Face recognition in Moscow’s metro, Tor’s battle against internet censorship, and other cybersecurity developments

Here are the week’s most important cybersecurity headlines.

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Group-IB: the number of ransomware attacks in 2020 rose by 150%

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In 2020, the number of ransomware attacks rose by more than 150% from the previous year, according to Group-IB, ForkLog reported.

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The average ransom demand more than doubled to $170,000. Ransomware operators Maze, DoppelPaymer and RagnarLocker demanded victims an average of between $1 million and $2 million.

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In Russia last year, the hacker group OldGremlin became more active, despite the tacit rule among cybercriminals not to operate in Russia, say experts.

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The Russian Ministry of Digital Development proposed allowing anonymised personal data trading

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The ministry proposed amendments to the bill clarifying the procedure for obtaining permission to use personal data. The proposals would permit the use of anonymised data from Russians, including, \”for entrepreneurial activity\”, РБК reports, citing the document.

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Anonymisation will be possible only with the user’s consent, except in exceptional cases. Operators will not be able to pass additional information to third parties that would allow identifying the owner of anonymised data.

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Google to stop tracking users for ad targeting

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Google plans to abandon third-party cookies used to track users. The company also stressed that it will not create alternative identifiers to track people visiting web pages and will not use them in its products.

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All Moscow Metro stations to implement fare payments via facial recognition

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By the end of 2021, all Moscow Metro stations will be equipped to allow contactless fare payments through the Face Pay facial-recognition system, according to Andrey Kichigin, deputy head of the metro.

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Lawyers from the public organisation RosKomSvoboda expressed doubts about the reliability of the databases where the collected biometric data will be stored.

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Researchers analysed more than 5 billion leaked passwords

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Analysts at Data Leakage & Breach Intelligence studied 5.1 billion unique email addresses and passwords that ended up in the public domain.

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According to these data, the most popular passwords of all time were: 123456, 123456789 and qwerty.

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Millions of Flickr photos used to build facial-recognition software

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The Tor Project advised users to check whether their Flickr photos were used in developing facial-recognition software. It is alleged that millions of Flickr photos are used for this purpose.

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Millions of photos uploaded to Flickr were used to build facial recognition software. You can now easily check if your photos were among them: https://t.co/tp5SvH0opw

— The Tor Project (@torproject) March 4, 2021

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Snowflake allows turning a user’s browser into a proxy. This helps residents in regions where Tor access is blocked to connect to it.

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Also on ForkLog:

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• Data for 21 million users of three VPN services.
• Theft of $14 million from DeFi project Furucombo.
• The elite Russian-language hacker forum Maza was hacked.
• Brave browser to launch a private search engine.
• Criminals began using Telegram bots for extortion of users.

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What to read this weekend?

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Facial recognition can be a dangerous technology from a privacy perspective, as well as for abuses, rights advocates say.

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We discuss the ambiguities of facial recognition and the risks associated with this technology, using Clearview — a company that \\”could end privacy as we know it\\” — as an example.

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