If you have been playing games on the smartphone and have seen ads for games like Gardenscapes, you must have realized that the gameplay shown in the ad is not what you get in the game. Especially if you have played the game called Gardenscapes and Homescapes, then you would be the first one to know that. Since these ads did not represent the actual gameplay and were giving wrong details about the game simply to attract the users, the Advertising Standards Agency has banned both these apps through Facebook ads. 

With the images and representation in the ads, you would always see a message that “Not all images represent actual gameplay.”. However, specifically, in this case, the ads were a complete misinterpretation of the gameplay. As per the reports from ASA, they received seven user complaints about the misleading ads. Playrix states that these features are available in the games as mini-games. But the people who have been playing these games, already know that it is not the truth. As per Playrix, only 0.03% reach the level of the game, where they will be able to play such mini-games. 

As per the app developer, these features were added in the game so that they could convey the different elements that are part of the game and provide a whole lot of variety to the users. However, if the feature is only available to 0.03% of the gamers, then it does not represent anything that the new users or users at the early stages will experience. Due to this, the developer has now changed the ad content based on the early levels of gameplay.

One of the biggest diagnostics chains in India, Dr. Lal PathLabs left a huge tranche of data of its patients, including the COVID test results of people exposed on a public server. The data stayed there for around a year before being reported by Melbourne-based security expert Sami Toivonen. As per them, the records of patients are in millions and some of them date back to even early 2019.

As per their official statement, “The publicly exposed S3 bucket contained over 9,000 files that included booking details including full names, gender, full addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, patient UID’s (unique identification numbers), digital signatures, limited payment details, doctor details and codes, and details and pictures of where, when, and what laboratory tests were taken“.

TechCrunch was the first to report about the data exposure. The diagnostic chain was storing the data on spreadsheets and saving it on the Amazon Web services without any password. Due to which the data became accessible to almost everyone. The data exposure was reported last month and since then it has been shut down. The data exposure has also been confirmed by Dr. Lal PathLabs and there is no confirmation on how it was exposed. As per them, they received an email from a cyber-security researcher about a misconfiguration in one of our minor web applications.

It was the web application where the data was stored temporarily. As per the diagnostic chain, the data affected is less than 0.5% of their records. It has been informed that any person who has used the services of the diagnostic chain in the last year or two, should be on the lookout for fraud email, messages, and phones from fraudsters posing as the diagnostic chain.