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Welcome to the Weekly Webroot Digest!#HappyFriday

 

This is a weekly series to highlight the best articles and news stories going on in the Community. 

What was your favorite story? What topics would you like to see? Sound off in the comments! :)

 



This chatbot will tackle scammers by wasting their time

An online safety organization based in New Zealand has developed an artificially intelligent email bot that has a new approach to the problem of email scammers.

 

"Re:scam can take on multiple personas, imitating real human tendencies with humor and grammatical errors, and can engage with infinite scammers at once," says Netsafe.

 

Once the conversation has ended, Re:scam will send a copy of the email chain back to you, which could be fun to read back, depending on the foolishness of your scammer.

 

Check it out & be amazed!

 



How to Opt Out of Equifax Revealing Your Salary History

KrebsOnSecurity series on how easy big-three credit bureau Equifax makes it to get detailed salary history data on tens of millions of Americans apparently inspired a deeper dive on the subject by Fast Company, which examined how this Equifax division has been one of the company’s best investments. In this post, he'll show you how to opt out of yet another Equifax service that makes money at the expense of your privacy.



 

Curiously, Equifax claims they have no evidence that anyone was harmed as a result of the year-long pattern of tax fraud related to how easy it was to coax salary and payroll data out of its systems.

 

Regardless, Krebs has you covered!

 



Apple FaceID Tricked With $150 Mask

Did you just score an iPhone X and want to show off the FaceID to your Friends? 

You may want to think again...

 

Security researchers have broken Apple's FaceID security system using a mask they said takes around a few days to make and costs only $150. 

 

In previous experiments, hackers and journalists failed to trick Apple's FaceID system with both photos and silicone masks. Bkav researchers said they were successful in their attempts after studying Apple's FaceID security manual and by leveraging their previous work on facial recognition systems.

 

See the video for yourself!

 



BlueBorne Vulnerability Also Affects 20 Million Amazon Echo and Google Home Devices

Over 20 million Amazon Echo and Google Home devices running on Android and Linux are vulnerable to attacks via the BlueBorne vulnerability, IoT cyber-security firm Armis announced today.



 

BlueBorne is a set of eight vulnerabilities in the Bluetooth implementations deployed on Android, iOS, Microsoft, and Linux. Affected OS makers and several IoT device makers issued updates in mid-September to address the flaws. BlueBorne allows attackers to take over devices that have Bluetooth enabled and run malicious code on the underlying OS or firmware.

 

Get all of the details!

 



Firefox Quantum: Security and privacy improvements

Mozilla has released Firefox 57, aka Firefox Quantum, and it comes with many performance improvements.



 

“We’re introducing a new Control Center in Firefox that contains site security and privacy controls in a single place in your address bar. Since some Web pages may appear broken when elements that track behavior are blocked, we’ve made it easy to turn off Tracking Protection in Private Browsing for a particular site using the Control Center,” Nick Nguyen, VP of FireFox, explained.

 

Read all of the security fixes/features added!

 

What was your favorite story of the week?

What stories or topics would you like to see covered next week?

 

Sound off in the comments and let us know! 

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