The Irish Data Privacy Commission announced that TikTok is facing a new European Union privacy investigation into user data sent to China.
TikTok is facing a fresh European Union privacy investigation into user data sent to China, regulators said Thursday.
The Data Protection Commission opened the inquiry as a follow up to a previous investigation that ended earlier this year with a 530 million euro ($620 million) fine after it found the video sharing app put users at risk of spying by allowing remote access their data from China.
The Irish national watchdog serves as TikTok’s lead data privacy regulator in the 27-nation EU because the company’s European headquarters is based in Dublin.
During an earlier investigation, TikTok initially told the regulator it didn’t store European user data in China, and that data was only accessed remotely by staff in China. However, it later backtracked and said that some data had in fact been stored on Chinese servers. The watchdog responded at the time by saying it would consider further regulatory action.
“As a result of that consideration, the DPC has now decided to open this new inquiry into TikTok,” the watchdog said.
“The purpose of the inquiry is to determine whether TikTok has complied with its relevant obligations under the GDPR in the context of the transfers now at issue, including the lawfulness of the transfers,” the regulator said, referring to the European Union’s strict privacy rules, known as the General Data Protection Regulation.
TikTok, which is owned by China’s ByteDance, has been under scrutiny in Europe over how it handles personal user information amid concerns from Western officials that it poses a security risk.
TikTok noted that it was one that notified the Data Protection Commission, after it embarked on a data localization project called Project Clover that involved building three data centers in Europe to ease security concerns.
“Our teams proactively discovered this issue through the comprehensive monitoring TikTok implemented under Project Clover,” the company said in a statement. “We promptly deleted this minimal amount of data from the servers and informed the DPC. Our proactive report to the DPC underscores our commitment to transparency and data security.”
Under GDPR, European user data can only be transferred outside of the bloc if there are safeguards in place to ensure the same level of protection. Only 15 countries or territories are deemed to have the same data privacy standard as the EU, but China is not one of them.
The probe is based on complaints from a lawmaker and an unnamed senior civil servant.
rench prosecutors have opened a criminal investigation into X over allegations that the company owned by billionaire Elon Musk manipulated its algorithms for the purposes of “foreign interference.”
Magistrate Laure Beccuau said in a statement Friday that prosecutors had launched the probe on Wednesday and were looking into whether the social media giant broke French law by altering its algorithms and fraudulently extracting data from users.
The criminal investigation comes on the heels of an inquiry launched in January, and is based on complaints from a lawmaker and an unnamed senior civil servant, Beccuau said.
A complaint that sparked the initial January inquiry accused X of spreading “an enormous amount of hateful, racist, anti-LGBT+ and homophobic political content, which aims to skew the democratic debate in France.”
POLITICO has reached out to X for comment.
The investigation lands as X is increasingly under fire from regulators in Paris and Brussels.
Two French parliamentarians referred the platform to France’s digital regulator Arcom on Thursday following anti-Semitic and racist posts by Grok, the artificial-intelligence chatbot that answers questions from X users.
The European Commission has separately been investigating the Musk-owned platform for almost two years now, on suspicion of breaching its landmark platforms regulation, the Digital Services Act.
techradar.com - 4 july
Almost a year later, the company comes forward with more details
The organization confirmed the news after an extensive investigation that took almost a year, noting in a data breach notification letter sent earlier to affected individuals the attack most likely took place on October 4 2024, when cybercriminals accessed its network and stole sensitive information on current and former employees, current and former support service contractors, and their dependents.
We don’t know exactly how many people were affected by this attack, or what the nature of the data is. IdeaLab just said the attackers took people’s names, in combination with “variable data”.
The Spanish police have arrested two individuals in the province of Las Palmas for their alleged involvement in cybercriminal activity, including data theft from the country's government.
The duo has been described as a "serious threat to national security" and focused their attacks on high-ranking state officials as well as journalists. They leaked samples of the stolen data online to build notoriety and inflate the selling price.
"The investigation began when agents detected the leakage of personal data affecting high-level institutions of the State across various mass communication channels and social networks," reads the police announcement.
"These sensitive data were directly linked to politicians, members of the central and regional governments, and media professionals."
The first suspect is believed to have specialized in data exfiltration, while the second managed the financial part by selling access to databases and credentials, and holding the cryptocurrency wallet that received the funds.
