A little out of the ordinary.
PA:
Security breach exposes student data
June 14, 2012 by admin
Jason A. Kahl reports:
The personal
information of all students in the Fleetwood School District was
stolen and posted online, district officials and Fleetwood police
said Wednesday.
The security
breach was discovered by parents of students in the district who
notified school officials Tuesday. The school contacted borough
police and the website, Wikispaces, where it was posted, and had it
taken down within hours, Dr. Paul B. Eaken, superintendent, said
Wednesday night.
The stolen
information included the name, date of birth, school identification
number, address, parents’ names, teacher’s name and grade level
of each of the approximately 2,700 students from kindergarten through
12th grade, Eaken said.
He
said the information came from a digital spreadsheet file stored in
the administrative section of the district.
Read more on Reading
Eagle.
Hopefully their ID number isn’t their
SSN.
[From the article:
They stated that families should be watchful for
unknown visitors [I've never seen a warning like that. Do they have
reason to suspect stalkers stole their data? Bob] and
unwanted mail."
… It was unclear when the information was stolen and how long it
had been online before the parents found it. [The
school district didn't know it was missing, someone had to tell them.
They were unable to see who accessed the data? Bob]
Eaken said the data was taken electronically from the school's
computer system, either by a virus, someone with a password or
someone hacking into the system. [So, someone
inside, someone outside or something else entirely? That pretty much
covers it. Bob]
For my “Business Continuity”
students... My Ethical Hackers already know...
Cyberrisks
to U.S. electric grid a matter of timing
Security technology used by U.S.
electric utilities is flawed and could increase the odds of computer
intrusions or sabotage, the chairman of an industry standards group
warns.
Jesse Hurley, co-chair of the North
American Energy Standards Board's Critical Infrastructure
Committee, says the mechanism for creating digital signatures for
authentication is insufficiently secure because not enough is being
done to verify identities and some companies are
attempting to weaken standards to fit their business models.
… This debate over critical
infrastructure security comes as the U.S. Senate prepares to debate a
Democrat-backed
bill that would give Homeland Security additional authority to
regulate
cybersecurity practices for critical infrastructure [Making
Infrastructure as secure as TSA makes flying? Why does that not give
me the warm fuzzies? Bob]
This is an interesting change... Think
the court will quash?
New submitter nbacon writes with news
that Comcast, apparently tired of the endless BitTorrent-related
piracy lawsuits, has
stopped complying with subpoena requests, much to the chagrin
of rightsholders. From the article:
"Initially
Comcast complied with these subpoenas, but an
ongoing battle in the Illinois District Court shows that the company
changed its tune recently. Instead of handing over subscriber info,
Comcast asked the court to quash the subpoenas. Among other things,
the ISP argued that the court doesn’t have jurisdiction over all
defendants, because many don’t live in the district in which they
are being sued. The company also argues that the copyright holders
have no grounds to join this many defendants in one lawsuit. The
real kicker, however, comes with the third argument. Here, Comcast
accuses
the copyright holders of a copyright shakedown, exploiting the
court to coerce defendants into paying settlements."
Perhaps I wasn't wrong in thinking
“Innocent” was a possible defense?
Retired
Judge Joins Fight Against DOJ’s ‘Outrageous’ Seizures in
Megaupload Case
Abraham David Sofaer, a former New York
federal judge, recently was presenting a paper at the National
Academy of Sciences about deterring cyberattacks when he learned the
feds had shut down Megaupload, seizing its domain names, in a
criminal copyright infringement case.
Troubling him more than his paper
on global cybersecurity (.pdf) was learning that the government
had seized the files of 66.6 million customers as part of its
prosecution of the file-sharing site’s top officers, and was
refusing to give any of the data back to its owners.
“It’s really quite outrageous,
frankly,” the 74-year-old President Jimmy Carter appointee said in
a recent telephone interview. “I was thinking the government
hadn’t learned to be discreet in its conduct in the digital world.
This is a perfect example on how they are failing to
apply traditional standards in the new context.”
A former State Department legal
adviser, Sofaer
has teamed up — free of charge — with the Electronic
Frontier Foundation in urging a federal court to set up a system
to allow Megaupload users to get back their legal content.
His entry into the high-profile case
comes as users increasingly turn to online storage systems and
services, including Dropbox, Gmail, YouTube, ReadItLater, iCloud, and
Google Drive, among others, to share and store their data — despite
the fact that legal protections for cloud services are weak and
servers can be shut down at any time by an aggressive prosecutor. In
an unrelated copyright infringement seizure, the feds confiscated the
domain of a hip-hop music blog at the behest of the recording
industry, only to return it, without apology or recompense, a year
later for lack of evidence.
… The government copied 25
petabytes of the data, and said the rest can be erased. The
Department of Justice told the federal judge overseeing the
prosecution that the government has no obligation to assist anybody
getting back their data, even if it’s non-infringing material.
… But in a recent court filing, the
authorities wrote that assisting
an Ohio man in getting back his company’s high school sports
footage “would create a new and practically
unlimited cause of action on behalf of any third party who can
claim that the government’s execution of a search warrant adversely
impacted a commercial relationship between the target of the search
and the third party.”
Sofaer, also a former clerk to
then-Supreme Court Justice William Brennan Jr. and now a Hoover
Institution fellow, claims the government’s
response is hogwash. All legal files could easily be
retrieved, just like they were before the service was shuttered in
January.
If you had access to all this data,
what could you determine? What voters look for in a Presidential
candidate? What stocks to buy or sell? The answer to life, the
universe and everything?
"Technology Review has an in
depth profile of the team at Facebook tasked with figuring out what
can be learned from all our data. The
Data Science Team mine that information trove both in the name of
scientific research into the patterns of human behavior and to
advance Facebook's understanding of its users. Facebook's ad
business gets the most public attention, but the company's data
mining technology may have a greater effect on its destiny — and
users lives."
What new degree should my young
whippersnappers be looking for? Cloud Management?
"Young whippersnappers might
imagine that Computer Science degrees — and the term "computer
science" — have been around forever. But they were invented,
after all, and early programmers couldn't earn a college degree in
something that hadn't been created yet. In The
Evolution of the Computer Science Degree, Karen Heyman traces the
history of the term and the degree, and challenges you on a geek
trivia question: Which U.S. college offered the first CS degree?
(It's not an obvious answer.)"
So let's all publish a book!
Self-publishing
a book: 25 things you need to know
Returned many short papers on topics I
searched...
Wednesday, June 13, 2012
Through a recent blog post by Angela
Maiers I discovered a nice service for finding and sharing
ebooks. The service is called ebook
browse and it's similar to services like Scribd
and DocStoc.
On ebook browse
you can browse for documents, upload and share your own documents,
and download the documents that other people make available. If you
want to make your documents available online for others to read, just
upload them to ebook
browse and share the link or embed them into your blog or website
using the embed code provided by ebook
browse.
… Students can upload to ebook
browse then use the embed code provided to display their
documents in their digital portfolios.
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