THREATS
Bounty hunters. Facebook is expanding its bug bounty programs, offering bigger payouts and rewards for finding flaws in hardware devices such as Portal and Oculus Quest. Google is temporarily boosting the rewards it pays for bugs related to "site isolation ," a cybersecurity feature for Chrome that the company recently extended from desktop to Android. Justin Schuh, Chrome's engineering director, called the advance, which protects the data of web browsers, "the single greatest advance in browser security since the creation of the sandbox."
Jail time. Federal prosecutors last year indicted a 23-year-old South Korean man who they allege ran the "world's largest" child exploitation site, per a recently unsealed court document. The website is said to have contained 8 terabytes of child abuse imagery—more than 250,000 unique videos. TechCrunch's Zack Whittaker describes a legal dilemma he encountered in trying to cover the story two years ago.
In session. College admissions websites are tracking the web habits of prospective applicants in order to determine which candidates are likely to accept an enrollment offer and be able to pay the tuition. Some privacy experts are concerned that these schools' data-handling practices could be violating federal law designed to protect student education records.
Hitting the jackpot. Hackers have been targeting ATMs around the world with malware that makes them spit out money, Motherboard reports. Officials believe a $1.5 million spree in Germany that took place in 2017 is linked to a single criminal gang. Reports indicate that such attacks may be on the rise in the U.S., Latin America, and Southeast Asia.
Dial-up Internet tones as digital mating calls.
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ACCESS GRANTED
BuzzFeed News published an investigation into Ads Inc., a business it says abused Facebook and thousands of consumers in a fraudulent, ad-based, money-making scheme. The story is billed as "an unprecedented, detailed inside look at how black hat affiliate markers weaponize targeted advertising, fake news articles, and overseas labor to exploit Facebook on a massive scale." The piece does not disappoint.
Since 2015, Ads Inc. has made money — lots of it — by executing one of the internet's most persistent, lucrative, and sophisticated scams: the subscription trap. The subscription trap works by tricking people into buying what they think is a single free trial of a celebrity-endorsed product. Although the customers would receive the product — which in most cases was not made by Ads Inc. itself — in reality, the celebrity has nothing to do with the offer. And in purchasing the free trial, the customer unwittingly commits to a pricey monthly subscription designed to be hard to cancel.
FORTUNE RECON
How to Claim a Cash Settlement of Up to $358 for Yahoo's Data Breaches by Chris Morris
Mark Zuckerberg Calls Facebook a Free-Speech Zone as Critics Demand More Restrictions by Danielle Abril
Samsung Galaxy S10s With Screen Protectors Can Be Unlocked by Anyone. Here's How to Keep Your Data and Display Safe by Lisa Marie Segarra
Secretive Data Firm Palantir May Be Skipping the 2019 IPO Market by Lucinda Shen
Chinese Officials Must Notify U.S. Before Making Contacts by Matt Lee
Apple's Routing of User Data to Google Could Be Breaking EU Privacy Law by David Meyer
ONE MORE THING
Meet le blob. This peculiar, yellowish, unicellular organism, now on display at the Paris Zoological Park, is a confounding, classification-averse species. The creature, charmingly called "slime mold," has no brain, exhibits 720 sexes, looks like a fungus, and seems to move and learn like an animal. Pretty weird!
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