This Week’s Byte of Security News and Updates

This week’s been quite an eventful one, with Facebook bringing in hashtags and Mumbai police force facing the brunt of cybercrime. Read on.

Facebook Hashtags – Exciting or Worrying?
If you never paid attention to your privacy settings on Facebook, then it’s time you started doing so. With the Social Media giant bringing in Mr. #hashtag into its family, you have all the reasons to worry about your posts becoming widely visible to others on the Internet. How do FB hashtags work? Simply put # before any phrase in your post, and it becomes clickable. Clicking on the phrase will show what people are talking about the hashtagged topic. Also, if someone searches for the same #phrase in graph search, your post will show up. Know more about this hashtag here.

NCCC – India’s Version of PRISM
The arrival of PRISM ruffled quite a lot of feathers in the Internet industry. After all, this cyber-snooping program of the US was designed to gain access to data of users of Google, Facebook, Yahoo and other online services. Interestingly, India took a cue from this move by the US, and has decided to come up with National Cyber Coordination Centre [NCCC], a similar cyber-surveillance program. More news on this new development here.

iOS 7 Beta Can Be Hacked to Access Images, Even in the Locked Mode
iOS 7 is still in the Beta stage, and some developers have already found security flaws in the operating system. Reportedly, the detected bug, allows anyone to view, modify, forward and even upload images, even if the phone is locked. Before you start flustering about it, know that this is just a beta version and being tested by developers. By the time, it is released officially, we can only hope that all such problems will be done away with it. Read how this bug works here.

Is it Bad Piggies that You Have on Your Phone or Bad Pigs?
Can you spot the difference between Bad Piggies and Bad Pigs? Yes, they are spelled differently, but that’s not the point here! Bad Piggies is a popular game in Google Play store, and Bad Pigs is a malicious app that looks identical to the original game app. And guess what? This malware got downloaded over 10,000 times, before anyone could notice it. So, if you have Bad Pigs, uninstall it. Good news is, it is no more on the app store.

From Mumbai to Greece
Mumbai police are in the news, but this time, as the victim. Reportedly, cybercriminals hacked into the Axis bank accounts held by at least 13 Mumbai police officials, and withdrew the booty from ATMs in Greece. NDTV has reported the withdrawn amount to be Rs. 13 lakh, and the crime was executed by using cloned debit cards.

That would be all for now. Stay tuned for next week’s edition on the latest security buzz and updates.

Rajiv Singha