Ah
the joys of social engineering... This is slower than computerized
schemes, but still $3,000 per hour beats minimum wage.
Thieves
impersonate Western Union workers, steal money
Western Union is one of
the easiest ways to get money and for some crooks one of the easiest
ways to steal it.
… Police say the
suspects called the store and pretended to work for Western Union and
at that point got them to perform a test.
"They call the
store ask to speak to the customer service rep that's working the
counter where Western Union is and tell them to run a test...and the
test is actually sending money instead of running a test," said
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Fraud Investigator Kevin Jones.
The con artists managed
to steal more than 3 thousand dollars from the store; it involved 3
separate transactions and took about 50 minutes.
… Police say it’s
the first time they have seen this kind of scam in Charlotte, they
are worried it may spread and want employees to be careful.
"Make sure you're
following store protocols if you think something is not right check
with your store manager call Western Union yourself," said Jones
who thinks the suspects may be from out of the country.
“It could be Nigeria,
it could be Canadians, it could be the U.K. it could be someone here
in the United States.”
Woody works in a mom
and pop type store he says this type of scam could be devastating.
Also
thought to involve social engineering, well phishing... Would have
required quick work after the funds had been transferred.
eSecurity
Planet just made aware of a breach disclosed earlier this week:
Posted by the Michigan
State University Police on October 20:
On
Friday, October 18, two employees reported receiving email
confirmation of a change in their direct-deposit designation. Police
say that valid credentials (MSU NetID and password) were used by a
perpetrator to modify the employees’ banking information on the EBS
HR/Payroll (SAP) system. It is believed that the perpetrator gained
access to the credentials through a sophisticated “phishing”
attack.
There
is no indication of a system-wide security breach or exposure of
other employee data. As a precaution, the EBS systems were taken
offline late Friday afternoon; it is anticipated that the systems
will be back online Monday morning at 7:00am.
In some restrictive
areas, this is going to be a real concern. Will downloading a
template become illegal (or grounds for a visit by the local gun
cops?) Can I print a 1/10th scale model of Gatling gun without
worrying about black helicopters at 3AM?
Suspected
3D-printed gun found in Manchester gang raid, say police
Police have seized
components for what could be the UK's first ever 3D-printed
gun in what they called a "really significant discovery".
Greater
Manchester police said they believed the parts represented the
next generation of firearms, which could be created by gangs
in the privacy of their homes and smuggled with ease because they
could avoid X-ray detection.
The gun parts were
discovered, along with a 3D printer, when officers executed warrants
in the Baguley area of the city on Thursday.
Officers found what
were thought to be a plastic magazine and trigger which could be
fitted together to make a viable gun. They said the haul also
included a quantity of gunpowder.
The raid was part of
Challenger, the largest ever multi-agency operation to target
organised crime
in Manchester.
… There have
been suggestions on some websites that the parts were not gun
components but printer parts – a spool holder and a drive block.
Police said they were still concerned about the finding because they
suspected the parts may have other uses.
A police spokesperson
said: "We are aware of this suggestion, and it would be easier
if it was cut and dried as to what these items are. But when you
take it as a whole, including the discovery of gunpowder, it is
disturbing."
A man has been
arrested on suspicion of making gunpowder [Not a 3D printer
item Bob] and remains in custody for questioning.
Hello.
We're your elected representatives. We don't need no stinking
intelligence!
Mike Masnick writes:
We
already knew that Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner was getting ready to release
a major
new anti-NSA spying bill called the USA Freedom Act, and Derek
Khanna has just revealed
many of the details of the bill, scheduled to be introduced in both
houses of Congress this coming Tuesday. It will be backed by
Sensenbrenner in the House and Pat Leahy in the Senate, and will have
plenty of co-sponsors (already about 50 have signed up) including
some who had initially voted against the Amash Amendment back
in July. In other words, this bill has a very high likelihood of
actually passing, though I imagine that the intelligence community,
and potentially the White House, will push back on it. For Congress,
gathering up a veto-proof majority may be a more difficult
task.
The
bill appears to do a number of good things, focusing on limiting the
NSA’s ability to do dragnet collections, rather than specific and
targeted data collection, while also significantly increasing
transparency of the activities of the NSA as well as the FISA court
when it comes to rulings that interpret the law.
Read more about what
the bill includes on TechDirt.
From Rep.
Sensenbrenner’s site:
http://sensenbrenner.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=355537
If my mission was to
gather intelligence, any time I spent defending my tools and
techniques is essentially a waste of my time.
James Ball reports:
The
UK intelligence agency GCHQ has repeatedly warned it fears a
“damaging public debate” on the scale of its activities because
it could lead to legal challenges against its mass-surveillance
programmes, classified internal documents reveal.
Memos
contained in the cache disclosed by the US whistleblower Edward
Snowden detail the agency’s long fight against making intercept
evidence admissible as evidence in criminal trials – a policy
supported by all three major political parties, but ultimately
defeated by the UK’s intelligence community.
Read more on The
Guardian.
I'm sure it sounded
good when Marketing pitched it...
