These days, new malware scams are a dime a dozen. Phony email links, misleading URLs, fake call centers; if you haven’t already stumbled across one yourself, chances are you know someone who has. But what’s stopping all this malicious code from running rampant and turning every last corner of the internet into a kill zone?
There are establishments and people who do not appreciate Google Glass, and it is understandable why. After all unlike smartphones or cameras, it is not obvious when a photo of video is being filmed, which can lead to some people feeling like their privacy is being invaded.
Of course some argue that there is a light indicator that shows when a photo or video is being recorded, and that the feature has to be activated in order for it to work. However security researchers, Mike Lady and Kim Paterson, have created a spyware for Google Glass that will allow photos to be taken without either the wearer or the subject’s knowledge! (more…)
Google Glass Spyware Can Take Photos Without The Wearer’s Knowledge original content from Ubergizmo. 
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Are you a jealous lover, helicopter parent, or otherwise neurotic human being with crippling trust issues? Then we’ve got the answer to all your problems right here. No, it’s not therapy (although, you know, good idea); it’s a top-of-the-line smartphone that comes pre-loaded with all the spyware an overbearing human could ever hope for.
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An American citizen living in Maryland sued the Ethiopian government today for infecting his computer with secret spyware, wiretapping his private Skype calls, and monitoring his entire family’s every use of the computer for a period of months. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is representing the plaintiff in this case, who has asked the court to allow him to use the pseudonym Mr. Kidane – which he uses within the Ethiopian community – in order to protect the safety and wellbeing of his family both in the United States and in Ethiopia.
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Der Spiegel‘s fairly harrowing report about the NSA’s hacking unit, Tailored Access Operations (TAO), got a little more harrowing this morning when an unnamed blogger at LeakSource published images from the agency’s hilariously-named and terrifying spy gear catalog.
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Thanks to the NSA PRISM revelations we’ve all lost our innocence about government cyber-spying, but how far down that rabbit-hole has law-enforcement gone? Revelations from the Def Con hacking conference in Las Vegas show that such tactics are old hat for another US anti-crime department: the FBI. For instance, one ex-official said that the bureau’s analysts (shown above) can routinely turn on the microphones in laptops and Android devices to record conversations without a person’s knowledge. On top of such in-house expertise, a private sector cottage industry has sprung up around cyber surveillance, marketing programs that can also hack handheld devices and PCs. One company even markets “zero day” bugging software that exploits unknown security holes — meaning crime lords can’t just patch their browsers to avoid detection.
[Image credit: Wikimedia Commons]
Source: WSJ
The scariest Google Glass hack just got fixed before anyone evil could actually use it, but the details are a little unsettling. Using nothing more than Glass’s camera and a malicious QR code, hackers would have been able to steal total control of the device if you so much as looked at the wrong thing.
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The Naval Warfare Surface Center in Crane, Indiana today revealed a smartphone app that puts the capability of modern smartphones to observe areas in sharp relief and shows the power of malware to tap into those capabilities. The app, PlaceRaider, is capable of running in the background of any smartphone running Android 2.3. While running in the background, it takes photos at random while recording the orientation and location of the phone. Those photos get sent back to a central server, where they can be used to reconstruct a pretty good idea of where the phone has physically been.
By Ubergizmo. Related articles: FTC declines to fine companies who sold 10000s of laptops with spyware preinstalled, Navy planning to equip three of its ships with 4G LTE,
Earlier today, we noted an FTC settlement which shows that seven rent-to-own business sold PCs with installed spyware that secretly collect consumer information. The software is designed by a possibly-defunct company called DesignerWare, and the FTC estimates that over 420,000 computers had included a utility called “Rental Agent,” which included a feature called “Detective Mode,” which not only included a keylogger but the ability to access the computer’s webcam. Creepy. This is one of the biggest corporate invasions of privacy in recent memory and the FTC report issues no fines and finds no criminal culpability.
By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Google could be fined $22.5 million for bypassing Safari privacy settings, Google could face fines up to $10 million over Apple’s Safari browser issue,
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