Prepare for more! Ransom is not the strategy here. If this goes
much more wide-spread, who benefits?
Ransomware
Forces Two Chemical Companies to Order ‘Hundreds of New Computers’
It appears that
LockerGoga, the same
ransomware that hit aluminum manufacturing giant Norsk
Hydro this week, also infected American chemicals companies Hexion
and Momentive, leaving employees locked out of their computers.
Hexion and Momentive,
which make resins, silicones, and other materials, and are controlled
by the same investment fund, were hit by the ransomware on March 12,
according to a current employee. An internal email obtained by
Motherboard and signed by Momentive’s CEO Jack Boss refers to a
“global IT outage” that required the companies to deploy “SWAT
teams” to manage.
… “Everything [went down]. Still no network
connection, email, nothing,” they said in an online chat on
Thursday.
Boss’s email said that the data
on any computers that were hit with the ransomware is probably lost,
and that the company has ordered "hundreds of new computers.”
… News of this attack shows that the hackers
behind the LockerGoga ransomware may be more active than previously
thought.
Until today, there were only two known victims of
LockerGoga, a relatively new type of malware that infects computers,
encrypts their files and ask for a ransom. The first known victim
was Altran,
a French engineering consulting firm that was hit in late January.
Then earlier this week, the
Norwegian aluminum giant Norsk Hydro revealed that it had been
hit by a ransomware attack. A Kaspersky Lab spokesperson said that
they have knowledge of more
victims around the world.
… Joe Slowik, a security researcher at Dragos,
a cybersecurity company that focuses on critical infrastructure and
who has studied the malware, said that LockerGoga
does not appear to be very good at its purported goal: collecting
money from the victims. In fact, as the ransom note
shows, and unlike other popular ransomware, victims have to email the
hackers and negotiate a price to get files decrypted, making it
harder for the criminals to scale their earnings.
“It’s a piece of very inefficient ransomware,”
Slowik told Motherboard in a phone call.
It may be inefficient at collecting money, but
it’s apparently good enough to slow down multinational companies in
both Europe and the United States.
Oh. That’s what it’s for.
What
Privacy is For
Privacy has an image problem. Over and over
again, regardless of the forum in which it is debated, it is cast as
old-fashioned at best and downright harmful at worst –
antiprogressive, overly costly, and inimical to the welfare of the
body politic. Privacy advocates resist this framing but seem unable
either to displace it or to articulate a comparably urgent
description of privacy’s importance. No single meme or formulation
of privacy’s purpose has emerged around which privacy advocacy
might coalesce. Pleas to “balance” the harms of privacy invasion
against the asserted gains lack visceral force.
The consequences of privacy’s bad reputation are
predictable: when privacy and its purportedly outdated values must be
balanced against the cutting-edge imperatives of national security,
efficiency, and entrepreneurship, privacy comes up the loser.
… As Part II discusses…
Privacy shelters dynamic, emergent subjectivity
from the efforts of commercial and government actors to render
individuals and communities fixed, transparent, and predictable.
… So described, privacy is anything but
old-fashioned, and trading it away creates two kinds of large
systemic risk, which Parts III and IV describe.
Interesting language?
Nigeria's
2019 Data Protection Regulation: A Fair Scale For Privacy And
Commercial Rights?
On January 25, 2019, Nigeria's National
Information and Technology Development Agency (NITDA)
issued the Nigeria Data Protection Regulation 2019 (the Regulation).
The Regulation took effect
on same date. In the fashion of the European Union's
Global Data Protection Regulation 2018 (GDPR),
the Regulation seeks among other things, to safeguard the rights of
natural persons to the privacy of their personal data by, among other
measures, regulating transactions involving the collection, use and
exchange of personal data. In this brief, we take a cursory look at
the Regulation and some of its imperatives for businesses that deal
in the personal data of those that the Regulation seeks to protect.
… The rights of Data Subjects include the
following:
- Data Subjects have the right to know their rights. The rights of the Data Subject are required to be made known to him before his personal data is processed. In this regard, the Data Controller must ensure that the means through which personal data is being collected has a conspicuous and understandable privacy policy.
Clearly, Scott Adams gets Trump logic.
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