Tori Floyd reports:
A
new feature for LinkedIn users has been unveiled, but it’s drawing
more questions over privacy rather than praise for ingenuity.
LinkedIn
announced Intro on October 23, a service that shows your LinkedIn
profile on emails sent through your iPhone Mail application. In the
blog
post about the new tool, the company explains that users will be
able to see at a glance who an unknown email sender is with a brief
bio and link to their LinkedIn account, right in the email client.
But
security experts have expressed concern over the new feature, as it
requires all of your email to be filtered through LinkedIn’s
computers.
Read more on Yahoo!
Yeah, this Snowden
thing is a real pain in the butt. Fortunately, everyone who never
considered how intelligence was gathered before Snowden will soon
forget Snowden and go back to their “Professional” Wrestling
shows.
Mark Clayton reports:
A
public backlash against reported US surveillance activities in
France, Germany, and Italy could lead to tough new laws that put
American technology companies in the tough spot of being forced to
defy either US authorities or the European Union.
Read more on CSMonitor.
Ends the high speed
chase, records the bad guy's illegal driving, lets as many cops as
desired zero in on the car once it stops? I like it. Now we need
something for runners!
Police
firing GPS tracking 'bullets' at cars during chases
… Police in Iowa
and Florida, however, seem to have taken the counsel of Q from the
"Bond" movies.
Instead of constantly
hurtling after potential madmen, they have found an entirely new
method of tracking their cars.
It's called Starchase.
Essentially, it's a cannon that fires "bullets" that are
sticky GPS devices.
CBS
12 offered an example in real life of how it's done.
Perhaps some lawyers
will learn technology after all... This may also be a way to “push”
research in almost real time.
140
Characters or Less: An Experiment in Legal Research, Patrick
M. Ellis - Michigan State University College of
Law - October 1, 2013
“In
1995, Robert Ambrogi, former columnist for Legal Technology News,
wrote about the Internet’s potential to revolutionize the
accessibility and delivery of legal information. Almost 20 years
later, Ambrogi now describes his initial optimism as a “pipe
dream.” Perhaps one of the greatest problems facing the legal
industry today is the sheer inaccessibility of legal information.
Not only does this inaccessibility prevent millions of Americans from
obtaining reliable legal information, but it also prevents many
attorneys from adequately providing legal services to their clients.
Whether locked behind government paywalls or corporate cash
registers, legal information is simply not efficiently and affordably
attainable through traditional means. There may, however, be an
answer. Although the legal industry appears to just be warming up to
social media for marketing purposes, social media platforms, like
Twitter, may have the untapped potential to help solve the
accessibility problem. This Note attempts to prove that assertion by
showing an iteration of social media’s potential alternative
use, as an effective and free information sharing mechanism for legal
professionals and the communities and clients they serve.
Generally speaking, law review editors and other academicians demand
that authors support every claim with a citation, or, at the very
least, require extensive research to support claims or theses. This
Note seeks to fulfill this requirement, with a variation on
conventional legal scholarship. Almost all of the sources in this
Note were obtained via Twitter. Thus, this somewhat experimental
piece should demonstrate social media’s potential as an emerging
and legitimate source of legal information. By perceiving and using
social media as something more than a marketing tool, lawyers, law
schools, and, most importantly, clients, may be able to tap into a
more diverse and more accessible well of information. This
redistribution of information accessibility may not only solve some
of the problems facing the legal industry, but also has the
capability to improve society at large.”
I knew we should have
moved faster, now the cable guys are horning in...
DirecTV,
Time Warner consider Aereo-like service, report says
TV providers DirecTV,
Time Warner Cable, and Charter Communications are thinking about
capturing free broadcast signals and streaming TV shows over the
Internet to get around paying networks, Bloomberg
reported Friday.
The new approach would
mimic Aereo, an online TV provider
at the center of a huge legal battle with the nation's top broadcast
networks (including CBS, CNET's parent company). Aereo uses tiny
antennas to allow consumers to stream live and local broadcasts over
the Internet and store shows in the cloud.
Aereo has been fairly
successful in the courtroom so far. If it wins in the end, it could
mean TV providers can use the same practice to avoid paying
retransmission fees, unnamed sources told Bloomberg. One source goes
so far to say that Time Warner Cable, which
has been at odds with CBS over fees, has considered buying Aereo.
Think
of it as an anti-phishing tool.
–
Automatically highlights North American telephone numbers on
websites, showing the location (city and state) when you hover over
the phone number, based on the area code and exchange. To find out
where the phone number is located, you just hover the mouse over the
phone number, and it will start a lookup of the location of the phone
number.
The
education game gets more complex. 107 schools.
Get
More Learning Options As 13 New Institutions Join Coursera
… Coursera makes up
a large part of the online learning universe. The numbers seem to
suggest that it is leading the pack. To add to their ranks, 13 new
institutions have signed up to bring the number of international
institutions using its platform to deliver online courses to 107.
Coursera also reached the milestone of 5 million students
enrolled and now offers them more than 500 courses to choose
from.
… To commemorate
this triple achievement, Coursera released an infographic
on its blog which gives you a bird’s eye view of the educational
offerings on the website.
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