A friendly heads-up!
SIM-Jackers
Can Empty Your Bank Account with a Single Phone Call
These
days – as journalist and food writer Jack
Monroe discovered
last week, when £5,000 was
stolen from
her bank account – scammers can simply transfer your phone number
to a new SIM card and gain access to every penny in your name.
This
relatively new crime is known as "SIM-jacking", and works
like this: perpetrators obtain important details about their victims
either by scouring social media or conning them into divulging
personal information. Using these details, they pose as their
victims, convince network providers to transfer their numbers to new
SIM cards and post out those SIMs. Once the swap is complete,
messages containing codes for those two-factor authentication systems
we now all have can be intercepted, and fraudsters can hop into your
email, social media or mobile banking accounts.
… In
2018, the BBC's Watchdog sent undercover reporters into Vodafone and
O2 stores to see if they could obtain replacement SIM cards without
proper ID checks. In both cases they walked away with the SIMs
without having to undergo
the checks.
"One
of the reasons SIM-swap attacks are so effective is that many
mobile phone carrier representatives are easy to socially engineer,"
explained a former black hat hacker, who dabbled in SIM swaps before
going straight and becoming a white hat hacker. "An attacker
can call your phone provider, pretend to be you and spin some story
to get the support agent to transfer your number to a SIM. If he
runs into any friction, he can hang up and try again with another
agent."
HIPAA
enforcement may need to get serious.
Healthcare
Organizations have Become Hotbed for Phishing Email Attacks in First
Quarter of 2019
A
new study by Proofpoint reveals that there has been a 300% jump in
imposter emails sent to healthcare organizations during the first
quarter of 2019.
- 95% of targeted healthcare companies saw emails spoofing their trusted domains or patients. The spoofed domains belonged to business partners of the targeted healthcare companies.
- Subject lines of 55% of all imposter email attacks included ‘payment’, request’ and ‘urgent’ related terms.
Why
we update. No need to hack through front line security when the
backdoor is wide open.
Outdated
OSs Still Present in Many Industrial Organizations: Report
… According
to the latest data from CyberX, 62% of analyzed sites house devices
running outdated and unsupported versions of Windows, such as Windows
XP and 2000, and the percentage jumps to 71% if Windows 7, which
reaches
end of support in
January 2020, is also included.
The
use of Windows versions that no longer receive security updates poses
a serious risk as it allows attackers to compromise systems using
vulnerabilities for which details and PoC exploits are often publicly
available. Moreover, the company pointed out, even if Microsoft
releases patches for unsupported versions of Windows to address
high-risk flaws, as it did in the case of the BlueKeep
vulnerability,
it may not be easy for an organization to deploy the patch on
industrial systems.
Here
now and ready for work.
Gartner
Announces Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends For 2020
Today
Gartner, Inc. announced its top ten strategic technology trends for
2020. Analysts presented their findings during Gartner
IT Symposium in
Orlando.
Gartner
defines a strategic technology trend as “one with substantial
disruptive potential that is beginning to break out of an
emerging state into broader impact and use, or which
is rapidly growing with a high degree of volatility
reaching tipping points
over the next five years.”
‘cause
AIs are special? Or perhaps they are just like regular people?
Copyright
Law Should Not Restrict AI Systems From Using Public Data
Commentary
– Center for Data Innovation:
“In March 2019, IBM created the “Diversity in Faces” dataset to
provide a set of photos of peoples’ faces of various ages and
ethnicities to help reduce
bias in facial recognition systems.
Even though IBM compiled the dataset from photos people shared online
with a license which allows
others
to use the images for any purpose, some people strongly
objected because
IBM did not explicitly ask people for permission to use their photos
in this dataset. NBC
News even
called it “facial recognition’s ‘dirty little secret.’”
While this characterization is profoundly misleading (it was an
effort to reduce bias in facial recognition, which is hardly “dirty,”
and IBM was very public about the source of this data), this
controversy highlights the challenge organizations face in creating
datasets for AI, even when they have lawful access to the data, and
the need for government to play a larger role in compiling data for
computational uses…”
What
kind of Terminator do we want?
