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Security: More Data Breaches, NATO, 'The Internet of Dongs' and Aadhaar 'Leak'

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Security
  • Millions of Swedish Health Hotline Calls Exposed Online in a Massive Case of Data Breach [Ed: When the state puts back doors in everything, as a matter of law]

    Data breach is becoming quite a nightmare for a lot of people with new breaches coming every now and then. In a recent data breach, millions of calls that were made by the Swedish residents have been exposed online. The Swedes were seeking medical advice through a national health telephone service in order to know more about symptoms and medications.

    According to reports, about 2.7 million conversations amounting to more than 170,000 hours are available online. The data in the conversation is extremely private with people talking about their diseases, symptoms, illness, and giving out their social security numbers. This breach has left the Swedish authorities bewildered as they investigate the whole thing.

    Data of the calls dates back to 2013 and is available for anyone to download and listen. Security expert Mikko Hypponen says that the audio calls were saved as Wav files. These files were left open on an unsecured server. This allowed any person to listen or download the 2.7 million conversations of the Swedish people. No encryption or authentication was required to crack the data making it easily available on the internet.

  • How Easy Is It To Spy On Armies Using Social Media? Uh, Very

    Recently, a NATO research group published a study on just how easy it is to target soldiers online and squeeze them for military intelligence. Posing as the enemy, the group was tasked with finding out as much as they could about an upcoming military exercise using nothing more than social media. Posting targeted Facebook ads as bait, they managed to lure dozens of soldiers into fake Facebook groups.

    While impostor accounts squeezed them for info, other researchers simply used Facebook's "Suggest Friends" feature to get information on their entire units. Having their names and details, the group could track them over other social platforms and mine for dirt -- like how one soldier was happily married on Facebook, but single and ready to mingle on several dating apps.

  • The Internet of Dongs remains a security dumpster-fire -- UPDATED

    Update: Internet of Dongs has produced its own supplementary assessments that delve into more nuance on these devices, they make a good case that Mozilla's criteria are too coarse to assess smart sex toys.

  • Don’t Get Your Valentine an Internet-Connected Sex Toy

    “At the end of the day, this can be serious,” Caltrider says. “These [devices] exist in the world, they're likely to be gifts, and so we wanted to get people to sit back and think, What are the privacy implications?”

  • Aadhaar data leak: Gas company Indane leaves data of 6.7mn customers exposed on its website

    The exposed data was brought to notice by a security expert who wants to remain anonymous. French security researcher Robert Baptiste who goes by the Twitter handle Elliot Alderson used a custom-built Python script to scrape this database and was able to customer data for 11,000 dealers. This data included the name and addresses of customers as well as their Aadhaar numbers. According to Baptiste, he was able to get details of 5.7 mn Indane customers before his script was blocked.

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