Educational

For years, car manufacturers including Range Rover, BMW, and Volkswagen kept secret security risks in their vehicles' keyless entry systems that exposed hundreds of millions of car owners to the risk of theft from attackers using gadgets available online for £100. In March 2018, Range Rovers were

The US company Securus provides a cellphone tracking service that can locate almost any cellphone in the US within seconds by obtaining data from major carriers via a system used by marketers and other companies. In 2018, former Mississippi County, Missouri, sheriff Cory Hutcheson was charged in

In 2018, a South Carolina woman realised her FREDI video baby monitor had been hacked when the camera began panning across the room to the spot where she breastfed her son. A 2015 study conducted by Rapid7 found that baby monitors have a number of vulnerabilities that are both easily exploited and

In June 2018, after privacy activists found security flaws in toys such as My Friend Cayla and others and the US Consumer Product Safety Commission opened an investigation into the problems of connected gadgets, Amazon, Walmart, and Target announced they would stop selling CloudPets. Made by Spiral

In 2018, military security officers from the Israeli Defence Force accused Hamas of loading fake World Cup and dating apps with malware and making them available via the Israeli version of the Google Play store in order to hack the mobile phones of Israeli soldiers. The apps were capable of

Days before the US November 2018 midterm elections, ProPublica discovered that an organisation called Energy4US spent $20,000 to run ads on Facebook pushing conservatives to support the Trump administration's reversal of fuel emission standards. On closer scrutiny, Energy4US appeared to be a front

In 2018, a group of researchers from the Campaign for Accountability posed as Russian trolls and were able to purchase divisive online ads and target them at Americans using Google's advertising platform. The researchers constructed fake profiles using the name and identifying details of the

In a systematic campaign over more than five years, Myanmar military used Facebook to covertly spread propaganda, mostly against the Rohynga, via accounts that appeared to be dedicated to pop stars and entertainment, turning the social media site into a tool for ethnic cleansing. Having garnered a

For many Filipinos, Facebook is their only way online because subsidies have kept it free to use on mobile phones since its launch in the country in 2013, while the open web is expensive to access. The social media network is believed to have been an important engine behind the ascent to the

In the run-up to the US 2018 mid-term elections, Facebook announced it would broaden the company's policies against voter suppression by banning misrepresentations about how to vote and whether a vote will be counted. The company also introduced a reporting option to allow users to report incorrect

In October 2018, in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and questions over Facebook's influence on the UK's EU referendum, Facebook announced it would add Britain to the US and Brazil on the list of countries where the company will no longer allow political groups to publish "dark" ads on

In May 2018, researchers in the US and China demonstrated that they could send commands that activate Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, and Google Assistant but that are inaudible to the human ear. The researchers were able to make smartphones and smart speakers dial phone numbers and open websites; the

In June 2018, human rights and digital rights activists in Myanmar called on Facebook to raise its level of moderation of Burmese-language content in order to reduce hate speech, which they said was at high risk of sparking open violence. In Myanmar, decades of civil war and the end of military rule

In July 2018, Dutch researcher Foeke Postma discovered that Polar, the manufacturer of the world's first wireless heart rate monitor manufacturer, was exposing the heart rates, routes, dates, times, duration, and pace of exercises performed by individuals at military sites and at their homes via its