Social Engineering, I didn’t think it would work until puberty changed your voice.

British schoolboy, 15, posed as a CIA director to access secret military reports and taunted FBI agents

Fionn Hargreaves reports:

A schoolboy hacker impersonated a CIA director to gain access to top secret military reports, a court heard yesterday.

Kane Gamble was just 15 when he posed as CIA chief John Brennan from his Leicestershire home, even taking control of his wife’s iPad.

The teenager gained access to passwords, personal information, security details, contacts lists and sensitive documents about operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Gamble, who founded the pro-Palestinian group ‘Crackas With Attitude’, taunted the security service on Twitter about his successes.

Read more on Daily Mail. See also The Telegraph for additional details about many of the targets/victims. Gamble had pleaded guilty in October, but this was the first time some of the details came out publicly.

It is possible.

https://heimdalsecurity.com/blog/ransomware-decryption-tools/

Ransomware Decryption Tools – Unlock Your Data for Free

In this anti-ransomware guide, we included these tools below and a very useful checklist to avoid all types of malware. Use the links below to navigate through it.

How to identify the ransomware you’ve been infected with
Ransomware decryption tools
Explanation on ransomware families and tools for decryptio
How to avoid ransomware in the future
Quick checklist for ransomware protection

Get ready for the next time.

https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/company/2018/2016-election-update.html

Update on Twitter’s Review of the 2016 U.S. Election

Finally! Someone gets it. (Optimism = wishful thinking)

QOTD

Quote of the Day:

Until you have backups, you don’t have a database. What you have is a prolonged period of optimism. — Laurie Voss.

At least, it may start a discussion.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/01/facebook-media-trustworthiness/551045/?utm_source=feed

5 Questions About Facebook's Plan to Rate Media by 'Trustworthiness'

Mark Zuckerberg announced Friday that Facebook will begin surveying users about which news sources they trust, in an effort to rank publications on “trustworthiness.” This rating will help determine media companies’ placement in the News Feed, thereby materially changing the traffic that their stories receive.

Zuckerberg provided only a cursory description of the survey methodology. “As part of our ongoing quality surveys, we will now ask people whether they’re familiar with a news source and, if so, whether they trust that source,” he wrote in a Facebook post. “The idea is that some news organizations are only trusted by their readers or watchers, and others are broadly trusted across society even by those who don’t follow them directly.”