News of the Cyber World

[kyonides]

WhatsApp hit with $267 million GDPR fine for bungling user privacy disclosure

Ireland’s Data Protection Commission fined Facebook-owned messenger WhatsApp for $225 million for failing to provide users enough information about the data it shared with other Facebook companies.

The fine is the largest penalty that the Irish regulator has waged since the European Union data protection law, the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, went into effect in 2018.

The watchdog, which kicked off its probe in 2018, ruled that Facebook failed to fully explain what “legitimate interests” the company used personal data for or how that data was processed. In addition to the fine, the ruling requires WhatsApp to take “corrective measures” in order to come into compliance with GDPR.

WhatsApp plans to appeal the fine, according to a spokesperson.

ProtonMail said Swiss court order left no choice but to log activist's IP address

ProtonMail, the encrypted email service that’s built a reputation for safeguarding user data, said it had no choice but to provide details about an activist to French authorities, amid mounting questions about the privacy protections in the popular mail client.

Swiss-based ProtonMail is an end-to-end encrypted service that markets itself as a tool that encrypts messages and other user data before the company accesses it. It’s a technique that, for more than 50 million users, aims to provide additional layers of protection than are available with more common email options, such as Gmail.

A French police report published on Sept. 2 appears to show that police used ProtonMail to collect the IP address, a specific number that pertains to an individual computer, of an unnamed French activist who was demonstrating against real estate gentrification in Paris. The case appears to undercut ProtonMail’s assurance that it does not log the IP addresses of unique users.

While the exact circumstances of the case remain murky, ProtonMail founder and CEO Andy Yen said in a series of tweets that the email firm was the subject of a legal order from a Swiss court. ProtonMail does not collect user IP addresses by default, Yen said, but “only if Proton gets a legal order for a specific account,” the company wrote in a Sept. 6 statement.

French police obtained a Swiss court order by transmitting their request through Europol, at which point ProtonMail began logging details on the IP address in question, according to TechCrunch. Authorities reportedly arrested the activist after obtaining more details about the IP address.

According to Wikipedia gentrification is:

...the process of changing the character of a neighborhood through the influx of more affluent residents and businesses. Because it tends to change the character of said neighborhood, it is a common and controversial topic in politics and in urban planning.

So how exactly did that activist commit any crime by protesting against REG!?

Even so ProtonMail assures you that they are unable to decrypt your email contents.

Cyber Command alerts US firms of 'ongoing' hacks targeting Atlassian enterprise software

U.S. Cyber Command is warning American organizations that hackers are exploiting software flaws in a popular project management tool, an indication that attackers could be preparing for a larger campaign that creates headaches throughout the private sector.

Cyber Command — the Defense Department’s cyber unit — said in a tweet Friday that “mass exploitation” of the issue “is ongoing and expected to accelerate.” The issue exists in Atlassian Confluence, an enterprise application marketed as a means of enabling remote work in corporate environments. Atlassian, an Australian corporation, warned clients on Aug. 25 to update their systems to the latest version of Confluence.

“Please patch immediately if you haven’t already — this cannot wait until after the weekend,” the Cyber Command warning stated.
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Specific details about the flaw in Atlassian’s Confluence software are sparse. The company said the issue, categorized as CVE-2021-26084, is an “injection vulnerability” that “would allow an authenticated user, and in some instances unauthenticated user, to execute arbitrary code on a Confluence Server or Data Center instance.”