Cybersecurity Corral Oct 21: TikTok Surveillance and Microsoft Security Lapse

• TikTok parent company planned surveillance – ByteDance reportedly had plans to use location data to conduct surveillance on individual U.S. citizens. [Forbes]

• Microsoft confirms security lapse – A misconfiguration in Azure Blob Storage resulted in an endpoint being publicly accessible. This in turn led to the inadvertent exposure of 2.4 terabytes of data, affecting more than 65,000 entities in 111 countries. [The Hacker News]

• Australia the new frontline of cyberattacks – This week health insurer Medibank was hit with a ransomware attack involving 200GB of stolen PII data. Electric company EnergyAustralia also reported a data breach. This follows the recent attacks on Australian telecoms Optus and Telstra. [7News]

• Bots appear to be invading multiple social platforms – The number of bots on Twitter is at the center of Elon Musk’s purchase of the social media platform. But it appears that other platforms also suffer from bot accounts. [Krebs on Security]