By Cameron Abbott and Sarah Goegan
Mark Zuckerberg testified before the US Congress in two marathon sessions this week. He was quizzed on topics including Cambridge Analytica and data sharing, privacy law and social media regulation, and Facebook’s policies.
By Cameron Abbott and Allison Wallace
Over the last few weeks we’ve been blogging about the data “sharing” scandal that has rocked Facebook, and has lead to a boycott of the popular social media site, and sent CEO Mark Zuckerberg to face the music on Capitol Hill.
In case you’d missed the story (which you can read about here, here and here), Facebook estimated 87 million people globally, including 300,000 Australians, had their data shared with Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy firm used by US President Donald Trump in his 2016 election campaign.
By Cameron Abbott and Sarah Goegan
Travel-booking site Orbitz confirmed that it has suffered a major data security breach, in which details of up to 880,000 credit cards were compromised.
By Cameron Abbott and Georgia Mills
News of Facebook’s involvement in the United States’ elections is nothing new, especially with the ongoing Cambridge Analytica scandal, so it should come as little surprise that the social media giant has extended its reach into the Australian electoral sphere.
Facebook approached Australia’s major political parties during the 2016 Federal election offering a powerful data matching tool. This “advanced matching” tool would allow parties to match data they had collected about voters- including names, dates of birth, contact details, and postcodes- against similar information provided by users on their Facebook profiles. The combined data would allow parties to identify swinging voters and target them with tailored ads when they use Facebook.
By Cameron Abbott and Samantha Tyrrell
It has been alleged that Cambridge Analytica, a political data analytics firm specialising in psychological profiling, has tapped more than 50 million users’ Facebook profiles without their consent and subsequently used the data to assist Donald Trump’s 2016 electoral campaign.
By Cameron Abbott, Keely O’Dowd and Samantha Tyrrell
Bug Bounty Programs (BBPs) actively encourage hackers to explore a company’s systems and report back on any vulnerability they discover. Often, pre-determined financial incentives are offered to the “security researcher” in return for their findings. The attraction of this process is obvious; rather than suffering a cyber incident that could – and for many organisations has – cost millions of dollars and resulted in reputational damage, companies can instead make a comparatively small payment to ethical “white hat” hackers with the intention of pre-empting an incident.
By Cameron Abbott and Keely O’Dowd
Over the weekend our closest neighbours agreed to greater cooperation on cyber security. The Member States of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the Secretary-General of ASEAN and Australian leaders met in Sydney to strengthen the ASEAN-Australia relationship. The leaders discussed issues of regional importance.
By Cameron Abbott and Allison Wallace
Since the introduction of self-serve checkouts in Australian supermarkets nearly ten years ago, customers have been engaging in the simplest of hacks to outsmart the supermarket technology. Mum and Dad cyber criminals? Not so much– mostly it is just by putting through more expensive items as much cheaper ones (think a kilo of lemons as a kilo of potatoes).
But thanks to an Aussie start-up, new AI technology will put an end to customer’s criminal careers. Read More
By Cameron Abbott and Harry Crawford
The NSW Government’s vulnerability to hacking has been exposed in a report by state’s auditor-general, in which it was revealed that one government agency took 49 days to shut down a hack.
This hack started with an email account of the unnamed agency being compromised and used to send out “phishing” emails to get the credentials of finance staff members. By day 20, 300 staff had clicked on the bogus link in the phishing email. 200 email accounts ended up being under the control of the hackers.
By Cameron Abbott and Keely O’Dowd
A study by Accenture and Ponemon Institute – Cost of Cyber Crime Study: Insights on the security investments that make a difference – found cyberattacks cost financial service firms more to address and contain than in any other industry. The rate of breaches in the industry has tripled in the past five years. On average, the cost of cybercrime for financial services companies globally has increased by more than 40% over the past three years, from $12.97 million per firm in 2014 to $18.28 million in 2017.
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