Have
you been getting strange(er) emails from John Kerry?
State
Department unclassified email system shutdown for repairs
The
US State Department has shut down its entire unclassified email
system after a suspected hacker
attack. The email system was shut down it give techs time to
evaluate and repair any damage done by the hacking attack. The first
word of the attack came Sunday from a State Department official who
said that "activity of concern" had been noticed on the
email network around the same time as a similar incident targeting
computers at the White House was noticed.
If
you don't know what your employees are doing, or don't react
appropriately to unauthorized actions? This could happen to you!
As
this blog noted in July 2013, a jury awarded a Walgreens customer
$1.44 million after finding Walgreens and one of their pharmacists
violated the customer’s privacy. In this case, a female pharmacist
had looked up and shared the customer’s records when she suspected
the female customer had shared a sexually transmitted disease with a
man who was the customer’s ex-boyfriend and the pharmacist’s
now-husband. The customer
first discovered the breach when her ex-boyfriend (and father of her
child) texted her [Would
Walgreeens have discovered this on their own? Bob] that
he had a printout of her prescription history that showed she had not
renewed her birth control prescription for the two months prior to
conception.
When
the customer subsequently discovered that her ex-boyfriend was living
with a Walgreens pharmacist, she contacted Walgreens to report the
breach. Walgreens
investigated and confirmed there had been a breach, [So
they had the data they needed to confirm a breach, but hadn't
bothered to look at it? Bob] but could not confirm that
the pharmacist had shared the information with anyone else. The
pharmacist was given a written warning and required to retake some
HIPAA training.
The
customer, Abigail Hinchy, subsequently filed a lawsuit against
Walgreens and the pharmacist, Audra Withers.
As I
also noted at the time of the jury verdict, I was impressed that the
employer, Walgreens, was also held liable for the breach.
Not
surprisingly, Walgreens appealed the judgement. One of its four
arguments on appeal was that the trial court erred by refusing to
grant summary judgment or a directed verdict in Walgreen’s favor on
claims based on respondeat superior and negligent retention and
supervision of an employee. Its fourth argument was that the jury
verdict was excessive and based on improper factors.
On
November 14, Judge Baker of the Court of Appeals of Indiana issued
the court’s opinion
in Walgreens v. Hinchy,
rejecting all of Walgreen’s arguments and affirming the
judgement.
Readers
may find the court’s discussion of the respondeat superior aspect
interesting, as well as the types of harm the jury had
considered in determining their award (pp. 21-23).
Although
I do not have any information on this, I do wonder what the jury
might have done about Walgreens’ liability if Walgreens had fired
the pharmacist promptly on learning of the breach.
Perhaps
the State Department could use this App?
Telegram
Provides A Secure & Fast-Growing Alternative To WhatsApp
Earlier
this year we detailed some secure
alternatives to WhatsApp, and one option was Telegram. Since
then, it has seen a lot of growth — fuelled in part by Facebook’s
acquisition of WhatsApp and receiving a further five million
signups during a four-hour WhatsApp outage in February.
Telegram
is becoming a serious contender for the title of best free messaging
app,
…
To get full end-to-end encryption, in which Telegram never receives
an unencrypted version of your message, you can use what’s called a
secret chat. With the end-to-end encryption, the option to confirm
with your recipient that you’re using the same encryption key to
increase security, and the ability to set a self-destruct timer,
secret chats provide about as much security as you could ask for in
messaging, though this doesn’t allow for cross-platform messages.
…
Telegram is so confident
in their security that they’re offering
$200,000 to anyone who can crack it.
…
There are always tradeoffs between convenience and security, but the
non-profit team behind Telegram aims to make them minimal. Even with
all of the security Telegram provides, it manages to be very
convenient. To get it up and running, you
just download the app, enter your phone number, and enter the
security code you receive by text. You’re now ready to
start messaging.
Secure
email?
Cotse.net
is now requiring its customers use encryption to send mail.
From
their user login page today:
Nov 16 – We now require encryption for the sending SMTP server
(between you and us), if you are experiencing errors in sending,
ensure that your mail client is set up to use STARTTLS or SSL/TLS.
The reason for this change is two-fold, first, if you want to send
all your mail across an unencrypted connection, why are you using a
service like us? Second, because frankly, we could not find
definitive answers on the downgrade attack described here
with regards to all email clients, specifically during an auto-config
process. So, to just negate it, if the connection between you and us
isn’t encrypted at all, the send will fail.
Another
reason to love that company!
“It's
for the fish!” What if this technology could track your car as
easily? When your “black box” connects to the Internet of Things
tracking will be automatic.
Tracking
Fishy Behavior, From Space
…
on Friday, American non-profits SkyTruth and Oceana, supported by
Google, unveiled a prototype program called Global Fishing Watch that
will eventually allow anyone with a computer to observe which vessel
is fishing where—and perhaps infer whether they are poaching or
not.
“Our
goal is to make the invisible visible,’ John Amos, the president of
SkyTruth, told me.
…
According to the team, it will be possible for experts to go online
and zoom into areas like marine reserves where fishing is forbidden
or coastal areas where it’s restricted to vessels with permits by
next March.
The
program is based on the Automatic Identification System (AIS),
originally a voluntary collision-avoidance system for ships that
relies on VHF transmitters aboard vessels that transmit their
position, identity and speed continuously to other ships and to
satellites.
When
this guy says “comprehensive,” he means it! (Except he missed
the PrivacyFoundation.org)
New
on LLRX – Guide To Privacy Resources 2015
Via
LLRX.com
– Guide
To Privacy Resources 2015 – Marcus P. Zillman’s guide is a
comprehensive listing of privacy resources currently available on the
Internet that impact your email, smartphones, websites, hard drives,
files and data. Sources include associations, indexes, search
engines as well as individual websites and organizations that provide
the latest technology and information to raise awareness of privacy
and security as you interact with others using the internet.
A
question for my Computer Security class. What could possibly go
wrong?
Facebook
seeks foothold in your office
Facebook
is secretly working on a new website called “Facebook at Work” to
get a foothold in the office that will see the social network of more
than 1bn people compete directly with Google, Microsoft and LinkedIn.
The
Silicon Valley company is developing a new product designed to allow
users to chat with colleagues, connect with professional contacts and
collaborate over documents, competing with Google Drive and Microsoft
Office, according to people familiar with the matter.
The
new site will look very much like Facebook – with a newsfeed and
groups – but will allow users to keep their personal profile with
its holiday photos, political rants and silly videos separate
from their work identity. [Unless
someone looks for them... Bob]
For
my Statistics class. How to tell when people you survey are lying.
This
Simple Mathematical Formula Proves That We Lie About Sex
A
new
study on kissing in the microbiology journal Microbiome contains
an interesting statistical discrepancy that demonstrates the way men
and women lie about sex.
…
But a section of the study briefly addresses a statistic that proves
some of the people in the study must have been misreporting their
numbers. The study was of couples, and there was an equal number of
men and women. Yet the average number of intimate kisses per day
reported by the men was twice the number of those reported by the
women. This is a statistical impossibility. Men and women ought to
report the same average number of kisses, and you can prove that with
math. The fact that the numbers mismatch demonstrates that someone
in the study was either exaggerating or downplaying the number of
kisses they received, as the authors of the study helpfully point out
Better
than printing your own money!
The
Humans That Make The Apps We Love
…
Have you ever thought about who makes the apps you love? Sure you
know Facebook
owns WhatsApp, but have you ever considered the humans who got it
started? That’s just what this infographic takes a look at. Get
ready for a fascinating look at the people responsible for the apps
we love.
Data
Vusualization.
DATA
+ DESIGN a simple introduction to preparing and visualizing
information
“Information
design is about understanding data. Whether you’re
writing an article for your newspaper, showing the results of a
campaign, introducing your academic research, illustrating your
team’s performance metrics, or shedding light on civic issues, you
need to know how to present your data so that other people can
understand it. Regardless of what tools you use to collect data and
build visualizations, as an author you need to make decisions around
your subjects and datasets in order to tell a good story. And for
that, you need to understand key topics in collecting, cleaning, and
visualizing data. This free,
Creative
Commons-licensed e-book explains important data
concepts in simple language.
[Download
or read online: https://infoactive.co/data-design
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