Avast antivirus subsidiary sells your browsing information to various corporations. Its clients have included Home Depot, Google, Microsoft, Pepsi, and McKinsey. Avast announced Thursday it will stop the Jumpshot data collection and wind down Jumpshots's operations with immediate effect. The data includes Google searches, lookups of locations and GPS coordinates on Google Maps, people visiting companies' LinkedIn pages, particular YouTube videos, and people visiting porn websites. The sale of this data is both highly sensitive and is supposed to remain confidential between the company and the clients.
Read MoreThe short-form video app is still accessible in the US, but its fate in the country is far from certain. US President Donald Trump has been attacking TikTok for months because of its ties to China. He has said he won't approve the deal unless Americans control the company. But TikTok's Chinese owner, ByteDance, is racing to close a deal with the American firms Oracle and Walmart that might be enough to stave off US pressure once and for all. The company has until Oct. 14 to file a request to temporarily block those restrictions.
Read MoreHackers have targeted the U.S. government and private corporations around the world. In a recent incident hackers attached malware to a server pushed software update from Texas company SolarWinds.
Read MoreFacebook's flagship messenger has ridden out the storms of protest that followed Apple's exposure of its alarming data collection and forced change of terms. But WhatsApp has gone further, warning tens of millions of angry users that they risk their private messages being read. Signal surged after WhatsApp's backlash, fueled by media headlines, but that rush of installs has faded. WhatsApp has been single-minded in its defense since January, focusing on security credentials on which it built its brand. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said back in January that iMessage is a key linchpin of their ecosystem.
Read MoreJapanese media reports that Line let Chinese engineers at Shanghai affiliate access Japanese users' data without informing them. Japanese media: Four engineers at a company in China, who perform system maintenance for Line, were allowed to access servers in Japan from 2018 that contained the names, telephone numbers and e-mail addresses of users. Line has since blocked access to user data at the Chinese affiliate, the company said. Line this month became part of Z Holdings, formerly Yahoo Japan, creating a $30 billion internet heavyweight to compete against local and U.S. rivals.
Read MoreDDoS-for-hire services are upping the potency of distributed denial-of-service attacks with a new technique. The technique abuses a widely used Internet protocol that drastically increases the amount of junk traffic directed at targeted servers. The biggest D/TLS-based attacks Netscout has observed delivered about 45 Gbps of traffic. The company has identified almost 4,300 publicly reachable D/LTS servers that are susceptible to the abuse. The attacks can be challenging to mitigate because the size of the payload is too big to fit in a single UDP packet.
Read More