Jodie Lauren Smith

In another surprising turn of events in the Facebook privacy issues saga, Russia has fined Facebook 3,000 rubles, or around $47, for non-compliance with the country's Data Localization law. You were probably expecting to see a couple of zeros on the end of that $47, but no, bizarrely this is the amount Russia had decided to fine the social media…

This week France launched a secure government only messaging app in order to protect government official's chats. The app, called Tchap is supposed to have elevated levels of security compared to off the self apps like Telegram, which French government officials were using until recently. All conversations on the app are protected with end-to-end…

Facebook scandals seem to be happening almost every week now! In this latest scandal, it was revealed that the social media giant has been caught collecting email contacts of their users. How is this possible? you might ask in disbelief. A few weeks ago Facebook was caught asking new users for the password to their email account in…

Ukrainian military departments have been targeted by a spear phishing campaign as part of a cyber espionage operation in which the attackers attempt to drop a RATVERMIN backdoor. Cybersecurity firm FireEye discovered the malicious campaign which is still ongoing against the Ukranian government. The campaign is reported to have started in 2018…

A new ransomware has been discovered called RobbinHood that is targeting networks and encrypting all computers on the network. Once the computers have been encrypted, the ransomware virus will request payment in bitcoins in order to decrypt a computer. It also gives the victims the option to pay a larger amount of bitcoins to decrypt the network as…

A new phishing scam called "The Nasty List" is going viral on Instagram. The Nasty list seems to have started earlier this week and works by using compromised accounts to send messages to users informing them they are on the Instagram Nast List. The messages read "OMG your (sic) actually on here at number 38" and "WOW. Your (sic) on here!!!…

Hackers have stolen almost $19 million in cryptocurrency from Bithumb. Bithumb is a popular South Korea cryptocurrency exchange that has faced hacking issues in the past. On Friday 29 March reports of a hack on Bithumb started to emerge on Twitter after cryptocurrency monitors spotted suspicious transactions on the platform. These monitors…

Facebook has once again been accused of poor security for asking some users for passwords to their email accounts. It was only a few weeks ago that Facebook was criticized for storing millions of user passwords in plaintext, accessible to their employees and unencrypted. Since the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018 in which Cambridge…

On 29 March a former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor accused of stealing huge amounts of sensitive data has changed his plea to guilty. Harold Thomas Martin III had top secret security clearances within the NSA and stole over 50 terabytes of classified national defense documents from government computers over a period of two decades.…

Last week it was revealed that Facebook mistakenly stored millions of user passwords unencrypted and in plaintext. The passwords were held on Facebook's internal servers and were not available to anyone outside the company, Facebook stated. They also added that there is no evidence that the passwords were compromised or accessed by employees for…