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Apple announces a kind of total surveillance for child protection with CSAM scanning, setting a fatal precedent.  "It's an absolutely appalling idea because it will lead to distributed mass surveillance of our phones and laptops," comments security luminary Ross Anderson on Apple's latest foray into "security." Cryptography professor Matthew Green warns of a dam breaking. There's really nothing to add to that. This is not about Apple searching for child porn on its servers and reporting it to the police. That's what all service providers like Google, Microsoft or Facebook do. It's about the fact that Apple now even wants to search for these images on the iPhones of its customers. Special search programs run secretly in the background on the devices without the owner's knowledge. Constantly and without any particular reason, for everyone. This is new. And it's frightening. The IT group, of all people, which likes to adorn itself with the i...

Facebook has assembled a team of experts to investigate the encryption of WhatsApp messages. The goal is likely to be the collection of data for personalized advertising. Facebook has hired a number of experts to look into the encryption of WhatsApp messages. Basically, only the chat partners can decrypt the corresponding messages with the app. Not even WhatsApp itself has this option. So the question arises as to how Facebook intends to obtain usable data from this. According to a report from Android Authority , the keyword is "homomorphic encryption". This would be a way to analyze data without decrypting it. However, it is still unclear how this will work exactly.  Facebook is looking for new ways to collect data What should be pretty clear, however, is the purpose of the whole action. Facebook wants to collect even more data about its users in order to be able to serve personalized ads. Unsurprisingly, Facebook has denied this intention. The issue comes at a time when Fac...

The spy program leaves traces on smartphones. Software now enables iPhone users to check their device for the surveillance tool. Governments around the world are spying on their critics - journalists, human rights activists, opposition figures: the international "Pegasus Project" series of revelations made headlines around the world two and a half weeks ago. At the center of the research, in which the Süddeutsche Zeitung was also involved, was the Pegasus spy software from the Israeli company NSO. The program is capable of infecting smartphones from a distance. A secret service or police agency that has a Pegasus license usually only needs the phone number of a target person to attack his or her smartphone. Pegasus then turns the phone into a digital bug, taking complete control of the device. All data and all communications can be viewed, stolen and analyzed by police and intelligence officers, even encrypted chats. Even remote control of the camera and microphone is possibl...

New figures show how hacker attacks are affecting the German economy. The amount of damage has jumped due to Corona - and the nature of the attacks has changed. Computer hackers have increasingly targeted the German economy. Since the beginning of the Corona crisis, for example, not only has the number of attacks by cybercriminals on local companies, research institutes, associations and institutions increased significantly. The total amount of damage has also increased by leaps and bounds. At 223 billion euros a year, it is currently more than twice as high as in 2018 and 2019. Nearly 90 percent of the one thousand companies and organizations surveyed in a representative poll conducted by the Berlin-based digital association Bitkom said they had been hit by attacks from the Internet - worse than ever before. In the two years before the Corona crisis, "only" 75 percent of companies saw themselves in the crosshairs of cybercriminals. At the time, the damage was estimated at ar...