An anonymous reader writes: Jeff Teper, CVP for Microsoft 365, has a vision for the company's Office 365 chat-based collaboration tool that competes with Slack, Facebook's Workplace, and Google Chat. In terms of reach, Teper wants Microsoft Teams to eclipse Windows. (Windows 10 runs on over 1 billion monthly active devices.)

Our interview took place a day after Microsoft concluded its online-only Build 2020 developer conference, where the company gave business developers new tools to build Teams apps. Microsoft launched a Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code extension for Teams in preview, introduced new integrations between its Power Platform and Teams, and announced a custom app submission process to help IT admins. Teper was happy to cover a range of Teams topics, including metrics, growth, competitors, consumer positioning, machine learning, and of course dealing with the increased demand during the coronavirus pandemic.

CAM4, a popular adult platform that advertises "free live sex cams," misconfigured an ElasticSearch production database so that it was easy to find and view heaps of personally identifiable information, as well as corporate details like fraud and spam detection logs. According to Wired, the database exposed 7 terabytes of names, sexual orientations, payment logs, and email and chat transcripts -- 10.88 billions records in all. From the report: First of all, very important distinction here: There's no evidence that CAM4 was hacked, or that the database was accessed by malicious actors. That doesn't mean it wasn't, but this is not an Ashley Madison-style meltdown. It's the difference between leaving the bank vault door wide open (bad) and robbers actually stealing the money (much worse). [...] The list of data that CAM4 leaked is alarmingly comprehensive. The production logs Safety Detectives found date back to March 16 of this year; in addition to the categories of information mentioned above, they also included country of origin, sign-up dates, device information, language preferences, user names, hashed passwords, and email correspondence between users and the company.

Out of the 10.88 billion records the researchers found, 11 million contained email addresses, while another 26,392,701 had password hashes for both CAM4 users and website systems. A few hundred of the entries included full names, credit card types, and payment amounts. Who's Affected? It's hard to say exactly, but the Safety Detectives analysis suggests that roughly 6.6 million US users of CAM4 were part of the leak, along with 5.4 million in Brazil, 4.9 million in Italy, and 4.2 million in France. It's unclear to what extent the leak impacted both performers and customers. The report says CAM4's parent company, Granity Entertainment, took the server offline within a half hour of being contacted by the researchers.

An anonymous reader writes: Browser maker Mozilla is working on a new service called Private Relay that generates unique aliases to hide a user's email address from advertisers and spam operators when filling in online forms. The service entered testing last month and is currently in a closed beta, with a public beta currently scheduled for later this year, ZDNet has learned. Private Relay will be available as a Firefox add-on that lets users generate a unique email address -- an email alias -- with one click. The user can then enter this email address in web forms to send contact requests, subscribe to newsletters, and register new accounts. "We will forward emails from the alias to your real inbox," Mozilla says on the Firefox Private Relay website. "If any alias starts to receive emails you don't want, you can disable it or delete it completely," the browser maker said.

Google announced this week new rules for the Chrome Web Store in an attempt to cut down the number of shady Chrome extensions submitted and listed on the site. From a report: Starting August 27, Google says it intends to enforce a new set of rules, which will result in a large number of extensions being delisted. These rules are meant to crack down on a series of practices extension developers have been recently employing to flood the Web Store with shady extensions or boost install counts for low-quality content. They include:
1. Developers cannot submit duplicate extensions anymore. (e.g. Wallpaper extensions that have different names but provide the user with the same wallpapers when installed.)
2. Extensions are not allowed to use "keyword spam" techniques to flood metadata fields with multiple terms and have the extension listed across multiple categories to improve the extension's visibility in search results.
3. Developers are not allowed to use misleading, improperly formatted, non-descriptive, irrelevant, excessive, or inappropriate metadata. Extension metadata needs to be accurate, and Google intends to be strict about it.
4. Developers are now forbidden from inflating product ratings, reviews, or install counts by illegitimate means, such as fraudulent or paid downloads, reviews, and ratings.

1.5 billion people use Gmail, according to a recent article in the BBC. And every day millions of them receive an email about a coronavirus scam: Scammers are sending 18 million hoax emails about Covid-19 to Gmail users every day, according to Google... The company said it was blocking more than 100 million phishing emails a day. Over the past week, almost a fifth were scam emails related to coronavirus. The virus may now be the biggest phishing topic ever, tech firms say...

