Sunday, March 25, 2018

Another breach of a national ID system and another case of “shoot the messenger?”
A new data leak hits Aadhaar, India's national ID database
… A data leak on a system run by a state-owned utility company Indane allowed anyone to download private information on all Aadhaar holders, exposing their names, their unique 12-digit identity numbers, and information about services they are connected to, such as their bank details and other private information.
… Yet the Indian authorities did nothing for weeks to fix the flaw. ZDNet spent more than a month trying to contact the Indian authorities, but nobody responded to our repeated emails.
We later contacted the Indian Consulate in New York and alerted Devi Prasad Misra, consul for trade and customs. Over two weeks, this issue was explained in detail, and we responded to many follow-up questions. A week passed, and the vulnerability was still not fixed. At the start of this week, we told the consul that we would publish our story on Friday and requested comment from the Indian government.
The consul did not respond to that last email. At the time of publishing, the affected system was still online and vulnerable – but, within hours after our story posted, the affected endpoint was pulled offline.


(Related)
Aadhaar biometric information not breached: UIDAI
A report in American tech website ZDNet has claimed a breach in the firewall of an unnamed state-owned utility that uses Aadhaar for authenticating users of its services. The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) dismissed the ZDNet claims as “baseless and irresponsible”, asserting that Aadhaar details “remain safe and secure”. “There is no truth in the story as there has been absolutely no breach of UIDAI’s Aadhar database,” it said.
… It said it is contemplating legal action.




Designed to fail?
Max Dible reports:
Marquis ID Systems, which issues state driver’s licenses and ID cards, reported Thursday that a system crash in September resulted in the loss of scans of sensitive personal documents that might prove irretrievable.
The “multiple hard disk crash,” as Marquis described it, coincided with a failure of the company’s backup system and affects roughly 66,500 Hawaii residents.
Read more on Hawaii Tribune-Herald.




Interesting recommendation, only use part of Zanifesto.
Zanifesto - Nice Infographic Design Templates
A couple of weeks ago I shared the Cool Infographics list of tools for making infographics. In that list of tools I found a new-to-me tool called Zanifesto.
Zanifesto is a free infographic creation tool. I tried it out this week to see if I could make a good looking infographic. I almost successful in that endeavor. Zanifesto has excellent templates for making infographics. The shortcoming of the service is that it wasn't all that easy to edit the templates. For example, in the template that I selected there was one element that I wanted to resize and slightly shift its position. That seems like it should be easy, but after many tries I got frustrated and just deleted it altogether. Changing fonts was almost as frustrating.
If you're looking for inspiration for an infographic, Zanifesto is useful for that purpose. I would look at the templates for inspiration and then use something else like Canva or even Google Drawings to make my infographic.


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