It seems there are always people who didn’t get (or understand) the word.

KS: Wichita State U. employees fall victim to phishing scam, lose paychecks

Suzanne Perez Tobias reports:

At least three employees of Wichita State University did not receive their paychecks recently after they were targeted by computer hackers.

The employees were victims of an e-mail phishing scheme, which asked them to type in their university ID number and password, allowing scammers to access bank account numbers, student records and other personal information, according to university officials.

Read more on Kansas.com.

I doubt we’ll have election security by 2020. This article mentions a few of the problems we have already seen.

https://www.securityweek.com/hr1-bill-includes-provisions-improve-us-election-security

HR1 Bill Includes Provisions to Improve U.S. Election Security

The Democrat-controlled House of Representatives has unveiled its first Bill: HR1, dubbed the 'For the People Act'. It has little chance of getting through the Republican-controlled Congress, and even less chance of being signed into law by President Trump.

Nevertheless, HR1 lays down a marker for current Democrat intentions; and it is likely that some of the potentially bi-partisan elements could be spun out into separate bills with a greater chance of progress.

One of these is likely to include the section on election security.

… Concerns began in late August 2016, when security researcher Logan Lamb discovered registration details for 6.7 million Georgia voters were being held in a publicly accessible database. This data included voter histories and personal information of all Georgia voters, tabulation and memory card programming databases for past and future elections, instructions and passwords for voting equipment administration, and executable programs controlling essential election resources.

… What made the situation worse was that when the database was eventually taken down, the log details were deleted. As a result, it is impossible to discover whether anyone other than Logan Lamb also accessed the database.

… Two days before the election it was reported that the online voter registration database was unsecured and vulnerable.

Another good “bad example” for my students.

https://www.securityweek.com/fewer-affected-marriott-hack-passports-red-flag

Fewer Affected in Marriott Hack, but Passports a Red Flag

Fewer Marriott guest records that previously feared were compromised in a massive data breach, but the largest hotel chain in the world confirmed Friday that approximately 5.25 million unencrypted passport numbers were accessed.

The compromise of those passport numbers has raised alarms among security experts because of their value to state intelligence agencies.

… The hackers accessed about 20.3 million encrypted passport numbers. There is no evidence that they were able to use the master encryption key required to gain access to that data.

Unencrypted passport numbers are valuable to state intelligence agencies because they can be used to compile detailed dossiers on people and their international movements. [Suggesting that the encryption yields the same number every time, so it can be used to track my movement. Bob]

… When Bethesda, Maryland, hotel chain initially disclosed the breach in November, the company said that hackers compiled stolen data undetected for four years, including credit card and passport numbers, birthdates, phone numbers and hotel arrival and departure dates.

Perspective.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/01/04/more-americans-are-using-ride-hailing-apps/

More Americans are using ride-hailing apps

Americans who use ride-hailing services has increased dramatically. Today, 36% of U.S. adults say they have ever used a ride-hailing service such as Uber or Lyft, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in fall 2018. By comparison, just 15% of Americans said they had used these services in late 2015, and one-third had never heard of ride-hailing before.

As a fan of Science Fiction I can tell you it makes it easier to understand the potential of new technologies.

Early Predictions of the Internet Date Back to 19th Century Sci-Fi

Science fiction writers are professional future-dreamers, imagining worlds far beyond their own. With technology advancing at astronomical rates, real life feels more and more like sci-fi every day (for better or worse). So it’s fun to look back at those writers who, decades and even centuries ago, imagined what life would be like now—and some of their predictions were surprisingly accurate.