“Hey!
Here’s my new bank account. Send all my payments here.”
BEC
Scams Average $301 Million Per Month In Illegal Transfers
The
frequency of business email compromise (BEC) scams has increased year
over year and so did the value of attempted thefts, reaching a
monthly average of more than $300 million.
…
The
latest report
from
Internet Crime Report from FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center
(IC3) informs BEC scams were responsible for most of the losses
generated by cybercrime.
Companies
lost $1.2 billion to this sort of cybercriminal activity that aims to
obtain funds by posing as a customer or upper management personnel in
a company in order to trick key individuals in the organization into
wiring funds to an attacker-control bank account.
… Crooks
have different tactics to attain their goal. In 2017 they used to
impersonate company CEOs, which have sufficient authority to instruct
individuals in charge of making payments to wire money to a specific
account.
This
approach dropped from 33% to 12% in 2018, indicating that fraudsters
are adapting and looking for new ways to play their tricks.
Last
year they seemed to prefer impersonating customers and vendors, and
used fake invoices in an attempt to get paid.
No
surprise. Telling Russian lies from politician lies ain’t easy.
Knowing who buys an ad should be.
Google’s
Tool to Tame Election Influence Has Flaws
Google
set up a searchable database of political ads last summer, following
calls for greater transparency in the wake of Russia’s interference
in the 2016 presidential election.
Nearly
a year later, the search giant’s archive of political ads is
fraught with errors and delays, according to campaigns’ digital
staffers and political consultants. The database, the Google
Transparency Report,
doesn’t always record political ads bought with Google’s ad tools
and in some instances hasn’t updated for weeks at a time, they say.
Several
campaigns, including those of Democratic presidential hopefuls Bernie
Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, have run ads in recent weeks that
didn’t appear in the Google archive, people familiar with the
campaigns’ ad-buying said. Such mistakes have occurred for
presidential and congressional candidates in both parties.
Good
summary, again no real suggestions for change.
How
Cyber Weapons Are Changing the Landscape of Modern Warfare
In the weeks before two Japanese and Norwegian oil
tankers were attacked, on June 13th, in the Gulf of
Oman—acts which the United States attributes to Iran—American
military strategists were planning a cyberattack on critical parts of
that country’s digital infrastructure. According to an officer
involved, who asked to remain anonymous, as Iran ramped up its
attacks on ships carrying oil through the Persian Gulf—four
tankers had been mined in May—and the rhetoric of the
national-security adviser, John
Bolton, became increasingly
bellicose, there was a request from the Joint Chiefs of
Staff to “spin up cyber teams.” On June 20th, hours after a
Global Hawk surveillance drone, costing more than a hundred million
dollars, was destroyed over the Strait of Hormuz by an Iranian
surface-to-air missile, the United
States launched a cyberattack aimed at disabling Iran’s
maritime operations. Then, in a notable departure from previous
Administrations’ policies, U.S. government officials, through leaks
that appear to have been strategic, alerted the world, in
broad terms, to what the Americans had done.
… At Cyber Command, teams are assigned to
specific adversaries—Iran, North Korea, Russia, and China, among
them—and spend years working alongside the intelligence community
to gain access to digital networks.
Would you sell out so cheaply?
What Amazon
Thinks You’re Worth
Shoppers were
offered a $10 credit in exchange for handing over their browser data.
It’s an investment that pays dividends for Amazon.
… Amazon’s Prime Day bonanza came with an
interesting deal: If users downloaded the Amazon Assistant app to
their browser, they would receive a $10 credit.
The Amazon Assistant is a browser extension,
shopping assistant, and recommendation tool, all rolled into one.
Hover over an item while you’re shopping on another site, and the
assistant will compare the item you’re looking at with a similar
one available on Amazon. Of course, when Amazon has the cheaper
deal, users will likely choose that one instead. But the assistant
also allows Amazon access to users’ browser data: the URLs of the
pages they visit, the search terms that brought them there, search
results and metadata about those pages. Amazon offered the exchange
last year as well, for a $5 credit.
Ah! Someone thinks there will be…
Life after
artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence stands to be the most
radically transformative technology ever developed by the human race.
As a former artificial intelligence entrepreneur turned investor, I
spend a lot of time thinking about the future of this technology:
where it’s taking us and how our lives are going to reform around
it. We humans tend to develop emergent technologies to the nth
degree, so I think there is a certain inevitability to the far-out
techno-utopian visions from certain branches of science fiction —
it just makes common sense to me and many others. Why shouldn’t AI
change everything?
… At the risk of speaking in generalities,
here’s how I forecast our weird, unknown future where AI is
simultaneously very advanced and very mainstream. Things are going
to be completely different from what we know today, but these changes
are distinctly positive, not negative.
Capabilities.
The
Israeli firm behind software used to hack WhatsApp boasted that it
can scrape data from Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft
cloud servers
The
company behind a WhatsApp hack has been boasting that it can break
into the cloud services of big tech companies, including Amazon,
Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, the
Financial Times reports.
The
Israeli security firm NSO group is infamous for its malware, Pegasus,
which the
FT said in May had
been used to hack
the phones of human rights activists using
just a single WhatsApp call. The malware could make its way onto the
target's phone, even
if they didn't pick up.
Now
NSO has been telling potential clients Pegasus has been developed to
target cloud servers, according to people familiar with the sales
pitch and documents shared with the FT. NSO reportedly said in its
pitch that, by hacking into these servers, it
could access someone's entire location data history, archived
messages, and photos.
According
to the sales documents viewed by the FT, the method involves copying
authentication keys for services like Google Drive, Facebook
Messenger and iCloud, from a targeted phone. Once this is done, a
separate server can then impersonate the device without alerting the
real owner.
The
document said that even if the malware is removed from the device,
attackers could still have unlimited access to data uploaded to the
cloud, the FT reported.
Cool
or criminal?
THIS
CLEVER NEW SERVICE AUTO-CANCELS YOUR FREE TRIALS
EVERY
TIME YOU sign up for a free trial of any kind, you’re forced to
take stock of your outlook on life. Realists accept that they’ll
eventually wind up paying for this thing that is currently free.
Pessimists understand this too, but are prematurely embittered even
as they plug in their credit card numbers. Optimists assure
themselves that they’ll keep track of when the trial ends and
they’ll cancel before they are ever charged, if it turns out they
don’t want to continue.
… As
of today, there is a more convenient way for you to cancel before
ever being charged: a service called Free Trial Card. It's available
now through the app
DoNotPay,
created by 22-year-old wunderkind coder and entrepreneur Joshua
Browder.
The
Free Trial Card is a virtual credit card you can use to sign up for
free trials of any service anonymously, instead of using your real
credit card. When the free trial period ends, the card automatically
declines to be charged, thus ending your free trial. You don’t
have to remember to cancel anything. If you want, the app will also
send an actual legal notice of cancelation to the service.
An
interesting homework challenge: What would you say to interest the
President enough to get this response? Probably not an argument
based on technology. (Did Microsoft really complain about
Microsoft?)
Trump
says he’s looking into a Pentagon cloud contract for Amazon or
Microsoft because ‘we’re getting tremendous complaints’
… “We’re
getting tremendous complaints from other companies,” Trump said in
a press pool at the White House during a meeting with the prime
minister of The Netherlands. “Some of the greatest companies in
the world are complaining about it.” He
named Microsoft, Oracle and IBM.
Since
April, Microsoft and Amazon have been the only remaining competitors
for the contract after IBM and Oracle were ruled out by the Defense
Department. The contract, known as JEDI, is viewed as a marquee deal
for the company that ultimately wins it, particularly as Microsoft
and Amazon are aggressively pursuing government work for their
expanding cloud units.
Something
for all my students. (Because they don’t teach this in high
school?)
Common
Craft Explains How to Craft Clear Email Communication
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