Latest IT Security News, Alerts and Updates for this Week

Your LG Smart TV might be silently spying on your TV watching habits
Jason Huntley, a UK-based developer made an unpleasant discovery while watching his LG Smart TV. He discovered that, the TV was silently logging his viewing habits and sending the data to LG. The TV was performing this action even when a feature called ‘Collection of watching info’ was disabled. The Smart TV was not only spying on the channels watched by the user, but also the names of media files stored on connected USB drives. In response to the allegation, LG has admitted that some of its TV sets were in fact collecting such information. In its own defense, the Korean Company stated that the aim behind mining such information is to serve relevant ads to users. The company also said that such information cannot be considered personal.

Good news is, LG will soon be pushing firmware update that will fix this spying habit of its Smart TVs. It hasn’t stated the date though. [source:https://www.theregister.co.uk]

Love, Date and Hack!
Looks like even love is not safe from being hacked. A server holding a massive amount of data stolen from Adobe, PR Newswire, and the National White Collar Crime Center (NW3C), has been found to also contain the stolen user data of the Australian dating site called Cupid Media. The data comprised names, email addresses, birthdays and plain passwords of a whopping 42 million users of the dating service. The company stated that the stolen data is most likely related to a security breach that occurred in the Web site in January 2013. If you hold any account in Cupid Media, it is recommended that you change your password at the earliest and ensure that you are not using the same password for your other online accounts. Read more on this here.

Facebook Takes Security Measures Post Adobe Hack
Looks like some users were using the same login information for their Adobe account and Facebook account. And this was somehow speculated by Facebook. That is why, after the Adobe breach, Facebook informed all such users to change their passwords. Until they do so, they will remain hidden on the social site. Facebook, reportedly, is logging the data that was stolen from Adobe and using it to tighten the security of its users. We must admit, that’s a proactive move by the social media giant to secure its user data. [Source:https://www.siliconbeat.com]

Google does away with searches with Child Porn – over 100,000 of them
Child porn has been a longstanding issue on the Internet. Search giant Google has released an algorithm that has cleaned over 100,000 results for searches related to child pornography. The company is also developing a technology that will help identify children who are abused in YouTube videos. Google Chairman Eric Schmidt stated that these changes will be rolled out in more than 150 languages, so that it can have a global effect. In addition to blocking such child pornography results, Google has also started displaying warnings to users searching for child sexual abuse. Google has deployed a team that reviews images that the algorithm might erroneously treat as sexual abuse. Read more about this development here.

Rajiv Singha