Monday, June 01, 2015

Similar to Social Security, but we don't have a process to give out 1,250,000 new numbers.
William Mallard of Reuters reports another breach due to successful phishing of employees:
Japan’s pension system has been hacked and more than a million cases of personal data leaked, authorities said on Monday, in an embarrassment that revived memories of a scandal that helped topple Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in his first term in office.
Japan Pension Service staff computers were improperly accessed by external email virus, leading to some 1.25 million cases of personal data being leaked, the system’s president, Toichiro Mizushima, told a hastily called news conference.
He apologised for the leak, which he said involved combinations of people’s names, identification numbers, birth dates and addresses.
Read more on Yahoo! News (AU).
Eleanor Warnock of WSJ reports that the breach was discovered on May 28, according to a statement from the pension service.
JPS representatives said they would change the pension numbers of the individuals affected and create a committee of outside experts to investigate the incident and strengthen cyber security.




The latest “It's for the children” overreach? I'm not sure which would be scarier: “We don't need to think this through” or “We did think it through and this is the result.” (A West Virginia county funded a national survey for a mere $125,000 per year?)
Jessie Shafer reports:
A survey given to students in our region has some parent’s calling our newsroom, asking if the survey questions are a bit too personal.
“I go to church or synagogue… Most days I’m alone at home for an hour or more… A doctor said that I’m overweight.” These are just a few question on that Jackson County, West Virginia school survey given to 5th thru 12th graders.
One Ripley dad said, “They need to stay out of my business and my kid’s business.”
It’s called a Pride Survey. It’s an anonymous, national survey funded by a grant through the Jackson County Anti-drug Coalition. The grant is for $125,000 per year for 5 years, officials said.
Read more on WOWK.
The Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment (PPRA) was designed to give parents the right to consent (or not consent) to surveys that get into personal details. The problem is that PPRA doesn’t apply to a situation where the survey isn’t funded by the U.S. Dept. of Education.
In this case, if you watch the video on the news site and look at the survey, you’ll learn that the students’ names are not collected on the form and that a permission form was allegedly sent home that gave parents the opportunity to opt their child out of the survey. But as one parent who was interviewed said, he never saw any form.
Consent for surveys about sensitive information should be opt-in and not opt-out. Schools and agencies count on parents not bothering to opt their children out or never seeing or understanding the forms.




If the cloud provider required customers to encrypt all the files stored in their cloud, would there be any liability? Is this treating a symptom rather than the cause?
Glynna Christian and Nikki Mondschein of Kaye Scholer LLP provide food for thought for businesses and covered entities when reviewing contracts with IT service providers:
IT service providers, particularly cloud service providers, increasingly are resisting unlimited liability for breaches of privacy and data security obligations in their customer agreements. Instead, they offer unlimited liability for breaches of confidentiality, asserting the customer’s risk of a data breach would be covered as a breach of confidentiality, and arguing that unlimited liability for breaches of data protection obligations is simply double dipping.
A Data Breach Is Not Needed to Create Liability
When an IT service provider takes this position, one of the first questions a customer asks is: Assuming that the service provider has access to data that would be covered by privacy and data security laws, what is the risk if the provider breaches the privacy and data security obligations without an actual data breach.
In other words, does there need to be a data breach for the customer to incur liability? Unfortunately, the answer is no.
Read more on Lexology.




...because scrap yards are kinda like pawn shops – everyone who come in is a suspect.
Sen. Chuck Schumer calls for regulation of scrap metal sales after thefts left commuters stranded and public transit vulerable
… Schumer (D-N.Y.) wants scrap yards and recyclers to maintain detailed records on their purchases, and those selling metals to provide records of the origin of the materials.




The constant redefinition of Big Data. Zettabyte (1021 or 1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 bytes) multiply by 1,000 each time to get: Yottabyte, Xenottabyte, Shilentnobyte, and Domegemegrottebyte.
CISCO Visual Networking Index Forecast
by Sabrina I. Pacifici on May 31, 2015
“We are in an era where technological advances are happening at an exponential rate. According to Cisco’s Visual Networking Index Forecast, in just four years you can expect to see the number of mobile devices skyrocket, non-PC devices to reign supreme, and online video to do a complete takeover of television. Head’s up—maybe it’s time to start carving out some space for those extra devices in your 2019 home-of-the-future.
  • Annual global IP traffic will surpass the zettabyte (1000 exabytes) threshold in 2016, and the two zettabyte threshold in 2019. Global IP traffic will reach 1.1 zettabytes per year or 88.4 exabytes (one billion gigabytes) per month in 2016. By 2019, global IP traffic will pass a new milestone figure of 2.0 zettabytes per year, or 168.0 exabytes per month.
  • Global IP traffic has increased more than fivefold in the past 5 years, and will increase nearly threefold over the next 5 years. Overall, IP traffic will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23 percent from 2014 to 2019.
  • Over half of all IP traffic will originate with non-PC devices by 2019. In 2014, only 40 percent of total IP traffic originated with non-PC devices, but by 2019 the non-PC share of total IP traffic will grow to 67 percent. PC-originated traffic will grow at a CAGR of 9 percent, while TVs, tablets, smartphones, and machine-to-machine (M2M) modules will have traffic growth rates of 17 percent, 65 percent, 62 percent, and 71 percent, respectively.
  • Traffic from wireless and mobile devices will exceed traffic from wired devices by 2019. By 2019, wired devices will account for 33 percent of IP traffic, while Wi-Fi and mobile devices will account for 66 percent of IP traffic. In 2014, wired devices accounted for the majority of IP traffic at 54 percent.
  • The number of devices connected to IP networks will be three times as high as the global population in 2019. There will be three networked devices per capita by 2019, up from nearly two networked devices per capita in 2014. Accelerated in part by the increase in devices and the capabilities of those devices, IP traffic per capita will reach 22 GB per capita by 2019, up from 8 GB per capita in 2014.
  • Broadband speeds will double by 2019. By 2019, global fixed broadband speeds will reach 43 Mbps, up from 20 Mbps in 2014.”




Come on America! We can do better!
Instead of Playing Golf, the World's Elderly Are Staging Heists and Robbing Banks
… Young men still commit a disproportionate share of crimes in most countries. But crime rates among the elderly are rising in Britain and other European and Asian nations, adding a worrisome new dimension to the problem of aging populations.
South Korea reported this month that crimes committed by people 65 and over rose 12.2 percent from 2011 to 2013—including an eye-popping 40 percent increase in violent crime—outstripping a 9.6 percent rise in the country's elderly population during the period. In Japan, crime by people over 65 more than doubled from 2003 to 2013, with elderly people accounting for more shoplifting than teenagers. In the Netherlands, a 2010 study found a sharp rise in arrests and incarceration of elderly people. And in London, police say that arrests of people 65 and over rose 10 percent from March 2009 to March 2014, even as arrests of under-65s fell 24 percent. The number of elderly British prison inmates has been rising at a rate more than three times that of the overall prison population for most of the past decade.
The U.S seems to have escaped the trend: According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the rate of elderly crime among people aged 55 to 65 has decreased since the 1980s.




According to Dilbert, I should start tweeting about my students.


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