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Windows 10 might start sharing your web history with other apps
Microsoft's Windows 10 might soon be sharing more on your online habits than you might be comfortable with.
An early development release of the Edge web browser spotted online reportedly has a toggle that will allow it to share your browsing data with other Windows 10 services.
While this could very well just be laying the groundwork for extending the sync service that shares browser data across devices, in the absence of a detailed explanation it does seem to have all the makings of a privacy intruding feature.
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Privacy intrusion
The setting labelled Share browsing data with other Windows features is accessible from under the Settings > Profiles in the Edge browser in the Canary stream.
“When turned on, Microsoft Edge will connect local browsing data from this profile with the rest of Windows. Turning this feature on will help you find information from your history, favorites, top sites, and recent tabs more easily using features such as the Windows Search box,” reads the description of the new setting.
At first glance, the setting does seem to be a convenience feature that will allow users to return to their favourite websites, directly from the desktop. However, Windows Search box is only used as an example of the services that will have access to your Edge browser data.
Other Windows 10 features such as Cortana involve ferrying information to Microsoft servers, which could rile up privacy advocates no end. Similarly, it isn’t clear if the feature allows Microsoft to display targeted advertisements directly on the desktop of the users, which could be annoying and embarrassing in the least, to outright dangerous if exploited by unscrupulous advertisers to deliver potentially unwanted programs (PUPs).
From the screenshots it isn’t clear whether the setting will be enabled by default or not. The absence of a data retention policy and how it will work across multiple devices raises further concerns.
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Via: Techdows
Date
22 Mar 2021Sources
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Major security issues found in top Linux program for embedded devices
Read MoreCybersecurity researchers have discovered 14 critical vulnerabilities in BusyBox, marketed as the Swiss Army Knife of embedded Linux.
BusyBox is one of the most widely used Linux software suites, and many of the world’s leading operational technology (OT) and Internet of Things (IoT) devices run BusyBox.
Some of the threats could have resulted in denial of service (DoS) attacks in exploited, and in rarer cases, could also lead to information leaks and possibly remote code execution.
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“These new vulnerabilities that we've disclosed only manifest in specific cases, but could be extremely problematic when exploitable. The proliferation of BusyBox makes this an issue that needs to be addressed by security teams,” the team noted.
Assessing the damage
To assess the threat level posed by these vulnerabilities, the researchers inspected JFrog's database of more than 10,000 publicly-available embedded firmware images.
Their experiment revealed that 40% of the images contained a BusyBox executable file that was linked with one of the affected applets, leading them to conclude that the vulnerabilities are extremely widespread among Linux-based embedded firmware.
That said, the researchers shared several reasons that lead them to believe that the discovered vulnerabilities would likely not pose a critical security threat.
For starters, the researchers say that even though the DoS vulnerabilities are trivial to exploit, their impact can usually be mitigated by the fact that the affected applets almost always run as a separate forked process.
Similarly, the use-after-free vulnerabilities may be exploitable for remote code execution, but the researchers didn’t not attempt to create a weaponized exploit for them. Finally, the information leak vulnerability is nontrivial to exploit.
The researchers note that all 14 vulnerabilities have been fixed in BusyBox 1.34.0 as they urge companies to upgrade their BusyBox deployments, or at least ensure that they aren’t using any of the affected applets.
Prevent information leaks with the help of one of these best firewall apps and services, and ensure your computers are running these best endpoint protection tools to add another layer of defense against cyber-attacks.
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