Thursday, November 14, 2019


Toward a secure architecture. An alternative to a national Guard Cyber Unit, or perhaps a complement?
North Dakota Expands Cyberdefense with New Funding, Workforce
With a recent funding boost for the 2019-21 biennium, the North Dakota Information Technology Department will use $15.4 million to expand its Cyber Operations Center (CyOC), adding a host of new toolsets, employing increased contractor support and analysis, and hiring eight new staff members.
Currently, the CyOC is responsible for a focused effort to conduct a statewide cybermaturity assessment to measure the level of cyber-readiness of 400+ public entities in the state. That effort is part of a larger initiative, launched by a bill passed earlier this year, to strategically align state government behind a unified cyberposture.




They apparently didn’t monitor their resources. Why so long to agree to minimal security?
Company discovered it was hacked after a server ran out of free space
Hacker was detected after creating a giant archive file that took up all the free disk space. Had been inside the company's network for almost two years, undetected.
In 2016, the company announced a security breach during which a hacker stole the personal details of around one million users. Following tips that the company had failed to secure its servers, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) started an investigation into the hack.
According to an FTC complaint at the time, the hacker exploited a vulnerability in InfoTrax's websites to upload a malicious code that enabled remote control of the company's website and adjacent server infrastructure.
The theft was aided by the fact that InfoTrax was storing customer data in cleartext. Stolen information included Social Security numbers, payment card information, bank account information, and user names and passwords.
This week, the FTC and InfoTrax agreed to a settlement according to which the Utah-based company would implement the security measures that led to the 2016 security breach. The settlement obliges InfoTrax to:
    • inventory and delete personal information it no longer needs;
    • conduct code review of its software and testing of its network;
    • detect malicious file uploads;
    • adequately segment its network; and
    • implement cybersecurity safeguards to detect unusual activity on its network.




For my Security students.
New Study Shows Financial Loss from Multi-Party Cyber Incidents Is 13X Larger than Single-Party Incidents
Today the Cyentia Institute published “Ripples Across the Risk Surface,” an in-depth study sponsored by RiskRecon that analyzes more than 800 cyber incidents and their impact on multiple downstream organizations. According to the study, multi-party loss events that impact thousands of downstream organizations, otherwise known as “ripple events,” result in 13X larger financial loss than traditional single-party incidents. The objective of this first-of-its-kind study is to raise market awareness on the hyper interdependencies organizations have on other organizations, and the ripple effect that grows by an order of magnitude beyond that singular data loss event.




Worth checking?
Brave 1.0 launches, bringing the privacy-first browser out of beta
Brave promises to prioritize security by blocking third-party ads, trackers, and autoplay videos automatically. So you don’t need to go into your settings to ensure greater privacy, though you can adjust those settings if you want to.




Those who grant-ith monopoly can take-ith it away. (As I have suggested for years.)
Victory over telecom industry gives Connecticut towns a way to provide their own faster, cheaper internet service
The telecommunications industry lost and consumers won in a Connecticut Superior Court decision that gives cities and towns the right to use existing utility infrastructure within their borders to create municipal networks that deliver cheap, fast internet service to homes and business.




Gartner trends are based on what senior IT executives are thinking.
10 Data and Analytics Trends for 2020
Data and analytics have gained traction in organizations, driven by the promise of big data a few years ago and the potential of machine learning and other types of artificial intelligence more recently. Even as many enterprises seemed to be stalled in their production AI plans, they are still making those plans, and know they are crucial for success in the years to come.
That's because data and analytics are serving an expanded role in digital business, according to Gartner analyst and VP Rita Sallam. Data and analytics have become key parts of how you serve customers, hire people, optimize supply chains, optimize finance, and perform so many other key functions in the organization.




If you build (gather and store) it, they will come. Field of Law Enforcement’s Dreams
Zack Whittaker reports:
The social media giant said the number of government demands for user data increased by 16% to 128,617 demands during the first half of this year compared to the second half of last year.
That’s the highest number of government demands it has received in any reporting period since it published its first transparency report in 2013.
Read more on TechCrunch.




