12/04/2021: Cybersecurity & Tech News Roundup

After a short break over Easter, Secarma’s tech news roundup is back, so buckle up for the latest technology updates, cybersecurity news, and more. Here’s what’s going on in the tech world this Monday:

A power failure at an Iranian nuclear facility is causing serious political problems

What does a power failure at the Natanz facility in Iran have to do with cybersecurity? Well, the Iranian media has been claiming that the outage was the result of a cyber-attack. This isn’t the first time critical facilities have been targeted by threat actors, but this incident stands out specifically because it happened a day after the Natanz complex revealed new uranium enrichment equipment.

Iran is currently pointing the finger at Israel – accusing Israeli nation state hackers of attempting to sabotage Iran’s nuclear programme, with Iran’s foreign minister vowing to “take revenge.” Israel hasn’t commented directly on the situation, but has expressed concerns about Iran’s nuclear efforts. This all comes at a very bad time, and could affect the progress of diplomatic talks concerning Iran’s nuclear capabilities that were only recently revived. Read more here.

Here’s what’s happening following the Facebook data leak

Data belonging to over 500 million Facebook accounts were recently leaked, but unless you keep on top of cybersecurity news, you may not be aware of it. Unfortunately, this isn’t going to change anytime soon, as Facebook does not plan to notify the users who were affected by the breach.

The dataset included users’ full names, phone numbers, locations, birthdays, and much more. Interestingly, among those user details was the personal info of Facebook’s founder – Mark Zuckerberg. Not only was Zuckerberg criticised for the leak, but also for his lack of loyalty to his own organisation; it was revealed that he uses the Signal app on his phone. This end-to-end encrypted application is seen as a more secure alternative to Facebook-owned WhatsApp and Messenger. Read more here.

Was LinkedIn breached?

If you value your privacy, now isn’t a great time to be on social media. First there was the massive Facebook data leak, now LinkedIn is the latest platform to hit the headlines due to possibly being compromised. The Microsoft-owned social network has confirmed that data scraped from over 500 million LinkedIn profiles was being sold by a cyber-criminal on a hacker forum.

This data included full names, email addresses, phone numbers, and more, but LinkedIn has completely denied that there was a breach. A spokesperson for the platform had this to say: “We have investigated an alleged set of LinkedIn data that has been posted for sale and have determined that it is actually an aggregation of data from a number of websites and companies.” Their statement claims that the data that was being sold only includes info you’d see on a user’s public page, so there was no data breach. Read more here.

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