The Category5.TV Newsroom

Here are the stories we're following for the week of Wednesday December 7, 2016

Thieves are using radio jammers to leave your car unlocked when you use your key fob to lock it.

Police in England are warning that thieves are using radio jammers to steal items from cars parked at motorway service stations.

The Police said the transmitters could be used to "interrupt" signals from remote keys, preventing vehicles from being locked properly.

The force said 14 recent thefts from vehicles with "no obvious sign of a break-in" had been reported.

It advised motorists to check vehicles before leaving them unattended.

Remote keys have a unique signal which is transmitted via radio waves from the fob to the car. Jammers overpower signals from the owner's key and interfere with this communication.

The devices can be used over a large area, in theory allowing thieves to cover an entire car park.

Would-be thieves rely on drivers pressing the lock button on their fob and forgetting to double-check whether the vehicle is secured - leaving it open and allowing easy entry.

More modern vehicles which use keyless entry could also be vulnerable.

Source: www.bbc.com

Sent to us by: Roy W. Nash

The evolution of the grocery store is coming... from Amazon.

Amazon has revealed plans for a brick-and-mortar grocery store chain without a checkout process, where customers will instead pay for the goods they have selected via an app.

The "Just Walk Out" shopping experience uses the same types of technologies found in self-driving cars.

Customers will swipe into the store using the Go app. It will use computer vision, sensors and deep learning algorithms to keep track of what customers are picking up off the shelves.
Amazon has spent four years developing the shop.

The shop will offer ready-to-eat breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snack options made fresh every day by on-site chefs or by local kitchens and bakeries.

Grocery essentials such as bread and milk will also be on sale alongside Amazon Meal Kits, with all the ingredients needed to make a meal for two in about 30 minutes.


Once the shopper leaves the store, their Amazon account will be charged and receipt sent to them.

The first shop is expected to open to the public in Seattle in the US in early 2017.

Source: www.bbc.com

Sent to us by: Roy W. Nash

From the "Creepy Toy Files": You might want to think twice about placing an i-Que or Cayla smart toy under the tree this season.

The makers of the i-Que and Cayla smart toys have been accused of subjecting children to "ongoing surveillance" and posing an "imminent and immediate threat" to their safety and security.

The accusations come via a formal complaint in the US by consumer groups.

They, along with several EU bodies, are calling for investigations into the manufacturers.

Genesis Toys, which makes the products, has not responded to a request for comment.

Nor has Nuance Communications, the firm that provides speech recognition software for the products. It is also a subject of the US complaint, filed with the Federal Trade Commission.

The Norwegian Consumer Council also assessed the toys and their terms and conditions. They found the products lacking and potentially in breach of advertising regulations.

"It's quite disturbing because the company reserves the right to direct marketing towards kids," said Finn Myrstad, technical director of digital services at the council.

In January 2015, the BBC and security researcher Ken Munro, at Pen Test Partners, revealed the vulnerability in Cayla's software that allowed the doll to be hacked.

And Mr Myrstad said it appeared the problem had not yet been fixed, nearly two years later.

According to the US complaint, the doll prompts children to provide personal data verbally - including their parents' names, the name of their school and the place where they live.

Rik Ferguson, researcher at security firm Trend Micro says, "How the data's collected how it's stored and shared - all of that appears to be almost entirely unregulated. And the parents are certainly not made aware in any comprehensible fashion of the extent of data that's collected or how it may be used in the future."

It also says the toys allow unauthorised Bluetooth connections from any phone or tablet within 50ft (15m).

The Norwegian Consumer Council has now filed its own complaints to three authorities in Norway, including the consumer protection ombudsman.

Further complaints from other bodies are to be filed in France, Sweden, Greece, Belgium, Ireland and the Netherlands.

Source: www.bbc.com

Sent to us by: Robbie Ferguson

Are you a Dailymotion user? Change your passwords immediately.

Details of more than 85 million users of video sharing site Dailymotion have been hacked, according to Leakedsource.

The breach detection company said 85.2 million usernames and email addresses and 18 million scrambled passwords had been stolen on 20 October.

But the passwords were protected with the Bcrypt hashing algorithm, which should make it hard for hackers to access accounts.

In a blog post, Dailymotion advised all its users to change their passwords.

It said: "It has come to our attention that a potential security risk, coming from outside Dailymotion may have comprised the passwords for a certain number of accounts."

It also passed on advice about how to come up with a hard to guess password and said users should not use simple word and number combinations such as "password1234".

Commenting on the hack attack Mark James, a security specialist at ESET, said: "Check and change your passwords on this site, if you have used that same password on any other site then change those immediately and possibly consider a password manager if you're not already using one. Without further information about what was or was not stolen, we won't know the extent of the damage - but needless to say more data being added to your already overflowing online profile floating around the web is not good for any of us."

Based in Paris, Dailymotion is ranked as the 113th most popular website in the world, according to Alexa rankings.

This year has seen a series of massive data breaches, with experts saying there are now 1.5 billion stolen credentials available to hackers and attackers online.

Source: www.bbc.com

Sent to us by: Roy W. Nash