Alleging a trail of broken promises, two privacy-focused advocacy groups yesterday filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission against a recent WhatsApp privacy policy change that states it will begin sharing user data with parent company Facebook. The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD) said in a joint...

The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Cyber Division warned election officials nationwide this month to fortify their systems in the wake of two breaches it was able to detect earlier this summer. A “flash” warning sent by the agency about 10 days ago warned state boards of election to take the necessary precautions to safeguard their...

Apple rushed an emergency iOS update today after the discovery of three zero-day vulnerabilities used by governments to spy on the activities of human rights activists and journalists. The zero days, called Trident, allow an attacker to take complete control of an iPhone or iPad with just one click. Trident’s three separate zero-days create an attack chain that can...

The No More Ransom initiative released decryption keys for yet another strain of ransomware this week; now victims of the mostly Dutch-leaning ransomware called WildFire can get their files back without paying attackers. According to an update from the Dutch National Police on Wednesday, when it took down command and control server responsible for WildFire, it was...

Juniper Networks on Friday acknowledged that exploits contained in the ShadowBrokers data dump do indeed target its products. “As part of our analysis of these files, we identified an attack against NetScreen devices running ScreenOS,” said Derrick Scholl, director of security incident response at Juniper. “We are examining the extent of the attack, but initial analysis...

Mike Mimoso and Chris Brook discuss the news of the week, including the Shadow Brokers debacle, the VeraCrypt audit, Pokemon ransomware, and a browser address bar vulnerability. Download: Threatpost_News_Wrap_August_19_2016.mp3 Music by Chris Gonsalves

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is blasting Microsoft for its “malicious” and “annoying” tactics when it comes to prodding Windows users to update their operating system to Windows 10. The digital watchdog group says Microsoft’s strategy of pushing the Windows 10 upgrade application onto users systems was unwelcome by many and the company crossed the line...

Vulnerabilities exist in systems that belong to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, a federal agency that’s part of the United States’ Department of Health and Human Services. If exploited the bugs could result in the disclosure of personally identifiable information and the “disruption of critical operations,” a government watchdog warned this week. The...

Cisco has quickly patched two vulnerabilities that were disclosed in the ShadowBrokers’ data dump. The networking giant today released advisories that it had fixed the flaws in its Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA), one of which was rated high severity; both of the vulnerabilities enable remote code execution. The ShadowBrokers are an unknown group of hackers...

Cisco has quickly patched one of two vulnerabilities that was disclosed in the ShadowBrokers’ data dump and issued an advisory on the other, which was patched in 2011, in order to raise awareness among its customers. The networking giant today released advisories saying that it had fixed both flaws in its Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA), the newest of which was...