Monday, June 22, 2020


After shooting at each other on the border, is this an escalation or merely a return to ‘actions less than war?’
40,300 hacking attempts suspected from entities in China to cripple utility, infra services
Between Tuesday to Friday, there were up to 40,300 hacking attempts, also referred to as ‘probes’, seeking to cripple the working of public-private service providers located in New-Delhi and Mumbai, cyber police sources said.
Though the hacking attempts have been unsuccessful so far in doing any concrete damage, their activities are unprecedented, the sources said.
The number of the hacking probes, 40,300, is unprecedented as for instance, there were zero such attempts from entities /individuals based in China last week," a source said.




Is this a recent breach or something the underground has been tapping for years?
BlueLeaks’ Exposes Files from Hundreds of Police Departments
Hundreds of thousands of potentially sensitive files from police departments across the United States were leaked online last week. The collection, dubbed “BlueLeaks” and made searchable online, stems from a security breach at a Texas web design and hosting company that maintains a number of state law enforcement data-sharing portals.
The collection — nearly 270 gigabytes in total — is the latest release from Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets), an alternative to Wikileaks that publishes caches of previously secret data.
KrebsOnSecurity obtained an internal June 20 analysis by the National Fusion Center Association (NFCA), which confirmed the validity of the leaked data. The NFCA alert noted that the dates of the files in the leak actually span nearly 24 years — from August 1996 through June 19, 2020 — and that the documents include names, email addresses, phone numbers, PDF documents, images, and a large number of text, video, CSV and ZIP files.
Additionally, the data dump contains emails and associated attachments,” the alert reads. “Our initial analysis revealed that some of these files contain highly sensitive information such as ACH routing numbers, international bank account numbers (IBANs), and other financial data as well as personally identifiable information (PII) and images of suspects listed in Requests for Information (RFIs) and other law enforcement and government agency reports.”




How would we make this function completely neutral?
Australia warned to not ignore domestic misinformation in social media crackdown
The Select Committee on Foreign Interference through Social Media has been tasked with probing the risk posed to the nation's democracy by foreign actors online, but it's been warned against ignoring the power of domestic influence in spreading misinformation.
It's also been cautioned against simply enforcing content blocking and leaving the responsibility to a handful of mostly US-based tech companies.




IF the US breaks the patent, who pays to deliver a vaccine to the rest of the world? (and a few thousand other questions)
The Covid-19 Vaccine Should Belong to the People
The Nation – The US government has the authority under existing law to break patent monopolies. “…The idea that some people would not receive a vaccine was once unthinkable. In a now legendary story, Jonas Salk developed the polio vaccine in 1955—and then gave it away for free. An interviewer once asked Salk who owned the patent for his polio vaccine. He responded, “Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent.” Salk was incredulous. “Could you patent the sun?” Since then, pharmaceutical corporations have patented the medical equivalent of the moon and the stars. Patent monopolies have fueled the current drug pricing crisis, and they may block access to any future Covid-19 vaccine… The public should get a say. Like Salk, Bancel has benefited greatly from public dollars. His corporation received millions in funding as early as 2013 to help develop its new way of making vaccines. Federal scientists helped design the new Covid-19 vaccine and are now running the critical human tests. The government also just gave $483 million to scale manufacturing. The public is paying at every stage for this potential vaccine—and so many others. All five candidates Trump is expected to short-list have benefited from public funding…”




Perspective. (Who knew?)
Google's U.S. Ad Revenue Is Expected to Decline in 2020, eMarketer Says
Google’s U.S. advertising revenue will decline this year for the first time since eMarketer began modeling it in 2008, the research firm said, largely because Google’s core search product is so reliant on the pandemic-battered travel industry.




Historical perspective.
How the Web was Won
On June 23, 1980 – 40 years ago tomorrow – English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee of CERN, a physics lab in Switzerland, began working on a project he called ENQUIRE. This work would eventually evolve into hypertext, HTML and the World Wide Web.




I’ll remember this testing method!



No comments: