Monday, September 16, 2019


Even an entire country can be a relatively small breach.
Data on almost every Ecuadorean citizen leaked
Names, financial information and civil data about 17 million people, including 6.7 million children, was found by security company vpnMentor.
The massive cache of data was found on an unsecured Amazon cloud server almost anyone could look at.




If you put all your eggs in one basket, you better protect that basket! Where are the backups? They don’t know what happened, when it happened or what was lost?
Robstown police evidence, reports lost during data breach
A data breach resulted in the loss of Robstown Police Department evidence and reports in pending investigations from 2018 and 2019.
The Nueces County District Attorney's Office announced the breach in a news release Friday afternoon on Facebook.
"The data was characterized as evidence (photos, videos, etc.) and reports relating to pending investigations," the release reads. "The information we received was that the breach was the result of RPD's servers being hacked and/or compromised by a virus sometime in the last couple of weeks."
The release goes on to say the department keeps a written list of cases investigated by detectives. They will review that list and attempt to track what data was lost, the release states.




For my Security class.
The ransomware crisis is going to get a lot worse
There is plenty of evidence to suggest that ransomware attacks are getting bigger and more sophisticated. In the space of just a few years ransomware has gone from a minor irritation for PC users to being a significant threat to large corporations and even nations. Major cybercrime gangs are looking to cash in on attacks, and state-backed attackers have realised the potential for creating both chaos and profit.
A few examples of the scale of the ransomware problem:
  • WannaCry, the biggest cyber incident of 2017, with than 300,000 victims in over 150 countries, was a form of ransomware most likely unleashed by North Korea (it was rapidly followed by NotPetya, an attempt by the Russian authorities to cause havoc in Ukraine with ransomware which rapidly spread beyond those borders).
  • Earlier this year the authors of one ransomware strain announced they were retiring because they had already earned $2 billion. "We have proved that by doing evil deeds, retribution does not come," they said at the time.




No surprise.
'ISRAEL'S ELECTION ON TUESDAY WILL BE TARGET OF CYBER-ATTACKS'
At the conclusion of the April 9 election, an Israeli watchdog group exposed a network of hundreds of social media accounts, many of them fake, used to smear opponents of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and to amplify the messages of his Likud Party.
Shortly before that, in January, it was reported that Iranians had been using hundreds of fake accounts on Israeli social media pages, in an effort to sow social division and influence the then upcoming Israeli election.
Now right before Israelis go to the polls, due to the proximity of the two elections as well as the immediacy and scale of the threats, it is highly doubtful that Israel has built a digital defense against cyberattacks this time around either, said Dr. Gabriel Weimann, a professor of communications at the University of Haifa.


(Related)
Exclusive: Australia concluded China was behind hack on parliament, political parties – sources
Australian intelligence determined China was responsible for a cyber-attack on its national parliament and three largest political parties before the general election in May, five people with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters.
Australia’s cyber intelligence agency - the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) - concluded in March that China’s Ministry of State Security was responsible for the attack, the five people with direct knowledge of the findings of the investigation told Reuters.




Are we getting serious? Perhaps justifying retaliation?
France’s Major Statement on International Law and Cyber: An Assessment
Last week, the French Ministry of the Armies (formerly the Ministry of Defense) released the most significant statement to date by any State regarding the application of international law in cyberspace. Droit International Appliqué aux Opérations dans le Cyberspace (International Law Applicable to Operations in Cyberspace) follows on the heels of an important speech by the United Kingdom’s then Attorney General, Jeremy Wright, on international cyber law last year at Chatham House. Estonia’s President has also spoken out on certain key international law rules as applied to cyberspace, which I discussed previously at Just Security. So too did the United States in speeches by the State Department’s Legal Advisers Harold Koh and Brian Egan. While other States have also proffered various comments on the subject, the UK and French are noteworthy for having staked out positions on a number of key unsettled issues.
This post will highlight the key points made in the French position paper and, where useful, compare and contrast them to statements by representatives of other governments, as well as Tallinn Manual 2.0 on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Operations, which was repeatedly cited in the French paper.




Will organizations have the same problem complying with CCPA’s requirements?
First OCR Enforcement of HIPAA’s Right of Access
Days after my recent blog post on the HIPAA Right of Access, the OCR released details of their first enforcement action for violation of the Right of Access.
The complaint, received in August 2018, involved a mother who waited over 9 months to receive prenatal records from Bayfront Health in St. Petersburg. She requested the records of her unborn child in October 2017 and after receiving incomplete records in March 2018, she did not receive the complete records until August 2018 (via her lawyers). It was not until after the OCR’s investigation in February 2019 that she received the complete records directly. HIPAA requires medical records to be provided within 30 days of the request.
The OCR concluded that Bayfront violated 45 C.F.R. § 164.524 by failing to provide access to PHI. Bayfront has paid $85,000 and agreed to a corrective action plan.




First time enforcer?
Chicago Brokerage to Pay $1.5 million Fine for Lack of Cybersecurity
A Chicago-based futures brokerage will pay $1.5 million for letting cyber criminals breach the firm’s email systems and withdraw $1 million from a customer’s account.
The order from The U.S. Commodities Futures Trading Commission also finds that Phillip Capital Inc. failed to disclose the cyber breach to its customers in a timely manner. The order also finds that PCI failed to supervise its employees with respect to cybersecurity policy and procedures, a written information systems security program and customer disbursements.
The order also requires PCI to, among other things, provide reports to the Commission on its remediation efforts.




Backgrounder?
The Dark Web: A guide for business professionals
The Dark Web is used to sell stolen data, drugs, and weapons—but it’s also used by legitimate outfits, like news organizations and the UN. This ebook looks at what the Dark Web is and how it affects you. The Dark Web is a network of websites and servers that use encryption to obscure traffic. Dark Web sites require the onion top-level domain, use non-memorable URL strings, and can be accessed only by using the open source, security-focused Tor browser. Because it’s portable and disposable, Tails, a Linux-based operating system that boots from a flash drive, adds a layer of security to Deep Web activity.
But the Dark Web is not all bad news. ProPublica, a well-respected investigative news organization, has a Dark Web site to help the company securely communicate with sources. The United Nations law enforcement department, the Office on Drugs and Crime, monitors the Dark Web and shares data with the public and global police organizations. Even Facebook, the world’s largest social network, has a Dark Web site relied on by more than one million users per month…”




I can see that.
Transparency is key to ethical AI
The concept of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is becoming commonplace in relation to the running of our lives and businesses – we’re all used to the idea, if not quite the practice, of using AI to improve the way we live and work.
As a result, the time has come to stop debating what it can do and start discussing what it should do.
Data is the fuel that feeds AI, and as such it’s now also firmly a part of public ethics across the globe. Regulations like the EU’s GDPR and South Korea’s Personal Information Protection Act have gone so far as to enshrine certain data rights into law. Organisations have to comply with these regulations, doing all they can to protect customer data and secure consent for feeding that data to their algorithms.
There are no easy answers when it comes to ethics. Yet, when trying to determine if your use of AI is ethical, you should ask yourself three basic questions: do you know what your AI is doing, can you explain it to your customers, and would they respond happily once you told them? If the answer is ‘no’ to any one of these, then it’s time for a rethink.




Do we need an Underwriters Lab for AI?
There’s a reason we don’t know much about AI
… In Britain, France and the European Union, government agencies examine the ethical, social and economic impact of artificial intelligence and other big new technologies used in health care and elsewhere. But while a number of U.S. academic centers study these issues, federal policymaking is practically nil.
This is an unprecedented and relatively recent lapse, when you consider that the government previously reviewed potentially risky technologies such as DNA modification, nuclear physics and human genome science. It’s particularly baffling given the real-world abuses of the new technologies, not least in China where the state uses AI and facial recognition to track, control and sometimes imprison millions of its Muslim citizens.
One reason for the curiosity gap is that the United States no longer has a place to do that kind of technology review. The Office of Technology Assessment conducted 750 studies on topics ranging from biotechnology to robotics and fuel economy from 1972 until then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his allies shut it down in 1995. Two other congressional research groups have suffered severe cuts—the Government Accountability Office’s funding has fallen by a third since 1990, the Congressional Research Service’s by 40 percent. The White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy created an AI task force in 2018, but its concern was promoting U.S. competitiveness, not oversight.




An early vision of AI. Tell me what has (and hasn’t) changed.
This article is part of Fast Company’s editorial series The New Rules of AI. More than 60 years into the era of artificial intelligence, the world’s largest technology companies are just beginning to crack open what’s possible with AI—and grapple with how it might change our future. Click here to read all the stories in the series.
Back in 1960, this was an excellent introduction to a subject that mattered a lot—and which, as Wiesner explained, people were just beginning to understand. It includes still-fascinating demos and interviews with significant figures in the history of AI. Fifty-nine years later after its first airing, its perspective on AI’s progress and possibilities remains unexpectedly relevant.




Lawyers, an AI developer’s resource?
How patterns in data affect getting legal work done
FT.com – Special Report – Innovative Lawyers in Europe – How patterns in data affect getting legal work done This article includes a annotated chart that ranks law firms and in-house teams for Data, Knowledge and Intelligence per the FT Innovative Lawyers Europe awards.
[From the article:
Peter Lee, co-founder and chief executive of UK legal engineering business Simmons Wavelength (owned by law firm Simmons & Simmons), says law firms are well placed to innovate with data because they generate so much information in the course of their work. “Lawyers often know more about the client’s business and future needs than the client does,” he says. However, the data they own is often controlled by different sections of the firm, which means extracting value can be complicated, and lawyers tend to lack skills in the technology.




I gotta ask: How does the Supreme Court interpret emojis in briefs?
Emojis Have Unsettled Grammar Rules (and Why Lawyers Should Care)
Emojis Have Unsettled Grammar Rules (and Why Lawyers Should Care) Eric Goldman discusses a new article by three Dutch researchers on the grammar of emojis, or more precisely, the lack thereof. Their abstract concludes: “while emoji may follow tendencies in their interactions with grammatical structure in multimodal text-emoji productions, they lack grammatical structure on their own.” Goldman states, in other words, when emoji symbols are strung together, we don’t have a reliable way of interpreting their meaning. He goes on to discuss the impact of emojis and the law.



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