A
Path Towards Reasonable Autonomous Weapons Regulation
Editor’s
Note: The
debate on autonomous weapons systems has been escalating over the
past several years as the underlying technologies evolve to the point
where their deployment in a military context seems inevitable. IEEE
Spectrum has
published a
variety of perspectives on this issue.
In summary, while there is a compelling argument to be made that
autonomous weapons are inherently unethical and should be banned,
there is also a compelling argument to be made that autonomous
weapons could potentially make conflicts less harmful, especially to
non-combatants. Despite an increasing amount of international
attention (including
from the United Nations ),
progress towards consensus, much less regulatory action, has been
slow. The following workshop
paper on autonomous weapons systems policy is
remarkable because it was authored by a group of experts with very
different (and in some cases divergent) views on the issue. Even so,
they were able to reach consensus on a roadmap that all agreed was
worth considering.
Those
who study history are doom to create the best AI?
What
Do Machine Learning and Hunter-Gatherer Children Have in Common?
… Hunter-gatherer
communities in Congo, where I do my
field research,
do not often give direct instructions when teaching their children.
Instead, they create a learning opportunity, like providing a tool,
and monitor the child’s action without interfering. The child then
adjusts her behavior according to the feedback she receives based on
her performance. Likewise, neural networks work by giving an
opportunity for the machine to learn (i.e., input) and providing
feedback based on the output obtained by the network structure.
The
ultimate goal in AI research is to generate artificial general
intelligence (AGI), that is a machine that can understand and learn
as we humans do. Many AI researchers, like the DeepMind team,
believe that this will be possible through more independent learning
strategies. In unsupervised
learning,
for example, machines learn by observing data without a predetermined
goal or explicit guidance. This form of learning is parallel to how
hunter-gatherer children learn most skills.
No
link to the report?
New
survey shows American workers are actually excited about AI for this
big reason
Monday.com, a visual
tool that simplifies the way teams work, released a report on the
state of automation and Artificial Intelligence that surveyed 1,000
employed Americans on their thoughts about automating workplace
tasks.
A majority of the
workforce (54%) believes they would save over five hours from tools
that automate tasks.
… Automation is
even becoming something that job-seekers look for as part of the
package.
“It’s becoming
part of a benefit,” Burns said. “If you go out there looking the
marketplace, you can see people talking about, What systems are you
using to automate your workflows?”
Why? Are AI systems
clamoring to buy books by AI authors?
Booksby.ai
is a bookshop entirely created by artificial intelligence
Melding the disparate
worlds of art and computer science, Andreas Refsgaard and Mikkel
Loose have developed a fascinating AI project called Booksby.ai, an
online bookstore entirely generated by artificial intelligence.
Every aspect of the site is generated by machine learning algorithms,
from the entire books and accompanying cover artwork, to the reviews
and pictures of people reviewing the books. And on top of that, all
the books are actually available to buy on Amazon.
… The
duo were not interested in generating a new machine learning model,
but instead used the project to aggregate a variety of different
preexisting models into a singular outcome. So, for example, the
books and accompanying reviews were generated using a freely
available character-based recurrent neural network called char-rnn.
The images of the reviewers faces were generated using a different
model,
and the book covers used yet
another model.
Even the books’ prices were set by a neural network trained on book
prices from Amazon.
How
to follow The Donald?
How
to create RSS Feeds from Twitter
RSS.app:
“Twitter is a great tool to stay up-to-date with everything that
is happening: news, hobbies and interests, celebrities and
influencers. However, some users prefer to consume and monitor this
information via RSS feeds using RSS readers or custom integrations
within their own apps. RSS.app allows users to create RSS feeds from
any public Twitter user feed, hashtag, at mention or search keyword,
as well as feeds of their own Twitter timelines without writing a
single line of code. Here are three options on how to create these
feeds…”
Time to start
collecting?
‘The
perfect combination of art and science’: mourning the end of paper
maps
UK
Guardian – Digital maps might be more practical in the 21st
century, but the long tradition of cartography is magical –
“Some
for one purpose and some for another liketh,
loveth, getteth, and useth
Mappes, Chartes, & Geographicall Globes.” So
explained John Dee,
the occult philosopher of the Tudor era. The mystical Dr Dee would,
perhaps, have understood the passion stirred by Geosciences
Australia’s recent decision to
stop producing or selling paper versions of its topographic maps in
December, citing dwindling demand…”
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