The growth in coronavirus-themed phishing is being recorded by several cyber-security companies. Barracuda Networks said it had seen a 667% increase in malicious phishing emails during the pandemic...

Google claims that its machine-learning tools are able to block more than 99.9% of [scam] emails from reaching its users.

McGruber shares a report from Business Insider: Facebook is blocking users from posting some legitimate news articles about the coronavirus in what appears to be a bug in its spam filters. On Tuesday, multiple Facebook users reported on Twitter that they found themselves unable to post articles from certain news outlets including Business Insider, BuzzFeed, The Atlantic, and the Times of Israel. It's not clear exactly what has gone wrong, and Facebook did not respond to a request for comment.

Alex Stamos, an outspoken former Facebook security exec, speculated that it might be caused by Facebook's shift to automated software after it sent its human content moderators home. "It looks like an anti-spam rule at FB is going haywire," he wrote on Twitter. "Facebook sent home content moderators yesterday, who generally can't [work from home] due to privacy commitments the company has made. We might be seeing the start of the machine learning going nuts with less human oversight. In a tweet, VP of Integrity Guy Rosen said: "We're on this -- this is a bug in an anti-spam system, unrelated to any changes in our content moderator workforce. We're in the process of fixing and bringing all these posts back."

Malware distributors "have started disseminating real-time, accurate information about global infection rates tied to the Coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic in a bid to infect computers with malicious software," reports security researcher Brian Krebs: In one scheme, an interactive dashboard of Coronavirus infections and deaths produced by Johns Hopkins University is being used in malicious Web sites (and possibly spam emails) to spread password-stealing malware. Late last month, a member of several Russian language cybercrime forums began selling a digital Coronavirus infection kit that uses the Hopkins interactive map as part of a Java-based malware deployment scheme.

The kit costs $200 if the buyer already has a Java code signing certificate, and $700 if the buyer wishes to just use the seller's certificate. "It loads [a] fully working online map of Corona Virus infected areas and other data," the seller explains. "Map is resizable, interactive, and has real time data from World Health Organization and other sources. Users will think that PreLoader is actually a map, so they will open it and will spread it to their friends and it goes viral...!" The sales thread claims the customer's payload can be bundled with the Java-based map into a filename that most Webmail providers allow in sent messages... The seller says the user/victim has to have Java installed for the map and exploit to work, but that it will work even on fully patched versions of Java...

It's unclear how many takers this seller has had, but earlier this week security experts began warning of new malicious Web sites being stood up that used interactive versions of the same map to distract visitors while the sites tried to foist the password-stealing AZORult malware.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Twitter today updated its Developer Policy to clarify rules around data usage, including in academic research, as well as its position on bots, among other things. The policy has also been entirely rewritten in an effort to simplify the language used and make it more conversational, Twitter says. The new policy has been shortened from eight sections to four, and the accompanying Twitter Developer Agreement has been updated to align with the Policy changes, as well. One of the more notable updates to the new policy is a change to the rules to better support non-commercial research.

Twitter data is used to study topics like spam, abuse, and other areas related to conversation health, the company noted, and it wants these efforts to continue. The revised policy now allows the use of the Twitter API for academic research purposes. In addition, Twitter is simplifying its rules around the redistribution of Twitter data to aid researchers. Now, researchers will be able to share an unlimited number of Tweet IDs and/or User IDs, if they're doing so on behalf of an academic institution and for the sole purpose of non-commercial research, such as peer review, says Twitter. The company is also revising rules to clarify how developers are to proceed when the use cases for Twitter data change. In the new policy, developers are informed that they must notify the company of any "substantive" modification to their use case and receive approval before using Twitter content for that purpose. Not doing so will result in suspension and termination of their API and data access, Twitter warns.

The policy additionally outlines when and where "off-Twitter matching" is permitted, meaning when a Twitter account is being associated with a profile built using other data. Either the developer will need to obtain opt-in consent from the user in question, or they can only proceed if the information was provided by the person or is based on publicly available data. [...] Finally, the revamped policy clarifies that not all bots are bad. Some even enhance the Twitter experience, the company says, or provide useful information. Going forward, developers must specify if they're operating a bot account, what the account is, and who is behind it. This way, explains Twitter, "it's easier for everyone on Twitter to know what's a bot – and what's not."

