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Top 10 Services That Hackers Target the Most

Andrew Orr ·

Software system provider Intact collected data and analyzed it to see which brands hackers are searching for as their next potential hacking targets.

We analysed search intent by digging out the number of searches for terms including ‘how to hack [xyz]’. Although career cybercriminals are likely to use more nefarious means to research and test their hacking processes, Google search data provides an insight into global intent and changing trends.

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‘Weedmaps’ Adds In-App Purchases for Cannabis Products

Andrew Orr ·

An app called Weedmaps was updated to let customers purchase products directly within the app. It’s a notable move because Apple’s restrictions previously forbade in-app purchases for cannabis.

The change comes after Apple opened up the App Store for some cannabis apps. Under the new guidance, licensed cannabis operators fall under the same restrictions (to Apple) as licensed pharmacies allowing apps like Weedmaps, which lists licensed cannabis operators, to offer such services.

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DeFi Platform ‘Poly Network’ Hacked, $600 Million in Crypto Stolen

Andrew Orr ·

Poly Network is a cross-chain decentralized finance platform and operates on the Binance Smart Chain, Ethereum and Polygon blockchains. It suffered a hack recently in which approximately US$600 million in crypto was stolen.

About one hour after Poly announced the hack on Twitter, the hacker tried to move assets including USDT through the Ethereum address into liquidity pool Curve.fi, records show. The transaction was rejected. Meanwhile, close to $100 million has been moved out of the Binance Smart Chain address in the past 30 minutes and deposited into liquidity pool Ellipsis Finance.

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Firefox 91 Update Lets You Fully Erase Your Browser History

Andrew Orr ·

Mozilla’s latest update to Firefox, version 91, offers enhanced cookie clearing when a user deletes their browser history.

When you decide to tell Firefox to forget about a website, Firefox will automatically throw away all cookies, supercookies and other data stored in that website’s “cookie jar”. This “Enhanced Cookie Clearing” makes it easy to delete all traces of a website in your browser without the possibility of sneaky third-party cookies sticking around.

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FEMA to Test Emergency Alert System on August 11, 2021

Andrew Orr ·

On Wednesday, August 11, 2021 FEMA will test its Emergency Alert System as well as the Wireless Emergency Alerts system. It will happen at 2:20 ET.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, runs the test every year or two to ensure the system is working properly. It’s no small task: A national emergency alert system that can broadcast a message to potentially hundreds of millions of people at any given time is fraught with technological hurdles that require close co-operation from the cell carriers and broadcast networks.

On the iPhone you can see if you have these alerts enabled in Settings > Notifications, and scrolling down to the bottom.

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‘Non-Standalone’ 5G Exposes Phones to Stingray Police Surveillance

Andrew Orr ·

5G that uses “non-standalone architecture” is rife with security issues and doesn’t protect people from Stingray police surveillance.

Borgaonkar and fellow researcher Altaf Shaik, a senior research scientist at TU Berlin, found that major carriers in Norway and Germany are still putting out 5G in non-standalone mode, which means that those connections are still susceptible to stingrays. The two presented at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas last week.

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Secure Chat App ‘Signal’ Announces Default Disappearing Messages

Andrew Orr ·

Signal, a messaging app that uses end-to-end encryption, introduced a feature to let you have all of your messages disappear by default.

Until now, disappearing messages had to be enabled on a per-conversation basis, but for those who want to take ephemerality to the fullest, Signal now supports the ability to preconfigure all conversations you initiate with a default timer.

We’ve also added the ability to set custom timer durations on your conversations, so that some content can be gone in 60 seconds and others can exist for 18 minutes or 4 weeks.

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Google Introduces New Safety Features for Kids and Teens

Andrew Orr ·

Google on Tuesday announced new safety features for minors across YouTube, Google Search, Google Play Store, and more.

In the coming weeks, we’ll introduce a new policy that enables anyone under the age of 18, or their parent or guardian, to request the removal of their images from Google Image results. Of course, removing an image from Search doesn’t remove it from the web, but we believe this change will help give young people more control of their images online.

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Parallels 17 is First macOS Monterey Virtual Machine Running on Apple Silicon

Charlotte Henry ·

Parallels 17, the latest version of the software that allows users to work with Apple and Windows operating systems on the same device, is out now. 9to5 Mac has a good breakdown of the latest features.

Software doesn’t stand still and neither do the operating systems. macOS Monterey and Windows 11 will be coming sooner than later and Parallels 17 is ready for them both as a host and a guest. If you need to start testing macOS Monterey for your job but are not ready to run it full time, Parallels 17 lets you run it in a virtual machine today. Parallels worked closely with Apple to optimize the experience of running macOS Monterey in a virtual machine. Parallels 17 shows noticeable speed improvements across the board. Resuming an OS is now 38% faster and OpenGL performs up to six times faster. Apple Silicon Macs report over a 20% performance boost with Windows 10 boot time, improved disk performance, and enhanced DirectX11 support.