Legal is not always seen as ethical. Google should have known better just based on the size of the database.
Rob Copeland and Sarah E. Needleman report:
Google’s project with the country’s second-largest health system to collect detailed health information on 50 million American patients sparked a federal inquiry and criticism from patients and lawmakers.
The data on patients of St. Louis-based Ascension were until recently scattered across 40 data centers in more than a dozen states. Google and the Catholic nonprofit are moving that data into Google’s cloud-computing system—with potentially big changes on tap for doctors and patients.
At issue for regulators and lawmakers who expressed concern is whether Google and Ascension are adequately protecting patient data in the initiative, which is code-named “Project Nightingale” and is aimed at crunching data to produce better health care, among other goals. Ascension, without notifying patients or doctors, has begun sharing with Google personally identifiable information on millions of patients, such as names and dates of birth; lab tests; doctor diagnoses; medication and hospitalization history; and some billing claims and other clinical records.
Read more on WSJ.
And this is exactly what happens when you have carve outs for sharing information without explicit notice and consent. FERPA has a carve-out that allows schools to share students’ personal information with third-party entities that they declare as “school officials” and now we see how an exception in HIPAA may have allowed a massive sharing without consent.
It is stunning to me that Ascension would have engaged in this data sharing without anticipating how the public might feel about this. I would feel betrayed by them and horrified.




Spain has published a few useful guidelines already. Where are the rest of the EU members?
The Spanish Supervisory Authority issues guidance on the use of cookies
On November 8, 2019, the Spanish Supervisory Authority (“SA”) issued detailed guidance on cookies and similar technologies in collaboration with stakeholders in the ad industry, including Adigital, Anunciantes, AUTOCONTROL and IAB Spain.




Interesting how lawyers are thinking about AI.
Artificial Intelligence, Finance, and the Law
Lin, Tom C. W., Artificial Intelligence, Finance, and the Law (November 4, 2019). 88 Fordham Law Review 531 (2019); Temple University Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2019-31. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3480607
Artificial intelligence is an existential component of modern finance. The progress and promise realized and presented by artificial intelligence in finance has been thus far remarkable. It has made finance cheaper, faster, larger, more accessible, more profitable, and more efficient in many ways. Yet for all the significant progress and promise made possible by financial artificial intelligence, it also presents serious risks and limitations.
This Article offers a study of those risks and limitations—the ways artificial intelligence and misunderstandings of it can harm and hinder law, finance, and society. It provides a broad examination of inherent and structural risks and limitations present in financial artificial intelligence, explains the implications posed by such dangers, and offers some recommendations for the road ahead. Specifically, it highlights the perils and pitfalls of artificial codes, data bias, virtual threats, and systemic risks relating to financial artificial intelligence. It also raises larger issues about the implications of financial artificial intelligence on financial cybersecurity, competition, and society in the near future. Ultimately, this Article aspires to share an insightful perspective for thinking anew about the wide-ranging effects at the intersection of artificial intelligence, finance, and the law with the hopes of creating better financial artificial intelligence—one that is less artificial, more intelligent, and ultimately more humane, and more human.”




Try not to frighten the AI controlling your pacemaker!
Fun New Paper Says We Should Make Machines Freak Out About Their Own Mortality
"In a dynamic and unpredictable world, an intelligent agent should hold its own meta-goal of self-preservation, like living organisms whose survival relies on homeostasis: the regulation of body states aimed at maintaining conditions compatible with life," write Man and Damasio in their published paper.
In short, we're talking about giving robots feelings. Making them care might make them better in just about every aspect, and it would also give scientists a platform to investigate the very nature of feelings and consciousness, say Man and Damasio.




What outcome will the App suggest?
AI app may help diagnose mental illness through speech: Study
Researchers have developed a speech-based mobile app that uses artificial intelligence to categorize a patient's mental health status, an advance that may lead to a tool to assist psychiatrists in diagnosing mental illnesses. The study, published in the journal Schizophrenia Bulletin, noted that many people in remote areas do not have access to psychiatrists or psychologists, and others can't afford to see a clinician frequently.
The researchers, including those from the University of Colorado at Boulder in the US, said therapists base their treatment plan largely on listening to a patient talk which they said was an old, subjective and unreliable method.
They developed a machine learning technology that can detect day-to-day changes in speech which hints at mental health decline.




Or perhaps ignoring economic advice is politically advantageous?
Against Economics
There is a growing feeling, among those who have the responsibility of managing large economies, that the discipline of economics is no longer fit for purpose. It is beginning to look like a science designed to solve problems that no longer exist.




I like lists. (How many are available free?)
Explore the list of 100 Novels That Shaped Our World
These English language novels, written over the last 300 years, range from children’s classics to popular page turners. Organised into themes, they reflect the ways books help shape and influence our thinking.



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