Thursday, January 17, 2019

A file collected by “the other guys.”
The 773 Million Record "Collection #1" Data Breach
Many people will land on this page after learning that their email address has appeared in a data breach I've called "Collection #1". Most of them won't have a tech background or be familiar with the concept of credential stuffing so I'm going to write this post for the masses and link out to more detailed material for those who want to go deeper.
Let's start with the raw numbers because that's the headline, then I'll drill down into where it's from and what it's composed of. Collection #1 is a set of email addresses and passwords totalling 2,692,818,238 rows. It's made up of many different individual data breaches from literally thousands of different sources. (And yes, fellow techies, that's a sizeable amount more than a 32-bit integer can hold.)
In total, there are 1,160,253,228 unique combinations of email addresses and passwords.
… Last week, multiple people reached out and directed me to a large collection of files on the popular cloud service, MEGA (the data has since been removed from the service). [MEGA was founded by Kim Dotcom. Bob]




I know articles like this seem repetitive, but I only select one or two each week to keep pounding my students with the “do it right the first time” message. Clearly many organizations do not.
FBI records, emails, Social Security numbers exposed in massive data leak, security experts say
A massive data leak has been discovered at the Oklahoma Securities Commission, in which millions of records – including files related to sensitive FBI investigations over the last seven years, emails dating back 17 years and thousands of Social Security numbers -- have been exposed.
The breach was uncovered last month by Greg Pollock, a cybersecurity researcher at UpGuard, who claims the millions of files were publicly available on an online server and didn’t require any password to access them.
… The Oklahoma agency is in charge of all financial securities business in the state and is tasked with regulation and enforcement of the business.




I guess that if half the world is below average that half is also ill-informed. (Okay. More than half.)
Most Facebook users still in the dark about its creepy ad practices, Pew finds
A study by the Pew Research Center suggests most Facebook users are still in the dark about how the company tracks and profiles them for ad-targeting purposes.
Pew found three-quarters (74%) of Facebook users did not know the social networking behemoth maintains a list of their interests and traits to target them with ads, only discovering this when researchers directed them to view their Facebook ad preferences page.
A majority (51%) of Facebook users also told Pew they were uncomfortable with Facebook compiling the information.
While more than a quarter (27%) said the ad preference listing Facebook had generated did not very or at all accurately represent them.




Something my students will probably read!
8 Sci-Fi Writers Imagine the Bold and New Future of Work
Ready Set Go…Wired – “Half of being human, give or take, is the work we do. Pick up a shift. Care for the sick. Fix the plumbing. Audition for a part. Sometimes it’s all we think about—and fret about, especially as technology comes for our jobs. Just search “future of” and autocomplete does the rest: Do you mean “future of work”? Freaking Google, surfacing our collective anxieties yet again. Economists and organizational behaviorists and McKinsey consultants crunch the numbers and tell us, with great surety, how we’ll spend our days. The careers and callings of tomorrow will inevitably be this, certainly not that, and look at all the superefficient self-guided factory robots! While the nature of work is always changing, the AI revolution has intensified the pace and magnitude of these predictions, painting a future that seems to need our labor less and less.
But charts and white papers only capture so much. Facts need feelings, and for that we turn to science fiction. Its authors are our most humane, necessary futurists, imagining not just what the future holds but how it might look, feel, even smell. In the following pages are stories from eight sci-fi specialists. Some are set in the near term; others, a bit farther out. All remind us that, no matter the inevitable upheavals, we don’t struggle alone—but with and for other people. And robots. —The Editors”


No comments: