For
my Computer Security students.
Credit
Card Hacking is Americans' Top Crime Worry: Poll
Credit-card
hacking is the number one crime on Americans' worry list, far above
getting mugged or murdered, according to a Gallup survey released
Monday.
As
the number of major retailers reporting cyber breaches grows, with
thieves stealing credit card data belonging to tens of millions of
their customers, awareness of the hacking threat has taken off.
"Americans
today are more worried about their credit card information being
hacked from stores than about any other crimes they are asked about,
and a relatively high percentage say they have been victims of this
hacking," Gallup said.
Sixty-nine
percent of Americans said they frequently or occasionally worry about
computer hackers stealing the credit-card information they have used
at stores.
The
only other crime that worries the majority of Americans -- 62 percent
-- is hacking and data theft of a computer or smartphone.
(Related)
The
number of detected cyberattacks skyrocketed in 2014 — up 48 percent
from 2013 — and they are costing companies more money, according to
two global studies released Monday.
This
year is expected to see 42.8 million cyberattacks, roughly 117,339
attacks each day, a
study from consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers found.
Nearly
all companies surveyed were hit by a cyberattack in 2014,
costing them hundreds of thousands, potentially millions, of dollars.
…
Security filings revealed that
retail giant Target alone shelled out upwards of $150 million since
its data breach during the 2013 holiday shopping season.
Another
report from security software vendor Kaspersky Lab estimated an
average data security incident costs a company $720,000.
(Related)
You may never know you've been a victim.
JPMorgan
Data Breach Involves Information on 76 Million Households
JPMorgan
Data Breach Involves Information on 76 Million Households, 7 Million
Small Businesses, CRS Legal Sidebar, October 23, 2014
“JPMorgan
did not provide individual customers with notice of the breach
because it believed that it had no obligation to do so because no
“sensitive customer information” was involved in the data
breach. This means that JPMorgan apparently has complied with data
breach notification standards
promulgated by the federal banking regulators pursuant to the privacy
provisions of
the Gramm-Leach-Bliley
Act (GLBA).
These standards specify the contents of breach notices that must be
supplied by telephone, mail, or electronic mail to all affected
customers when a data breach involves “sensitive customer
information.” Should “sensitive customer information” be
involved in a data breach, the guidelines require financial
institutions, such as JPMorgan, to notify customers only if after a
“reasonable investigation” the company determines that “misuse
of its information about a customer has occurred or is reasonably
possible.”
Notice
that the US government does not make this accusation about a group
that is not part of the Chinese government. This is pure diplomatic
speak.
Ellen
Nakashima reports:
A coalition of security researchers has identified a Chinese
cyberespionage group that appears to be the most sophisticated of any
publicly known Chinese hacker unit and targets not only U.S. and
Western government agencies but also dissidents inside and outside
China.
News of the state-sponsored hacker group dubbed Axiom comes a week
before Secretary of State John F. Kerry and two weeks before
President Obama are due to arrive in Beijing for a series of
high-level talks, including on the issue of cybersecurity.
Read
more on Washington
Post.
(Related)
Countries (particularly China and Russia) tend to take accusations
personally.
FireEye
Links Russia to Cyber Espionage Campaign Dating Back to 2007
Security
firm FireEye has released a new report uncovering and detailing a
large cyber-espionage campaign that the company believes is sponsored
by the Russian government and dates back to 2007.
The
group behind the campaign, which FireEye is calling APT28, is a
skilled team of developers and operators collecting intelligence on
defense and geopolitical issues that would clearly benefit Russia.
Unlike
many attacks often attributed to China and detailed in Mandiant’s
(now part of FireEye) APT1
report released in 2013, the APT28 attackers do not appear to be
after intellectual property theft for economic gain.
…
Last
week, Trend Micro released a report
on a cyber-espionage operation dubbed "Operation Pawn Storm"
which targeted military, government and media organizations around
the world and utilized the Sofacy malware.
But
according to McWhorter, the direct link and attribution to Russia is
what FireEye is highlighting in its APT28 report.
…
the
report
(PDF)
About
time someone initiated a smackdown!
Nate
Cardozo and Jamie Lee Williams write:
School districts across the country are grappling with how to deal
with their students’ use of technology and social media. All too
often, in an attempt to protect students, they end up implementing
technology polices that give administrators too much power and go too
far in restricting what students can do online. Williamson
County Schools, a public school district in affluent Williamson
County, Tennessee, is one such school district. Recently, a
concerned parent, Daniel Pomerantz, brought the policy to the
attention of EFF and the ACLU of
Tennessee (ACLU-TN). Mr. Pomerantz was right to be concerned.
Earlier today, EFF and ACLU-TN sent a letter to the board on behalf
of our client detailing our concerns. As we outline in our letter
to the school board, the school district’s technology
and Internet policy is troubling in a number of ways. Indeed,
the policy violates the First and Fourth Amendment rights of 35,000
Williamson County students across the district’s 41 schools. We
teamed up with ACLU-TN to demand that the Williamson County School
Board immediately suspend the unconstitutional policy.
Read
more on EFF.
If
it takes analysis of Big Data to determine who to discriminate
against, will it be obvious to anyone who does not analyze Big Data
that documents the discrimination?
Companies
that target certain people based on their online behavior could be
practicing a form of discrimination, the American Civil Liberties
Union (ACLU) warned on Monday.
Some
businesses look at massive amounts of information about what people
do on the Internet to target ads to one group over another, which the
ACLU told the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) “has the potential to
significantly reinforce existing economic disparities between racial
groups."
“Because
decisions about which advertisements to display are in some cases
based on data about race or factors closely linked to race, we are in
danger of segregating the consumer experience on the Web,” ACLU
officials told FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez in a formal filing.
Both
the FTC and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau should
investigate whether or not companies are violating the rules by using
new forms of
discrimination, the civil liberties group said.
“Sell
'em while they're young!” (and don't forget to tell them how hard
it is to use Windows!)
…
The tech giant has chosen 114 schools in 29 states to get grants as
part of the Obama administration’s ConnectED effort, which seeks to
connect 99 percent of the country’s students to high-speed
broadband Internet.
“We
believe that the young minds and young innovators of tomorrow should
have every opportunity to realize their potential through today’s
powerful learning tools,” Apple said in announcing
its plans.
In
the schools Apple will be targeting, 96 percent of students are
eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, a common metric of poverty.
Ninety-two percent of students in the schools are of a racial or
ethnic minority.
“Despite
their economic challenges, these schools share a vision of what their
students’ lives would be like with Apple technology,” Apple said.
I
think I'll start using this as my best example of something that will
never happen. Politicians limiting the lies they can tell? You must
be joking.
Disclosure
rules pushed by Democrats [Next
week it's the Republican's turn Bob] could result in the
creation of a government review board monitoring the Internet, the
chairman of the Federal Election Commission (FEC) warned Monday.
…
The FEC deadlocked last month on the question of whether there
should be more stringent reporting requirements for political
advertisements that are distributed only on the Internet.
I
keep meaning to buy more cocoa... I don't remember why.
Clinical
Trial Shows Cocoa Diet Reverses Age-Related Memory And Cognitive
Decline
“A
new study and clinical trial by scientists at Columbia University
Medical Center has shown that in healthy human adults, a diet of
cocoa that is rich in flavanols is able to reverse the effects of
age-related memory decline. Imaging reveals one region of the brain
that is responsible for the improvement in cognition. The study is
one of the first to show that dietary
modification results in startling brain function improvement
upon targeting of one specific brain region. Cognition tests reveal
significant improvements in memory recall and reaction times, to the
extent that performance of older people resembled that of younger.
…
Previous studies have shown that age-related memory decline starts
in early adulthood but has little impact on quality of life until the
sixth and seventh decades.
Interesting.
Would anyone notice if he (for example) changed the code to favor
one political party over another? That would not break any laws,
would it?
How
Facebook Is Changing the Way Its Users Consume Journalism
NYT
– Ravi Somaiya:
“Many of the people who read this article will do
so because Greg Marra, 26, a Facebook engineer, calculated that it
was the kind of thing they might enjoy. Mr. Marra’s team designs
the code that drives Facebook’s News Feed – the stream of
updates, photographs, videos and stories that users see. He is also
fast becoming one of the most influential people in the news
business… About 30
percent of adults in the United States get their news on Facebook.
Roughly once a week, he and his team of about 16 adjust the complex
computer code that decides what to show a user when he or she first
logs on to Facebook. The code is based on ‘thousands and
thousands’ of metrics, Mr. Marra said, including what device a user
is on, how many comments or likes a story has received and how long
readers spend on an article.”
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