Month: July 2017

Enlarge (credit: Keith Ivey)

A federal judge on Monday refused to block President Donald Trump's advisory panel from demanding that the states hand over their registered voters' full names, political affiliations, addresses, dates of birth, criminal records, the last four digits of their Social Security numbers, and other personal identifying information, including whether they voted in elections the past decade.

The Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, which wants to make the data public, has been met with stiff resistance, including from at least 44 states which say they cannot comply with the complete demand because laws in their individual states prohibit them from doing so.

But in a lawsuit from the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), which challenged the demand on privacy and other grounds, US District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of the District of Columbia said Trump's commission is exempt from the usual requirement that agencies consider privacy impacts of their new databases. She said the commission—which at Trump's urging wants to study voting irregularities such as whether dead people have been voting—is not an agency. Therefore, it is exempt from a 2002 law requiring a privacy impact statement for newly created government data systems.

Enlarge (credit: Tim Malabuyo)

A mysterious piece of malware that gives attackers surreptitious control over webcams, keyboards, and other sensitive resources has been infecting Macs for at least five years. The infections—known to number nearly 400 and possibly much higher—remained undetected until recently and may have been active for almost a decade.

Patrick Wardle, a researcher with security firm Synack, said the malware is a variant of a malicious program that came to light in January after circulating for at least two years. Dubbed Fruitfly by some, both malware samples capture screenshots, keystrokes, webcam images, and information about each infected Mac. Both generations of Fruitfly also collect information about devices connected to the same network. After researchers from security firm Malwarebytes discovered the earlier Fruitfly variant infecting four Macs, Apple updated macOS to automatically detect the malware.

The variant found by Wardle, by contrast, has infected a much larger number of Macs and remained undetected by both macOS and commercial antivirus products. After analyzing the new variant, Wardle was able to decrypt several backup domains that were hardcoded into the malware. To his surprise, the domains remained available. Within two days of registering one of the addresses, close to 400 infected Macs connected to the server, mostly from homes located in the United States. Although Wardle did nothing more than observe the IP address and user names of Macs that connected to his server, he had the ability to use the malware to spy on the users who were unwittingly infected.

Enlarge (credit: Adi Chappo)

Don’t worry Comic-Con fans, you don’t have to remove your comic books from your checked luggage, despite what a Sunday photo circulated on Twitter suggests.

The dust-up began after a person named Adi Chappo tweeted the above, tagging United Airlines, which responded on Twitter:

The restriction on checking comic books applies to all airlines operating out of San Diego this weekend and is set by the TSA. ^MD

— United (@united) July 23, 2017

But by Monday, the Transportation Security Administration was saying that no such restriction existed.