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Submission + - Refunds For 300 Million Phone Users Sought In Lawsuits Over Location-Data Sales (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The four major U.S. wireless carriers are facing proposed class-action lawsuits accusing them of violating federal law by selling their customers' real-time location data to third parties. The complaints seeking class action status and financial damages were filed last week against AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint in U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland. The four suits, filed on behalf of customers by lawyers from the Z Law firm in Maryland, all begin with text nearly identical to this intro found in the suit against AT&T: "This action arises out of Defendant's collection of geolocation data and the unauthorized dissemination to third-parties of the geolocation data collected from its users' cell phones. AT&T admittedly sells customer geolocation data to third-parties, including but not limited to data aggregators, who in turn, are able to use or resell the geolocation data with little or no oversight by AT&T. This is an action seeking damages for AT&T gross failure to safeguard highly personal and private consumer geolocation data in violation of federal law."

The proposed classes would include all of the four carriers' customers in the U.S. between 2015 and 2019. In all, that would be 300 million or more customers, as the lawsuits say the proposed classes consist of at least 100 million customers each for AT&T and Verizon and at least 50 million each for Sprint and T-Mobile. Each lawsuit seeks damages for consumers "in an amount to be proven at trial."

Submission + - Bitdefender Disables Anti-Exploit Monitoring in Chrome After Google Policy Chang (bleepingcomputer.com)

Submitted by secwatcher
secwatcher writes: One of the programs that a lot of users have seen listed in these alerts and is suggested to be removed is the Bitdefender antivirus program as shown above. Having a well known company like Google telling users to remove a security solution is a problem as these programs are important for many users to have installed on their computers in order to protect them from malware, unwanted programs, and malicious websites.

Submission + - VORACLE Attack Can Recover HTTP Data From VPN Connections (bleepingcomputer.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A new attack named VORACLE can recover HTTP traffic sent via encrypted VPN connections under certain conditions. The attack was discovered by security researcher Ahamed Nafeez, who presented his findings at the Black Hat and DEF CON security conferences held last week in Las Vegas.

The conditions are that the VPN service/client uses the OpenVPN protocol and that the VPN app compresses the HTTP traffic before it encrypts it using TLS. To make matters worse, the OpenVPN protocols compresses all data by default before sending it via the VPN tunnel. At least one VPN provider, TunnelBear, has updated its client to turn off the compression. HTTPS traffic is safe, and only HTTP data sent via the VPN under these conditions can be sent. Users can also stay safe by switching to another VPN protocol if their VPN client suppports multiple tunneling technologies.

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