Microsoft announced today a coordinated takedown of Necurs, one of the largest spam and malware botnets known to date, believed to have infected more than nine million computers worldwide. From a report: The takedown effort came after Microsoft and industry partners broke the Necurs DGA -- the botnet's domain generation algorithm, the component that generates random domain names. Necurs authors register DHA-generated domains weeks or months in advance and host the botnet's command-and-control (C&C) servers, where bots (infected computers) connect to receive new commands. "We were then able to accurately predict over six million unique domains that would be created in the next 25 months," said Tom Burt, Microsoft Vice President for Customer Security & Trust. Breaking the DGA allowed Microsoft and its industry partners to create a comprehensive list of future Necurs C&C server domains that they can now block and prevent the Necurs team from registering.

Facebook filed a lawsuit this week against Namecheap, claiming the domain name registrar has refused to cooperate in an investigation into a series of malicious domains that have been registered through its service and which impersonated the Facebook brand. ZDNet reports: Christen Dubois, Director and Associate General Counsel at Facebook, said today that Facebook engineers tracked down 45 suspicious Facebook lookalike domains registered through Namecheap, which had the owners' details hidden through the company's WhoisGuard side-service. Some of the sample domains included the likes of instagrambusinesshelp.com, facebo0k-login.com, and whatsappdownload.site. Dubois said lookalike domains like these -- which abuse the Facebook brand -- are often used for phishing, fraud, and scams.

"We sent notices to Whoisguard between October 2018 and February 2020, and despite their obligation to provide information about these infringing domain names, they declined to cooperate," Dubois said. "We don't want people to be deceived by these web addresses, so we've taken legal action," the Facebook exec said.

Adrianne Jeffries, Leon Yin, and Surya Mattu, reporting for The Markup: Pete Buttigieg is leading at 63 percent. Andrew Yang came in second at 46 percent. And Elizabeth Warren looks like she's in trouble with 0 percent. These aren't poll numbers for the U.S. 2020 Democratic presidential contest. Instead, they reflect which candidates were able to consistently land in Gmail's primary inbox in a simple test. The Markup set up a new Gmail account to find out how the company filters political email from candidates, think tanks, advocacy groups, and nonprofits. We found that few of the emails we'd signed up to receive -- 11 percent -- made it to the primary inbox, the first one a user sees when opening Gmail and the one the company says is "for the mail you really, really want."

Half of all emails landed in a tab called "promotions," which Gmail says is for "deals, offers, and other marketing emails." Gmail sent another 40 percent to spam. For political causes and candidates, who get a significant amount of their donations through email, having their messages diverted into less-visible tabs or spam can have profound effects. "The fact that Gmail has so much control over our democracy and what happens and who raises money is frightening," said Kenneth Pennington, a consultant who worked on Beto O'Rourke's digital campaign. "It's scary that if Gmail changes their algorithms," he added, "they'd have the power to impact our election."

If you thought LinkedIn had already reached peak undesirability, you were wrong: the company is now planning to add Snapchat-style Stories to its platform. From a report: Yes, the business-focused networking app that fills your inbox with recruiter and PR spam may be getting Stories. Social media users have been suffering from Stories exhaustion for years at this point. It's a feature that works great for its pioneer, Snapchat, and for Instagram... and pretty much nothing else -- I mean, have you ever watched a Facebook Story on purpose? LinkedIn Stories inevitably promise to bring well-manicured, painfully corporate video clips to your feed as a way to mix up the approach to networking. Or, as the company puts it, to "bring creativity and authenticity to the ways that members share more of their work life, so that they can build and nurture the relationships necessary to become more productive and successful."

Truecaller, one of the world's largest caller-identification service providers, has amassed 200 million monthly active users and is increasingly proving that it can turn a profit, it said Tuesday. The company also noted that India is its largest market with 150 million active users. From a report: Reaching the 200 million milestone gives the Swedish firm a significant lead over its Seattle-based rival Hiya, which had about 100 million users as of October last year. But unlike its rivals, Truecaller has expanded beyond its caller ID and spam monitoring service. In recent years, it has added messaging and payments services in some markets. Both of these are gaining adoption, said Truecaller co-founder and chief executive Alan Mamedi (pictured above) in an interview with TechCrunch. The payments service, currently available only in India, would soon be expanded to some African markets, said Mamedi. In India, Truecaller plans to offer lending service in a few weeks, he said.