The two were arrested yesterday at their homes. During the raids, the police confiscated a large number of electronic devices that may lead to more incriminating evidence, buyers, or co-conspirators.
M-Trends 2025 data is based on more than 450,000 hours of Mandiant Consulting investigations. The metrics are based on investigations of targeted attack activity conducted between Jan. 1, 2024 and Dec. 31, 2024. Key findings in M-Trends 2025 include:
55% of threat groups active in 2024 were financially motivated, which marks a steady increase, and 8% of threat groups were motivated by espionage.
Exploits continue to be the most common initial infection vector (33%), and for the first time stolen credentials rose to the second most common in 2024 (16%).
The top targeted industries include financial (17.4%), business and professional services (11.1%), high tech (10.6%), government (9.5%), and healthcare (9.3%).
Global median dwell time rose to 11 days from 10 days in 2023. Global median dwell time was 26 days when external entities notified, 5 days when adversaries notified (notably in ransomware cases), and 10 days when organizations discovered malicious activity internally.
M-Trends 2025 dives deep into the aforementioned infostealer, cloud, and unsecured data repository trends, and several other topics, including:
Democratic People's Republic of Korea deploying citizens as remote IT contractors, using false identities to generate revenue and fund national interests.
Iran-nexus threat actors ramping up cyber operations in 2024, notably targeting Israeli entities and using a variety of methods to improve intrusion success.
Attackers targeting cloud-based stores of centralized authority, such as single sign-on portals, to gain broad access.
Increased targeting of Web3 technologies such as cryptocurrencies and blockchains for theft, money laundering, and financing illicit activities.
A hacker breached the GitLab repositories of multinational car-rental company Europcar Mobility Group and stole source code for Android and iOS applications, as well as some personal information belonging to up to 200,000 users.
#Android #Breach #Code #Computer #Data #Europcar #GitLab #InfoSec #Security #Source #iOS
A hacker claims to have stolen thousands of internal documents with user records and employee data after breaching the systems of Orange Group, a leading French telecommunications operator and digital service provider.
#Breach #Computer #Data #Email #Extortion #InfoSec #Jira #Leak #Orange #Ransom #S.A. #Security
A bug in the Android and iPhone monitoring operations allows anyone to access private data exfiltrated from a victim's device.
Yesterday we discovered another client-side JavaScript attack targeting +500 websites, including governments and universities. The injected scripts create hidden links in the Document Object Model (DOM), pointing to external websites, a programming interface for web documents.
Rhode Island officials said they're still analyzing the impact of a ransomware gang's breach of state health and social services systems. Some are still down.
The president and former prime minister were among targets of hackers selling highly sensitive data.
Italian probe reveals “gigantic and alarming market of confidential data,” prosecutors say.
Italian police have placed four people under house arrest including Leonardo Maria Del Vecchio, son of the late billionaire founder of Luxottica, as part of a probe into alleged illegal access to state databases, a source said on Saturday.
A lawyer for Leonardo Maria Del Vecchio said he was "eagerly awaiting the completion of preliminary investigations to be able to prove he has nothing to do with the events in question and that charges laid against him have no basis.
A notorious hacker named USDoD, who is linked to the National Public Data and InfraGard breaches, has been arrested by Brazil's Polícia Federal in
48-page report citing Ars Technica urges FTC, FCC investigate connected TV data harvesting. Gen AI, potentially racially discrimniatory practices head concerns.
Transport for London's ongoing cyber incident has taken a dark turn as the organization confirmed that some data, including bank details, might have been accessed, and 30,000 employees' passwords will need to be reset via in-person appointments.
Thousands of records belonging to Confidant Health exposed on a non-password-protected database, including ID, insurance, medicaid cards, and more.
The Dutch Data Protection Authority imposed the largest fine yet against facial recognition company Clearview AI under the GDPR.
I decided to write this post because there's no concise way to explain the nuances of what's being described as one of the largest data breaches ever. Usually, it's easy to articulate a data breach; a service people provide their information to had someone snag it through an act of unauthorised access and publish a discrete corpus of information that can be attributed back to that source. But in the case of National Public Data, we're talking about a data aggregator most people had never heard of where a "threat actor" has published various partial sets of data with no clear way to attribute it back to the source. And they're already the subject of a class action, to add yet another variable into the mix. I've been collating information related to this incident over the last couple of months, so let me talk about what's known about the incident, what data is circulating and what remains a bit of a mystery.
