And that’s not all. Each week, we round up security and privacy news that we haven’t covered in depth. Click on the title to read the full story. And stay safe out there.
If you use uBlock Origin’s Chrome extension to filter online ads, you’re in for a bit of a frustrating time in the near future. Google has started rolling out new Chrome extension standards, called Manifest V3, which will disable the old version of the uBlock Origin extension that most users may have installed. And while you might be thinking, “Google is the silverback gorilla of online advertising, of course they end up forcing me to watch the ads!” There is some good news. A new version of the ad filtering extension that meets Manifest V3 standards, uBlock Origin Lite, is now available. Then again, it won’t block as much as the previous uBlock version. However, as a Google spokesperson told The Verge, you have options: “The leading content filtering extensions are all available in Manifest V3 — with options for AdBlock users, Adblock Plus, uBlock Origin and AdGuard.” Either way, you’ll need to install the new extension soon.
US authorities announced charges this week against a 25-year-old Alabama man accused of hacking Security and Exchange Commission X account. Prosecutors asserted that Eric Council Jr. obtained personal information and documents for a fake ID of a person controlling the @SECGov account from unidentified co-conspirators. The council allegedly used fake IDs to carry out a case SIM swap attacktricked an AT&T retail store employee into giving him a new SIM card, which he eventually used to take control of the victim’s phone account. The co-conspirators used that to gain access to SEC account X, where they posted a fake announcement about Bitcoin’s regulatory status, followed by a price increase of $1,000 per bitcoin. Council was charged with conspiracy to commit aggravated identity theft and access device fraud.
A spokesperson told Fast Company this week that grocery chain Kroger has never widely used facial recognition technology in its stores and has no current plans. The company has faced a firestorm over its use of electronic price tags over concerns that ESLs could be used to impose surge prices on popular items and fears that the devices can also be implemented with facial recognition. The company piloted facial recognition technology at a store called EDGE in 2019, but has not continued to develop the service. US lawmakers included Rashida TlaibElizabeth Warren and Robert Casey publicly raised concerns about Kroger’s use of ESL.
Microsoft informed customers that it was unable to capture more than two weeks of security logs from several cloud services in September, including Microsoft Entra, Sentinel, Defender for Cloud, and Purview. News of the missing records was first reported by Business insiders. The company said in the announcement that “a bug in one of Microsoft’s internal monitoring agents led to issues in some agents uploading log data to our internal logging platform ”. The gap lasted from September 2 to September 19. A Microsoft executive confirmed to TechCrunch that the problem was due to “an operational error in our internal watchdog.”
System activity logs are important for all types of activity and are especially used for security monitoring and investigations as they can detect breaches and malicious activity. After Russian hackers penetrated US government networks through SolarWinds software in 2020, many agencies were unable to detect activity in their Microsoft Azure cloud service because they did not pay for premium features. Microsoft, so they don’t have full network activity logs. legislator was offended about raising fees, and the Biden administration has been working for more than two years to force Microsoft to do so Free logging service. The company finally announced the change in July 2023.
