Tag Archive for: flood

Critics of DMCA takedowns flood Copyright Office with thousands of comments

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Critics of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act have flooded the U.S. Copyright Office with tens of thousands of comments complaining about a process that often forces websites to kill user-generated content when faced with a copyright complaint.

Before Thursday, the Copyright Office had received only about 80 public comments about potential changes to the DMCA’s notice-and-takedown provisions, with the comment period scheduled to close Monday.

But another 55,000 people had filed comments as of Friday morning after digital rights group Fight for the Future and YouTube channel ChannelAwesome launched a campaign late Thursday to encourage people to complain about “the many ways that the DMCA is abused to censor and take down legitimate content from the Internet, stifling innovation, cultural creation, and freedom of speech.”

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Network World Security

Trojanized Android apps flood third-party stores, compromise phones

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Attackers are creating rogue versions of popular Android applications that compromise the security of devices and are extremely hard to remove.

Researchers from mobile security firm Lookout have found more than 20,000 samples of such trojanized apps. They’re typically fully functional copies of top Android applications like Candy Crush, Facebook, Google Now, NYTimes, Okta, SnapChat, Twitter or WhatsApp, but with malicious code added to them.

The goal of these rogue apps is to aggressively display advertisements on devices. A scary development though is that, unlike traditional adware, they root the devices where they get installed in order to prevent users from removing them.

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Network World Security

Partners Health Care breach: Here comes the flood

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A phishing attack that led to the compromise of patient information at Partners Health Care could be the start of a predicted flood of such attacks against healthcare providers.

The breach discovered Nov. 25, 2014 exposed the group’s email accounts to the attackers. A notice posted by Partners says some of the emails compromised contained “names, addresses dates of birth, telephone numbers, and, in some instances, Social Security numbers, and some of our patients’ clinical information, such as diagnosis, treatment received, medical record numbers, medical diagnosis codes, or health insurance information.”

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Network World Tim Greene

A flood of phishing sites and how to avoid them – CNET News

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You could call it the Web site phishing deluge. Cybercriminals are cranking out fake Web sites branded as eBay, banks, and other financial companies to the tune of tens of thousands every week, according …
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