalent, with Snapchat third."
"A wave of artificial intelligence-driven misinformation and disinformation that could influence key looming elections poses the biggest short-term threat to the global economy, the World Economic Forum (WEF) has said.
In a deeply gloomy assessment, the body that convenes its annual meeting in Davos next week expressed concern that politics could be disrupted by the spread of false information, potentially leading to riots, strikes and crackdowns on dissent from governments."
"This week, Atlassian's . This follows the trend of more and more high-profile hacks that are waking consumers up - like , , and the that rocked the country when 40 million debit and credit card numbers stolen during the holiday shopping time that year. (See of all the hacks from 2004 - present.)"
"UK's electronic eavesdropping and security agency, GCHQ, has been secretly gathering intelligence from the world's biggest internet companies through a covertly run operation set up by America's top spy agency, documents obtained by the Guardian reveal."
"Participants used an app on their phones to record 30-second intervals of themselves reading a piece of text, describing a positive experience, then describing a negative experience. Doctors also took recordings from a control group of 25 patients who were either healthy or getting non-heart-related tests.
The doctors found 13 different voice characteristics associated with coronary artery disease. Most notably, the biggest differences between heart patients and non-heart patients' voices occurred when they talked about a negative experience."
"Not everything is so straightforward in Google land, as Google's chat protocols Hangouts and Talk, suffered a privacy issue on the 26 September that saw instant messages routed to unintended recipients."
"But Lodge admits that the BYOD trend does have a number of flaws. His biggest concern? It encourages students to use technology during teaching time: "The major downside of BYOD is the potential for distraction. Students' own devices are likely to include all the applications they use on a regular basis. This cannot be controlled like it can be with computers provided by the institution.""
"One of the biggest arguments against mandating backdoors in encryption is the fact that, even if you trust the United States government never to abuse that power (and who does?), other criminal hackers and foreign governments will be able to exploit the backdoor to use it themselves. A backdoor is an inherent vulnerability that other actors will attempt to find and try to use it for their own nefarious purposes as soon as they know it exists, putting all of our cybersecurity at risk. "
The need for schools to prepare for 21st century learning was top of the agenda at this year's BETT conference.They must embrace mobile technologies, games, podcasts and social networking, according to leading educationalist Professor Stephen Heppell.Schools should also break away from traditional classroom and curriculum models, he argued.The gap between those schools embracing technology and those not is getting bigger, he said.Prof Heppell was speaking to delegates at BETT, the world's biggest educational technology show.
"China's internet censors have cracked down on searches about the Panama Papers, a massive leak of documents that reportedly tie the relatives of current and retired Chinese politicians, including President Xi Jinping, to offshore companies used for tax evasion.
The reports by an international coalition of media outlets working with the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, or ICIJ, are based on documents from the Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca, one of the world's biggest creators of shell companies."
""If they are not happy, and not eating well, in some cases you can predict whether the pig is sick," said Jackson He, chief executive officer of Yingzi Technology, a small firm based in the southern city of Guangzhou that has introduced its vision of a "future pig farm" with facial and voice recognition technologies.
China's biggest tech firms want to pamper pigs, too. Alibaba, the e-commerce giant, and JD.com, its rival, are using cameras to track pigs' faces. Alibaba also uses voice-recognition software to monitor their coughs."
"Quest Diagnostics, one of the biggest blood testing providers in the country, warned Monday that nearly 12 million of its customers may have had personal, financial and medical information breached due to an issue with one of its vendors."
"The thousands of leaked documents focus mainly on techniques for hacking and reveal how the CIA cooperated with British intelligence to engineer a way to compromise smart televisions and turn them into improvised surveillance devices."
"Google, Uber, Tesla and the major truck manufacturers are looking to a future in which people like Baxter will be replaced - or at the very least downgraded to co-pilots - by automated vehicles that will save billions but will cost millions of jobs. It will be one of the biggest changes to the jobs market since the invention of the automated loom - challenging the livelihoods of millions across the world."
aren01 on 20 Aug 21"According to a report by Sophos, malware and spam are on the rise on social networks such as Twitter, MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn. In the last year, 57% of users report they have been spammed via social networking sites, an increase of 70.6% compared to last year. Furthermore, 36% of users claim they've been sent malware via social networking sites, which is a rise of 69.8% from last year. On the other hand, CEOs of companies are concerned that their employees' usage of social networks is posing a security risk for their company. Sophos has surveyed more than 500 organizations, discovering that 72% of them think social networks are a danger for their companys, with 60% of them tagging Facebook as the biggest security risk, followed by MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn. Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos, says that Facebook is the biggest threat because it's the biggest social network out there, but he also places some of the blame on Facebook's own privacy rules. "When Facebook rolled-out its new recommended privacy settings late last year, it was a backwards step, encouraging many users to share their information with everybody on the internet," he says. Interestingly enough (and contrasted to some of the reports we've seen lately), Cluley thinks that simply barring access to Facebook is not the solution. "Social networks can be an essential part of the business mix today," he says, "and the answer is not to bar staff from participating in them but to apply some 'social security' instead.""
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