Perhaps you should look for someone to certify their security as
well?
The
New Target That Enables Ransomware Hackers to Paralyze Dozens of
Towns and Businesses at Once
On July 3, employees at
Arbor Dental in Longview, Washington, noticed glitches in their
computers and couldn’t view X-rays. Arbor was one of dozens of
dental clinics in Oregon and Washington stymied by a ransomware
attack that disrupted their business and blocked access to patients’
records.
But the hackers didn’t
target the clinics directly. Instead, they infiltrated them by
exploiting vulnerable cybersecurity at Portland-based PM Consultants
Inc., which handled the
dentists’ software updates, firewalls and data backups.
Arbor’s frantic calls to PM went to voicemail, said Whitney Joy,
the clinic’s office coordinator.
“The second it
happened, they ghosted everybody,” she said. “They didn’t give
us a heads up.”
A week later, PM sent an
email to clients. “Due to the size and scale of the attack, we are
not optimistic about the chances for a full or timely recovery,” it
wrote. “At this time we must recommend you seek outside technical
assistance with the recovery of your data.”
On July 22, PM notified
clients in an email that it was shutting down, “in part due to this
devastating event.”
… The
attack on the dental clinics illustrates a new and worrisome frontier
in ransomware — the targeting of managed service providers, or
MSPs, to which local governments, medical clinics, and other small-
and medium-sized businesses outsource their IT needs. While many
MSPs offer reliable support and data storage, others have proven
inexperienced or understaffed, unable to defend their own computer
systems or help clients salvage files. As a result, cybercriminals
profit by infiltrating dozens of businesses or public agencies with a
single attack,
while the beleaguered MSPs and their incapacitated clients squabble
over who should pay the ransom or recovery costs.
The
robots are coming! The robots are coming!
Robot
hazards: from safety to security
Robotics landscape is
experiencing big changes. Robots are spreading and will soon be
everywhere. Systems traditionally employed in industry are being
replaced by collaborative robots, while more and more professional
and consumer robots are introduced in people's daily activities.
Robots are increasingly intertwined with other facets of IT and
envisioned to get much more autonomy, interacting physically with
humans. We claim that, following Personal Computers (PCs) and
smartphones, robots are the
next technological revolution and yet, robot security is
being ignored by manufacturers. The present paper aims to alert
about the need of dealing not only with safety but with robot
security from the very beginning of the forthcoming technological
era. We provide herein a document that reviews robot hazards and
analyzes the consequences of not facing these issues. We advocate
strongly for a security-first approach as a must to be implemented
now.
Just because I know a
few hacking techniques does not mean I’m a… Okay, maybe that’s
a bad example.
Ethical,
Legal and Social Challenges of Predictive Policing
While Predictive
Policing is an innovative tool to use data and statistical methods to
forecast the probability of crime and improve the effectiveness of
deployment of resources, it is based on many underpinning
assumptions. The main ethical issues relating to PP circle around
the themes data selection and machine bias, visualisation and
interpretation of forecasts, transparency and accountability, time
and effectiveness as well as the problem of stigmatisation of
individuals, environments and community areas. This translates into
the legal domain and particularly questions relating to privacy. The
current legislative framework only partly addresses these issues,
focusing mainly on individual rights and not on groups and how they
might be affected. The main societal concerns relating to the use of
Predictive Policing circle around the establishment of trust. In
this overview developed in cooperation with several European law
enforcement agencies and members of civil society, we submit that it
is still unclear whether Predictive Policing is effective if its main
objective is to reduce crime rates.
No comments:
Post a Comment