They didn't expect
praise, did they? This isn't whistle blowing, it's digital
paparazzi.
Hackers
crack major data firms, sell info to ID thieves, says report
An illegal service that
sells personal data "on any U.S. resident" -- which can
then be used for identity theft -- hacked into servers at several
major data aggregators including LexisNexis and Dun & Bradstreet,
according to a report.
The service's customers
have, the report said, "spent hundreds of thousands of dollars
looking up SSNs, birthdays, driver's license records, and obtaining
unauthorized credit and background reports on more than 4 million
Americans."
In an article
Wednesday, former Washington Post reporter Brian Krebs, who now
writes the KrebsOnSecurity
blog, outlined how a site called Expose.su managed earlier this year
to post financial information on celebrities and government
officials.
The
site's activities triggered an FBI investigation, in part because
Expose.su managed
to publish the Social Security Number, address, and a credit report
of then-FBI Director Robert Mueller.
According to Krebs,
Expose.su (think "exposes you") got its info from another
site, ssndob.ms, or SSNDOB (think "Social Security Number"
and "date of birth"), which got the data by way of a small
botnet it operates. The botnet appears to have access to compromised
servers at several large data brokers in the United States, including
LexisNexis, Dun & Bradstreet, and Kroll Background America.
(And, in regard to the bot program installed on the hacked servers,
Krebs reported that "none of the 46 top
antimalware tools on the market today detected it as malicious.")
[Probably because it is not. Bob]
… Krebs, who got
his hands on a copy of SSNDOB's database, reported that a closer
examination of it indicates that since SSNDOB came on the scene early
last year, the service has sold more than 1.02 million unique SSNs
and nearly 3.1 million date of birth records.
SSNDOB markets itself
on underground cybercrime forums, Krebs said, and sells data at
prices that "range from 50 cents to $2.50 per record, and from
$5 to $15 for credit and background checks.
Another school board
outsmarted by students. Why would anyone think this would not
happen? Shouldn't they be rewarding this kind of independent
learning? (My guess, it took a week for anyone to notice, but no
time at all to hack the iPads.)
LAUSD
halts home use of iPads for students after devices hacked
LAUSD students have
figured out how to bypass security restrictions on iPads issued to
them by the school district, giving them access to non-scholastic
Internet sites.
Following news that
students at a Los Angeles high school had hacked district-issued
iPads and were using them for personal use, district officials have
halted home use of the Apple tablets until further notice.
It took exactly one week for nearly 300 students at Theodore
Roosevelt High School to hack through security so they could surf
the Web on their new school-issued iPads, raising new concerns about
a plan to distribute the devices to all students in the
district.
… Students began to
tinker with the security lock on the tablets because "they took
them home and they can't do anything with them,"
[This is modern education? Bob]
said Roosevelt senior Alfredo Garcia.
Roosevelt students
matter-of-factly explained their technique Tuesday outside school.
The trick, they said, was to delete their personal profile
information. With the profile deleted, a student was free to surf.
Interesting. Being
“most qualified” does not mean “any good.”
Seen on RT:
Supreme
Court Justice Antonin Scalia said Wednesday the court eventually will
have to determine the legality of far-reaching National Security
Agency spying programs, though he is not convinced the court is
equipped to based on modern security threats.
Scalia,
speaking at the Northern Virginia Technology Council, said elected
officials are most qualified to discern how much personal
information of Americans the NSA can collect, and under what
circumstances.
Read more on RT.
Well, they might be
most qualified if they were actually informed, but we’ve already
seen complaints where members of Congress were kept in the dark or
not shown government documents that they supposedly should have had
access to.
But even then, Congress
may be willing to “give up a little privacy for security” so to
speak, and laws they pass may not be constitutional, so eventually
this will get to SCOTUS.
So simple. So true.
Gotta love xkcd.
If you’re not a
regular reader of xkcd: (1) why not? and (2) remember to hover over
the cartoon to see the alt text.
What sounds simple in
the brainstorming session turns out to be a bit more complicated.
Even if Yahoo is willing to “forget,” others are not. The “Right
to be forgotten” is not observed by all players at the same time.
Did Yahoo send notices to everyone on the “Recycled User's”
contact list?
Kristin Burnham
reports:
Yahoo
announced late Tuesday night that the company plans to roll out a
tool for recipients of recycled email accounts to return messages
that were not intended for them. [And if
they accidentally 'return' one that was meant for them? Bob]
InformationWeek reported Tuesday on three
[Potentially many more Bob]
Yahoo users who began receiving
emails containing personal information intended for the former
user — including bank and wireless account information — after
signing up for a recycled Yahoo account.
The
new button, called “Not My Email,” will roll out this week
and will be found under the “Actions” tab in users’ inboxes.
The button will help users of recycled accounts train
their inboxes [Potential to
'automatically' return the wrong email Bob] to recognize
which email is intended for them and which is not, eventually
rejecting email before the user has read it.
Yahoo
said it also plans to offer help to users who have lost their Yahoo
account due to inactivity. These steps include the option to reclaim
your old account; outreach to users by phone and email; and extending
the grace period for inactive accounts. Yahoo did not say when the
option to reclaim an inactive account would be available.
Read more on
InformationWeek.
