Prison smuggler busted by his own drone camera

By Lisa Vaas

Step aside Amazon, drone deliveries are already a thing in prisons. There are many things that conspirators on the outside can do drone-wise: drop mobile phones, chargers, batteries, drugs, knives, memory cards, earphones, saws, or even drills.

There are also many ways for those drone drops to be duds: sometimes they crash into walls, spark fights in the prison yard or get snagged on barbed wire.

Now, we have a new drone-delivering duh: the criminals who didn’t realize their drone was filming them. Because it has a C A M E R A.

As the BBC reports, two Scottish men were caught smuggling drugs – well, trying to, anyway – into Perth Prison when they accidentally filmed themselves packing cannabis and pills into a drone.

The pair, Paul Reilly, 32, and Michael Martin, 35, were trying to get the contraband to Martin’s prisoner brother, but they mistakenly filmed themselves loading up the drone with £3,000 (around US $4,000) worth of drugs hidden inside Kinder Egg candy. (You might not be familiar with those sugary delights – in which a chocolate egg surrounds a plastic capsule containing a small toy – given that they’ve been banned in the US up until 2017, due to a 1930s law banning candy with non-food, choky objects inside.)

Read more at https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2018/10/05/prison-smuggler-busted-by-his-own-drone-camera/

Wi-Fi versions to get names people can actually understand

By Danny Bradbury

Fed up with navigating alphabet soup when trying to buy fast wireless networking that reaches from one end of the house to the other?

Then rejoice, for the high priests of Wi-Fi just made your life – and the lives of wireless network equipment vendors everywhere – a little easier. The next generation of Wi-Fi networking technology has been renamed Wi-Fi 6.

The Wi-Fi Alliance, the industry group that certifies equipment to support the 802.11 wireless networking standard, has introduced a new, easier numbering system to distinguish different versions of the networking protocol. 

While the IEEE standards body ratifies new versions of the 802.11 protocol that underpins modern Wi-Fi equipment, it is the Wi-Fi Alliance that provides the technical profile that vendors can use to implement the protocol in their equipment. It also operates the certification program that lets them qualify their devices as Wi-Fi compatible. 

Read more at https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2018/10/05/wi-fi-versions-to-names-people-can-actually-understand/

Facebook doubles cooling off period to cash in on your FOMO

By Lisa Vaas

Well, well, well, many of us are now thinking. Sure, Facebook was fun while it lasted.

But really, post-Cambridge Analytica/mega-breach/data slurping/fake news/Russian propaganda/et al., for some people it’s time to move on. Time to delete the account once and for all.

Well, if you’ve really decided, after all that, to finally thumbs-down the Face, get ready to wait a good, long time. In a move first noticed by The Verge, Facebook’s now doubled the time it takes to delete an account. It used to be 14 days, but now it will take 30 days before an account is killed.

This is actually for our own good, Facebook says. A spokesperson said that Facebook’s seen people who think they want to delete their accounts forever develop cold feet:

We recently increased the grace period when you choose to delete your Facebook account from 14 days to 30 days. We’ve seen people try to log in to accounts they’ve opted to delete after the 14-day period. The increase gives people more time to make a fully informed choice.

As the Verge notes, maybe this is a good thing. Maybe some of us aren’t really ready to ditch the relationship completely. Maybe we just need a time-out. A nice, long, 30-day break from the place that moves fast and breaks things, and the people who use it to be less than cordial.

Read more at https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2018/10/05/facebook-doubles-cooling-off-period-to-cash-in-on-your-fomo/

Google’s Intra app secures older Androids with encrypted DNS

By John E Dunn

If you agree that it’s high time that all Domain Name System (DNS) queries were encrypted to boost user privacy, two things Google has done in recent weeks will come as good news.

The first was the inclusion of a rapidly-emerging IETF DNS encryption standard called DNS over TLS (DoT) as a default setting in the latest Android 9 ‘Pie’, released in August.

The second arrived yesterday when Alphabet subsidiary Jigsaw (formerly Google Ideas) released a new app called Intra that allows Android users not running 9 (i.e. almost everyone) to get their hands on the same security technology but using a close cousin of DNS over TLS called DNS over HTTPS (DoH).

Under Android 9, DNS over TLS privacy is configured via Settings > Network & Internet > Advanced > Private DNS (the default setting routes via Google’s 8.8.8.8 or 8.8.4.4 but third-party alternatives can be added). Intra essentially offers the same options in the form of an app.

With encrypted HTTPS spreading, the last year has seen a surge in interest in another big part of the web privacy and security puzzle, DNS queries.

Read more at https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2018/10/05/googles-intra-app-secures-older-androids-with-encrypted-dns/