LaLiga’s App Listened in to Catch Bars Illegally Streaming Soccer

Spain has fined the country’s soccer league, LaLiga, €250,000 for violating EU data privacy and transparency laws. LaLiga’s app is used for keeping track of games and stats. However, the app was using the phone’s microphone and GPS to track bars illegally streaming soccer games.

Using a Shazam-like technology, the app would record audio to identify soccer games, and use the geolocation of the phone to locate which bars were streaming without licenses. However, the Spanish data protection agency claims that the app didn’t make this clear, and has ordered LaLiga to take down the app by June 30th.

Russia Plans To Ban Nine VPNs Within a Month

The Russian government has taken major steps to create a heavily restricted Internet for its citizens, announcing the ban of nine VPN providers within the month. Russia’s telecommunications regulation agency, Roskomnadzor, wrote to ten VPN companies, asking them to link their servers to government-run IT systems.

Thankfully, nine of the ten providers asked refused to do so. This means ExpressVPN, HideMyAss!, Hola VPN, IPVanish, KeepSolid, NordVPN, OpenVPN, TorGuard, and VyprVPN will all be blocked in due time. The one VPN which accepted Roskomnadzor’s demands was Kaspersky, who themselves were banned by the US government for suspected ties to the Russian government.

Ajit Pai-proposed Upgrade Pays Off For Rural ISPs

The FCC’s Connect America Fund distributes money to ISPs in exchange for new broadband developments in underserved areas. The previous speed requirements for the CAF were a 10Mbps downstream and a 1Mbps upstream.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai led a vote in December of 2018 to raise the standard for new CAF projects to 25Mbps and 3Mbps down. After making bogus claims about advancements made by the FCC, this decision by Pai actually will have an impact on broadband speeds in rural areas.

However, these speeds aren’t all that fast by today’s standards. The eventual goal of the Connect America Fund is to offer gigabit speeds across the United States.

Businesses Hit With 235 Percent More Threats in 2019

The Malwarebytes Labs Cybercrime Tactics and Techniques Q1 2019 report found that threats aimed at corporate targets have increased by 235 percent, compared to last year.

As consumer cryptomining has declined with the shutting down of the popular drive-by mining company CoinHive, cybercriminals have shifted their focus away from individual users and towards businesses.

Verizon Patches Vulnerabilities Affecting Millions of Routers

In December of 2018, the cyber risk management company Tenable identified three vulnerabilities in the Verizon FiOS Quantum Gateway router. Out of these vulnerabilities, the most serious allowed for a hacker to gain complete control of a router and visibility into other devices connected to it.

Verizon has patched these vulnerabilities with the release of their firmware update on March 1st. The company is urging users to update to firmware version 02.02.00.13 if the latest update has not been installed.