Mogster shares a report from the BBC: Monty Python stars have led the tributes to their co-star Terry Jones, who has died at the age of 77. The Welsh actor and writer played a variety of characters in the iconic comedy group's Flying Circus TV series, and directed several of their films. He died on Tuesday, four years after contracting a rare form of dementia known as Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD). Here are some of Jones' best lines:

"Now, you listen here! He's not the Messiah. He's a very naughty boy!" -- as Brian's mother in Monty Python's Life of Brian

"I'm alive, I'm alive!" -- as the naked hermit who gives away the location of a hiding Brian in Life of Brian

"I shall use my largest scales" - as Sir Belvedere, who oversees a witch trial in Monty Python and the Holy Grail

"What, the curtains?" -- as Prince Herbert, who is told "One day, lad, all this will be yours" in Holy Grail

"Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam" -- as the greasy spoon waitress in a Monty Python sketch

It's a tantalizing prospect for traders whose success often hinges on microseconds: a desktop PC algorithm that crunches market data faster than today's most advanced supercomputers. Japan's Toshiba says it has the technology to make such rapid-fire calculations a reality -- not quite quantum computing, but perhaps the next best thing. From a report: The claim is being met with a mix of intrigue and skepticism at financial firms in Tokyo and around the world. Toshiba's "Simulated Bifurcation Algorithm" is designed to harness the principles behind quantum computers without requiring the use of such machines, which currently have limited applications and can cost millions of dollars to build and keep near absolute zero temperature. Toshiba says its technology, which may also have uses outside finance, runs on PCs made from off-the-shelf components.

"You can just plug it into a server and run it at room temperature," Kosuke Tatsumura, a senior research scientist at Toshiba's Computer & Network Systems Laboratory, said in an interview. The Tokyo-based conglomerate, while best known for its consumer electronics and nuclear reactors, has long conducted research into advanced technologies. Toshiba has said it needs a partner to adopt the algorithm for real-world use, and financial firms have taken notice as they grapple for an edge in markets increasingly dominated by machines. Banks, brokerages and asset managers have all been experimenting with quantum computing, although viable applications are generally considered to be some time away.

Following in Mozilla's footsteps, Google announced today plans to hide notification popup prompts inside Chrome starting next month, February 2020. ZDNet reports: According to a blog post published today, Google plans to roll out a "quieter notification permission UI that reduces the interruptiveness of notification permission requests." The change is scheduled for Google Chrome 80, scheduled for release on February 4, next month.

Starting with Chrome 80 next month, Google's browser will also block most notification popups by default, and show an icon in the URL bar, similar to Firefox. When Chrome 80 launches next month, a new option will be added in the Chrome settings section that allows users to enroll in the new "quieter notification UI." Users can enable this option as soon as Chrome 80 is released, or they can wait for Google to enable it by default as the feature rolls out to the wider Chrome userbase in the following weeks. According to Google, the new feature works by hiding notification requests for Chrome users who regularly dismiss notification prompts. Furthermore, Chrome will also automatically block notification prompts on sites where users rarely accept notifications.

Security researcher Ibrahim Balic said he has matched 17 million phone numbers to Twitter user accounts by exploiting a flaw in Twitter's Android app. TechCrunch reports: Ibrahim Balic found that it was possible to upload entire lists of generated phone numbers through Twitter's contacts upload feature. "If you upload your phone number, it fetches user data in return," he told TechCrunch. He said Twitter's contact upload feature doesn't accept lists of phone numbers in sequential format -- likely as a way to prevent this kind of matching. Instead, he generated more than two billion phone numbers, one after the other, then randomized the numbers, and uploaded them to Twitter through the Android app. (Balic said the bug did not exist in the web-based upload feature.)

Over a two-month period, Balic said he matched records from users in Israel, Turkey, Iran, Greece, Armenia, France and Germany, he said, but stopped after Twitter blocked the effort on December 20. Balic provided TechCrunch with a sample of the phone numbers he matched. Using the site's password reset feature, we verified his findings by comparing a random selection of usernames with the phone numbers that were provided. While he did not alert Twitter to the vulnerability, he took many of the phone numbers of high-profile Twitter users -- including politicians and officials -- to a WhatsApp group in an effort to warn users directly. A Twitter spokesperson told TechCrunch the company was working to "ensure this bug cannot be exploited again."

