This Week in Getting Hacked: You! By Your Congresspeople

Welcome back to ‘This Week in Getting Hacked’—the world’s greatest cybersecurity-related link dump! Each week, we bring you the best news stories from the cybersecurity field, letting you know who’s getting hacked, who’s hacking, what data is leaking, and about what you should take with caution. So strap in, change your password, and let’s find out who’s getting hacked this week!
On to the links…

Hey, did you know that your elected Congressmen—the people who are supposed to, you know, represent your interests—voted to allow ISPs to sell your browsing history to the highest bidder? What’s that? You DIDN’T want that? Well, you don’t know anything, you stupid peasant!

This is good for you! Sure, ISPs only had to shell out just a million or two to get your representatives full support of a bill that they are apparently unaware ALSO gives up their own browsing history, but who cares…more money for Comcast!
Anyways, if you’d like to take up the mantle of “active participant in democracy”, here’s a list of all 256 Congressmen—all conveniently Republican—and exactly how much it cost to get their vote. Divide that number by the amount of people in your district to get a real idea of literally how little they think of you.

The rise of biometric data for use in cybersecurity is coming—Apple already uses fingerprint data to secure your device, Android has facial recognition, and we’re not far off from chopping off an unnamed security guard’s head to use his iris to gain access into a top-secret government compound.

That said, it might be a lot easier to steal your fingerprint than any password, and since your fingerprint or face is unlikely to change—barring some weird Nicholas Cage “Face/Off” kinda thing—gaining access to older, less secure biometric data could also prove useful for a hacker. Anyways, the answer, obviously, are “passthoughts”.

Here’s a cool map that lets you know if your internet traffic is going through the NSA. Spoiler alert: Probably.

If you use LastPass to store all your passwords, a major exploit allows attackers to grab your passwords. The exploit was contained in the browser extension, which would allow malicious sites to access the secured password data, as well as run some harmful code on your computer.

That’s kind of the problem with password databases—if someone can access the database, they can access the motherload of your passwords. So like, make sure you’re safe, and stuff.

And finally…
71% of Android phones on major carriers in the US have outdated security patches, leaving 71% of Android phones on major carriers incredibly susceptible to attackers. Isn’t that fun? And before you go blaming Google, just remember that they release patches nearly every month, so it’s basically your carrier being the slowpoke in this scenario. Hooray!
See you all next week! Stay safe out there!