WIRED: Secretive White House Surveillance Program Gives Cops Access to Trillions of US Phone Records. “A little-known surveillance program tracks more than a trillion domestic phone records within the United States each year, according to a letter WIRED obtained that was sent by US senator Ron Wyden to the Department of Justice (DOJ) on Sunday, challenging the program’s legality.”
The Verge: Signal tests usernames so you can avoid sharing your phone number . “Signal is publicly testing letting users add usernames to their accounts so they don’t have to share their phone number to connect via the encrypted messaging service. The test was announced via a post on the Signal forums by VP of engineering Jim O’Leary, who referred to the feature as ‘pre-beta’ and warned that there’ll be rough edges including crashes and broken push notifications.”
Insider: A traveler’s Delta flight was canceled, so he called the airline’s number listed on Google. It led to a scammer — then he says he discovered more airlines with the same problem.. “‘My @delta flight got canceled from JFK. The customer service line was huge, so I google a Delta JFK phone number. The number was 1888-571-4869 Thinking I reached Delta, I started telling them about getting me on a new flight,’ he tweeted Sunday. But that phone call led him to a scam, he said. And, after more digging, [Shmuli] Evers said he discovered at least six other airlines with what he suspected were scam numbers listed on Google.”
Motherboard: Blockbuster NYTimes Story Accidentally Leaked Phone Numbers of Russian Soldiers Criticizing War. “In its investigation, the Times decided to publish only the first names of the quoted soldiers to protect their identities. The inclusion of apparent phone numbers undermines that effort. Armed with a phone number, Russian authorities may be able to track down who was critical of the government’s wartime efforts. Motherboard found the Times website included not only the numbers of apparent soldiers on these calls, but also the alleged family members back home.”
BBC: Twitter in data-protection probe after ‘400 million’ user details up for sale. “A watchdog is to investigate Twitter after a hacker claimed to have private details linked to more than 400 million accounts…. Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) says it ‘will examine Twitter’s compliance with data-protection law in relation to that security issue’.”
The Mainichi: Yahoo Japan to require users’ cell phone numbers to post comments on news stories . “Yahoo Japan Corp. will make it mandatory for users to provide their cell phone numbers when posting in the comments section of its news distribution service in order to deter inappropriate postings, the IT firm has announced.”
Review Geek: Firefox Relay Now Offers Burner Phone Numbers to Curb Spam. “The Firefox Relay service, which allows you to mask your email address and curb spam, now offers virtual phone numbers. It’s a simple but effective idea; calls and texts made to your ‘fake’ phone number are screened for spam (using custom or automatic filters) before being forwarded to your phone.”
The Verge: Twitter tests a special tag to highlight phone number-verified accounts. “Elon Musk’s bot-baiting aside, Twitter has had many people call for changes to how it identifies accounts and what can be done to call out which ones are more legit than others. Now engineer Jane Manchun Wong has dug up a Twitter label that would put a mark on accounts with a verified phone number.”
Motherboard: How a Third-Party SMS Service Was Used to Take Over Signal Accounts. “Last week, hackers broke into the systems of Twilio, a cloud communications company that provides infrastructure to other companies to automate sending text messages to their users. By breaking into Twilio systems, hackers could have sent text messages to victims, and read their text messages as well. This potentially gave the hackers a chance to take over any victim’s accounts that were tied to their phone number on services that use Twilio. Crucially, Twilio provides text verification services for the encrypted messaging app Signal.”
MakeUseOf: 7 Sites to Identify the Owner of a Phone Number. “Phone numbers are a little like fingerprints; they can reveal a lot about a person, for example, their name or where they live. If you received a call from a number you don’t recognize, the following resources can help you identify the caller before you ring them back. One option even calls the number for you.”
TechCrunch: Period tracker Stardust surges following Roe reversal, but its privacy claims aren’t airtight. “TechCrunch ran a network traffic analysis of Stardust’s iPhone app on Monday to understand what data was flowing in and out of the app. The network traffic showed that if a user logs into the app using their phone number (rather than through a login service provided by Apple or Google), Stardust will periodically share the user’s phone number with a third-party analytics service called Mixpanel.”
MakeUseOf: The 5 Best Apps for a Temporary Burner Phone Number. “We’ve all seen criminal types using burner phones on shows like The Wire and Breaking Bad. And most of us have secretly wanted to throw a phone away or break it in half at the end of a conversation. Unless you have reason to believe the NSA or FBI is interested in you, it’s probably not something you need. However, there are all sorts of non-criminal reasons to have a second phone number. While you may want to get a physical burner phone for emergencies, you could also just get a burner app on your existing phone.”
IANS: 4 mn phone numbers of Clubhouse users ‘up for sale’ on Dark Web. “‘A database of 3.8 billion phone numbers of #Clubhouse users is up for sale on the #Darknet,’ leading cybersecurity expert Jiten Jain wrote on Twitter. ‘It also contains numbers of people in user’s phonebooks that were synced. So chances are high that you are listed even if you haven’t had a Clubhouse login,’ Jain added.”
Vice: Facebook Says It’s Your Fault That Hackers Got Half a Billion User Phone Numbers. “Facebook has become accustomed to dealing with multiple massive privacy breaches in recent years, and data belonging to hundreds of millions of its users has been leaked or stolen by hackers. But, instead of owning up to its latest failure to protect user data, Facebook is pulling from a familiar playbook: just like it did during the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018, it’s attempting to reframe the security failure as merely a breach of its terms of service.”
Troy Hunt: The Facebook Phone Numbers Are Now Searchable in Have I Been Pwned. “The headline is pretty self-explanatory so in the interest of time, let me just jump directly into the details of how this all works. There’s been huge interest in this incident, and I’ve seen near-unprecedented traffic to Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) over the last couple of days, let me do my best to explain how I’ve approached the phone number search feature.”