It’s nice that honest
netizens can report “not my mail,” but thanks to Yahoo!’s
ridiculous recycling plan, there’s nothing that stops people from
reading e-mail that was not intended for their eyes – as an earlier
report by InformationWeek showed. They are considering a
”Require-Recipient-Valid-Since” protocol, but the sooner they fix
this security and privacy mess that they’ve created, the better.
Another simple money
saving idea that needed more research...
Loek Essers reports:
Schools
that compel students to use commercial cloud services for email and
documents are putting privacy at risk, says a campaign group calling
for strict controls on the use of such services in education.
A
core problem is that cloud providers force schools to
accept policies [Only if they say “Yes”
Bob] that authorize user profiling and online behavioral
advertising. Some cloud privacy policies stipulate
that students are also bound by these policies, even when
they have not had the opportunity to grant or withhold their consent,
said privacy campaign group SafeGov.org in a
report released on Monday.
Read more on CIO.
I suggest a Law School
course titled “Technology for Lawyers”
'The
First Time a Tumblr Has Been Used in an Argument in a Supreme Court
Brief'
"Amicus Tumblr"
has a certain ring to it, no?
On October 8, the
Supreme Court will hear arguments in McCutcheon
v. Federal Election Commission. The case centers on whether
aggregate limits on donations to campaigns are constitutional, an
extension of the legal logic behind the infamous Citizens United
decision.
Before the Court hears
arguments, though, the justices will have already consulted something
unique: A legal document predicated on a Tumblr. According to
Lawrence
Lessig, the Harvard Law professor filing the brief, it’s the
first time a Tumblr has been used in a Supreme Court filing.
On his
own Tumblr this morning, Lessig (who’s also a
contributor to The Atlantic) explained the reasoning:
The
basic argument of the brief is that the Framers of the Constitution
used the word “corruption” in a different, more inclusive way,
than we do today. The Tumblr captures 325 such uses collected from
the framing context, and tags to help demonstrate this more inclusive
meaning.
… The Tumblr is
already online (at ocorruption.tumblr.com),
and its sidebar promises to “[collect] every use of the term
‘corruption’ among the records of the Framers.” Every entry
consists of the name of one of the founders, a date, a block quote
with all usages of corruption in bold, and a source. On July 25,
1788, for instance, James Iredell pronounced
to North
Carolina’s Constitutional Convention that the King of England:
has
the disposal of almost all offices in the kingdom, commands the army
and navy, is head of the church, and has the means of corrupting a
large proportion of the representatives of the people, who form the
third branch of the legislature.
Would our Congress look
here for ideas? Laws that are “Worst Practices?”
Commentary
– The ‘Legalization’ of China’s Internet Crackdown
Stanley
Lubman – “Internet usage – especially microblogging on
Sina Weibo, China’s largest Twitter-like social media site – is
presenting new challenges and new attempts to meet them from a
government determined to maintain control. In recent months Beijing
has launched a multi-pronged offensive against online criticism of
current policies and institutions that includes a propaganda
campaign, arrests and a duplicative new legal rule that attempts to
justify the response and deter future online critiques. This call to
battle is not new, but its codification in legal dress is disturbing
and represents a magnified threat to online discussion and dissent in
China.”
Perspective. I'm
surprised it waited this long. When will (more) big city papers
follow?
World's
oldest newspaper to end print edition, go digital only
After nearly 280 years
in print, the world's oldest continuously published newspaper is
stopping the presses in favor of a digital presence.
Lloyd's List, which was
founded in 1734 as a notice posted to a London coffee shop's wall,
announced Wednesday it will cease its print edition in December. The
newspaper is widely regarded as the leading source of news and
analysis for the global shipping market.
… "The
overwhelming majority of our customers choose the capabilities of
digital over print," editor Richard Meade said in a statement
noting the advantages of a digital-only model.
… The Seattle
Post-Intelligencer stopped publishing a print edition in March 2009,
followed the next month by the Christian Science Monitor. Magazines
such as Newsweek and US News & World Report have followed suit,
choosing to publish only on the Internet.
For the Swiss Army
toolkit.
– Turn back time?
Yes! Intermission lets you pause and rewind live
audio on your computer. Streaming audio will never be the
same! With Intermission, you can jump back and replay something you
missed, then resume live playback. You can even pause streaming
audio on services like Pandora, iTunes Radio, or Spotify to build
a buffer, then skip right past the ads and songs you don’t
want to hear.
(Ditto) I'll check
this one out...
– The Internet is
forever. Your private communications don´t need to be. Wickr is a
free app that provides military-grade encryption of text,
picture, audio and video messages, sender-based control over who can
read messages, where and for how long, best available privacy,
anonymity and secure file shredding features, and security that is
simple to use.
Have you been watching
this? Un-possible! (The boats that fly are amazing!)
Oracle
Team USA caps stunning comeback to win America's Cup
Skipper Jimmy Spithill
and Oracle Team USA won the America's Cup on Wednesday with one of
the greatest comebacks in sports history.
Spithill steered
Oracle's space-age, 72-foot catamaran to its eighth straight victory,
speeding past Dean Barker and Emirates Team New Zealand in the
winner-take-all Race 19 on San Francisco Bay to keep the oldest
trophy in international sports in the United States.
[Also
see:
We have a huge color
printer and we're not afraid to use it!
Complement 100
Diagrams That Changed the World with 17
equations that changed the world and the fantastic Cartographies
of Time.
Dilbert illustrates the
downside of winning an argument.
No comments:
Post a Comment