It’s not a war, but we want to send in the troops anyway. And feel free to shoot back!
Australian government wants power to run cyber-response for businesses under attack
Australia’s government has proposed giving itself the power to take over private enterprises’ response to cyber-attacks on critical infrastructure.
A new Consultation Paper titled Protecting Critical Infrastructure and Systems of National Significance [PDF] notes that critical infrastructure is vulnerable to cyber attack, that such attacks are already happening and that the nation needs a plan so that if something nasty happens – like a hack taking out energy suppliers - other industries don’t go down like dominoes.
… Under such circumstances, critical infrastructure operators should be given “appropriate immunities to ensure they are not limited by concerns of legal redress for simply protecting their business and the community.”
(Related)
State-backed hacking, cyber deterrence, and the need for international norms
… While Chinese, Russian, North Korean and Iranian state-backed APT groups get most of the spotlight (at least in the Western world), other nations are beginning to join in the “fun.”
It’s a free for all, it seems, as the world has yet to decide on laws and norms regulating cyber attacks and cyber espionage in peacetime, and find a way to make nation-states abide by them.
When your little helper turns on you…
https://thehackernews.com/2020/08/amazon-alexa-hacking-skills.html?&web_view=true
Amazon Alexa Bugs Allowed Hackers to Install Malicious Skills Remotely
Check Point cybersecurity researchers—Dikla Barda, Roman Zaikin and Yaara Shriki—today disclosed severe security vulnerabilities in Amazon's Alexa virtual assistant that could render it vulnerable to a number of malicious attacks.
According to a new report released by Check Point Research and shared with The Hacker News, the "exploits could have allowed an attacker to remove/install skills on the targeted victim's Alexa account, access their voice history and acquire personal information through skill interaction when the user invokes the installed skill."
"Smart speakers and virtual assistants are so commonplace that it's easy to overlook just how much personal data they hold, and their role in controlling other smart devices in our homes," Oded Vanunu, head of product vulnerabilities research, said.
Amazon patched the vulnerabilities after the researchers disclosed their findings to the company in June 2020.
This is a biggie and probably not the last.
Oracle and Salesforce hit with GDPR class action lawsuits over cookie tracking consent
The use of third party cookies for ad tracking and targeting by data broker giants Oracle and Salesforce is the focus of class action style litigation announced today in the UK and the Netherlands.
The suits will argue that mass surveillance of Internet users to carry out real-time bidding ad auctions cannot possibly be compatible with strict EU laws around consent to process personal data.
The litigants believe the collective claims could exceed €10BN, should they eventually prevail in their arguments — though such legal actions can take several years to work their way through the courts.
Report is free with registration.
New Ponemon Institute Report Indicates Major Consumer Privacy Gap
A new study from the Ponemon Institute indicates that people are increasingly aware of online consumer privacy issues, but also overwhelmingly feel that they do not have the tools to protect themselves and are looking to government to intervene. [They should know better! Bob]
The study, entitled “Privacy and Security in a Digital World,” asked a diverse sample of 650 adults from across the United States about their sentiments toward various aspects of big tech platforms. Consumers indicated that their general trust in online services has dropped in recent years, with particularly sharp increases in concerns about search engines and social media platforms. Very few trust websites in general with collection and sharing of personal information, but only about half seem to be fully aware of the personal protection options that are available to them.
Panic and ignorance – a salesman’s dream?
The dystopian tech that companies are selling to help schools reopen sooner
Thousands of schools nationwide will not be reopening this fall. But in Las Vegas, the private K-12 Meadows School plans to use an artificial intelligence-powered thermal screening system to keep students safe as they return to classes.
The system will scan for signs that students have elevated temperatures — an indication they might have Covid-19 — as they enter buildings for their classes. If they’re flagged, the students will be asked to wait separately for about 10 minutes, and then get their temperature taken again. If the result is within a normal range, they’re cleared to start their day. If not, they’ll be sent home.
“Things are strange enough. Kids are going to be coming to school with masks. They’re going to be meeting friends with masks,” Jeremy Gregersen, the head of school at Meadows, told Recode. “They’re going to be meeting their teachers for the first time in person in strange new ways, and what we want is for kids to feel welcome and to normalize their arrival at school as early as possible.”
… A slew of firms, many of which already sold surveillance products, are adjusting their technology to the pandemic. The suite of products includes everything from computer programs that can identify whether or not a student is wearing a mask to artificial intelligence that measures how well people are social distancing. Sometimes, these capabilities are sold together as a package.
I can see where this would be a concern.
TikTok's US employees plan to sue Trump administration over executive order
Employees say the order would bar TikTok from paying them.
This could get interesting.
Amazon can be held liable for products sold on Marketplace, appeals court rules
Amazon can be held liable for defective products sold on its Marketplace in California, an appeals court ruled Thursday. The California Fourth District Court of Appeals reversed a 2019 trial court ruling and reinstated claims from a woman who says she suffered third-degree burns when a defective laptop battery she bought from a third-party seller on Amazon caught fire.
The decision could have dire repercussions for Amazon, which has argued for years that it only serves as an intermediary between buyers and third-party sellers on the Marketplace portion of its platform. That stance has protected Amazon from liability for Marketplace products, that is, until now. The company is now facing several other lawsuits over defective products in other courts.
For my friends in the English department:
Poor Grammar Makes For a Poor Extortion Campaign; ’You Under Attack‘ Pay Us ’Before Make Drama’
Try it yourself.
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/natural-language-processing-python-seo/377051/#close
An Introduction to Natural Language Processing with Python for SEOs
… We are going to learn practical NLP while building a simple knowledge graph from scratch.
Specifically, we are going to extract useful facts automatically from Search Engine Journal XML sitemaps.
In order to do this and keep things simple and fast, we will pull article headlines from the URLs in the XML sitemaps.
We will extract named entities and their relationships from the headlines.
Finally, we will build a powerful knowledge graph and visualize the most popular relationships.
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