"Upon learning of this bug, we suspended the accounts used to inappropriately access people's personal information. Protecting the privacy and safety of the people who use Twitter is our number one priority and we remain focused on rapidly stopping spam and abuse originating from use of Twitter's APIs," the spokesperson said.

Businesses often send one-time passwords, account alerts and appointment confirmations via text. But if you've ever received one of those, you know they tend to come from a random number, and bad actors can take advantage of that by disguising phishing scams as one of those messages. To protect users, Google will soon verify SMS messages from registered businesses. From a report: When you receive a message from a verified business, you'll see the company name, logo and a verification badge in the message thread. Businesses must sign up to use Verified SMS, and so far, 1-800-Flowers, Banco Bradesco, Kayak, Payback and SoFi are on-board. Verified SMS is rolling out gradually in the US, Brazil, Canada, France, India, Mexico, Philippines, Spain and the UK. Google is also adding real-time spam detection. When Google suspects a message is phishy or garbage, it will show a spam warning in Messages.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: An email sent by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to all Florida county commissioners indicated that the ransomware that struck the city of Pensacola on December 7 was the same malware used in an attack against the private security firm Allied Universal, according to a report by the Pensacola News Journal. That malware has been identified elsewhere as Maze, a form of ransomware that has also been distributed via spam email campaigns in Italy.

Bleeping Computer's Lawrence Abrams reported in November that the Maze operators had contacted him after the Allied Universal attack, claiming to have stolen files from the company before encrypting them on the victims' computers. After Allied apparently missed the deadline for payment of the ransom on the files, the ransomware operators published 700 megabytes of files from Allied and demanded 300 Bitcoins (approximately $2.3 million) to decrypt the network. The Maze operators told Abrams that they always steal victims' files to use as further leverage to get them to pay: "It is just a logic. If we disclose it who will believe us? It is not in our interest, it will be silly to disclose as we gain nothing from it. We also delete data because it is not really interesting. We are neither espionage group nor any other type of APT, the data is not interesting for us." "The use of the data to blackmail the victim, and in Allied's case, the threat to use Allied's certificates and domain name to spam customers with additional ransomware attacks, is something new," writes Sean Gallagher.

"This is the first time this has ever happened, as far as we know," said Brett Callow, a spokesperson for the antivirus software vendor Emisoft. "Ransomware groups usually encrypt, not steal. We expect data exfiltration to become more and more commonplace. Whether Pensacola's data was exfiltrated, I obviously can't say."

The nonprofit Open Source Technology Improvement Fund connects open-source security projects with funding and logistical support. (Launched in 2015, the Illinois-based group includes on its advisory council representatives from DuckDuckGo and the OpenVPN Project.)

To raise more money, they're now planning to offer "hacker-themed swag" and apparel created with a state-of-the art direct-to-garment printer -- and they're using Kickstarter to help pay for that printer: With the equipment fully paid for, we will add a crucial revenue stream to our project so that we can get more of our crucial work funded. OSTIF is kicking-in half of the funding for the new equipment from our own donated funds from previous projects, and we are raising the other half through this KickStarter. We have carefully selected commercial-grade equipment, high quality materials, and gathered volunteers to work on the production of the shirts and wallets.
Pledges of $15 or more will be rewarded with an RFID-blocking wallet that blocks "drive-by" readers from scanning cards in your pocket, engraved with the message of your choice. And donors pledging $18 or more get to choose from their "excellent gallery" of t-shirts. Dozens of artists have contributed more than 40 specially-commissioned "hacker-themed" designs, including "Resist Surveillance" and "Linux is Communism" (riffing on a 2000 remark by Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer).

There's also shirts commemorating Edward Snowden (including one with an actual NSA document leaked by Edward Snowden) as well as a mock concert t-shirt for the "world tour" of the EternalBlue exploit listing locations struck after it was weaponized by the NSA. One t-shirt even riffs on the new millennial catchphrase "OK boomer" -- replacing it with the phrase "OK Facebook" using fake Cyrillic text.

And one t-shirt design shows an actual critical flaw found by the OSTIF while reviewing OpenVPN 2.4.0.

So far they have 11 backers, earning $790 of their $45,000 goal.