Quick Announcement: Following the testimony of Frances Haugen to the US Senate, Facebook's vice president of integrity, Guy Rosen, published a blog post in which he defended Facebook's policies against hate speech, claiming that the prevalence of hate speech on the platform has dropped 50% over the past nine months.
Even though we usually focus on issues of technology, cybersecurity, and business on this blog, we're going to do something a little different today. We are going to explore the legal issues surrounding the controversies relating to Facebook that began last week.
On Monday of this week, Facebook as well as other apps owned by Facebook, like Instagram and Messenger, experienced a full system outage for about six hours. As a result, many users were not able to log into their accounts, instead receiving an error message upon visiting the sites’ URLs. The problem has since been fixed—everyone should be able to log into their accounts now—, and there doesn’t appear to be any evidence of foul play.
On September 16th, the VoIP service provider VoIP.ms; located in Quebec, Canada; was hit with a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. VoIP systems employ internet signals to send information over telephones and other communication devices, rather than conventional landlines.
The Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the federal bureau responsible for monitoring the computer systems connected to important national infrastructure as well as informing the general public on cyber security threats, recently released an announcement relating to a hacking scheme targeting Windows computers.
Quick Announcement: Microsoft has announced an official release date for Windows 11, its new operating system--October 5, 2021. Existing Windows users can download the new OS free of charge beginning on this date. For more information, check out our post on the new operating system.
On September 1st Rob Pegoraro, a tech columnist at USA Today, reported on a data leak involving a few million customers at T-Mobile, a popular mobile device service provider. He writes, "The T-Mobile hack may have made it easier for attackers to stage a SIM swap attack, in which they take over a phone line to intercept two-step verification (also called two-factor authentication), a process during which users respond to a text, email or push notification to verify ownership of a particularly valuable online account.
On August 24th, CNN reported a story about a data leak, which publicly released the personal information of millions of people, as well as data from major government organizations and large businesses. "The data leak, which affected American Airlines, Maryland's health department and New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority, among others, led to the exposure of at least 38 million records, including employee information as well as data related to Covid-19 vaccinations, contact tracing and testing appointments, according to UpGuard, the cybersecurity firm that uncovered the issue.
Quick announcement: Facebook is currently running a trial of integrating voice and video chat into its main application, meaning that users could soon start conferencing over Facebook directly without using the Messenger app. If you'd like to read more of our coverage on how technology has recently affected workplace communication, click here.
This week, a software company called Video Window announced a new addition to its product line, called Video Window Remote. Similar to Zoom and Skype, many of Video Window's products focus on internet-based video communication. This new product ups the ante, so speak, by playing a continuous feed of a worker's office directly onto their home devices.