Interesting. First time I've seen
anyone turn off their phones...
Zappos
hacked; notifying 24+ million Zappos.com and 6pm.com customers of
breach and to reset passwords
January 15, 2012 by admin
Online retailer Zappos has been hacked.
Its CEO, Tony Hsieh, posted
a copy of an email notification explaining the
breach to all employees with a copy of the email notification sent to
customers:
The following
email was sent to our employees today:
Subject: Important
– Security
Dear Zappos
Employees -
Please set aside
20 minutes to carefully read this entire email.
We were recently the victim of a cyber attack by a criminal who
gained access to parts of our internal network and systems through
one of our servers in Kentucky. We are cooperating with the FBI to
undergo an exhaustive investigation.
Because of the
nature of the investigation, the information in this email is being
sent a bit more formally, and unfortunately we are not able to
provide any more details about specifics of the attack beyond what is
in this email and the link at the end of this email, but we can say
that THE SECURE DATABASE THAT STORES OUR CUSTOMERS’ CRITICAL CREDIT
CARD AND OTHER PAYMENT DATA WAS NOT AFFECTED OR ACCESSED.
… Due to the
volume of inquiries we are expecting, we realized that we could serve
the most customers by answering their questions by email. We
have made the hard decision to temporarily turn off our phones and
direct customers to contact us by email because our phone
systems simply aren’t capable of handling so much volume. (If 5%
of our customers call, that would be over 1 million phone calls, most
of which would not even make it into our phone system in the first
place.)
What I can’t figure out from the
above is whether they are indirectly saying that they stored full
credit card numbers on another server. I hope they clarify this in
future statements.
So, this was happening over the
Christmas break but no one bothered with it until they returned to
work? No evidence of hacking, so what will they charge the boys
with? Normal backup procedures should insure that no data was lost
(I dang sure backup the work I do)
Fairfax
officials: 2 Lake Braddock students stole passwords, erased school
data
Two Fairfax County middle-school
students used stolen passwords to wreak
havoc with a school software application used countywide by thousands
of teachers, students and parents, according to authorities.
Officials at Lake Braddock Secondary
School in Burke reported the breach to police Jan. 3,
the first day of classes after winter vacation. Course content had
been erased from the school’s Blackboard site, an online system
that teachers use to post assignments, hold discussions and
communicate with parents.
… According to one Lake Braddock
parent, Facebook began buzzing in late December
with students’ complaints about the Blackboard-related oddities,
including missing assignments and “poorly written pornographic
e-mails” they received via the online system.
An investigation led to the two boys,
who had apparently obtained the passwords of a fellow student and 17
teachers, Luftglass said. Officials don’t know how
the boys got the passwords, but there is no evidence that
they hacked into the Blackboard software or exploited a security
loophole, she said.
… This is not the first time a
Fairfax student has gotten into Blackboard trouble. In 2010, a
third-grader
deleted content and changed the passwords of
administrators, including Superintendent Jack D. Dale.
I would have thought this strategy was
obvious. 1) The government has been buying data for years, long
before they were slapped down for the Total Information Awareness
project. 2) Google, Facebook and others have shown that selling
personal data or using it to direct advertising is hugely profitable.
Automatic
License Plate Readers
January 15, 2012 by Dissent
I’ve blogged about license plate
recognition previously.
Now the PrivacySOS
blog has more reason to be concerned about this type of surveillance:
A 2012
investigation
by the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) showed that, as
privacy advocates feared, at least one private manufacturer of
license plate recognition systems has been retaining its own ALPR
data, creating an enormous, national database. As government
accountability groups have feared, information from that database,
the National Vehicle Location Service, is not bound by the few
privacy regulations governing government ALPR databases. CIR showed
that the private firm that owns that database, Vigilant Video, sells
our data to police, creating a loophole to skirt around the few
public regulations that exist to protect us from improper,
retroactive police spying.
Governments have
for some time purchased
our credit, criminal, residential, employment
and other data from private corporations. Now ALPR data is added to
that mounting pile of information on each one of us, as multinational
intelligence and data firms are integrating
their systems with ALPR technology, further expanding the reach of
the surveillance matrix.
Read more on PrivacySOS.
h/t, ACLU
of Massachusetts
“We can't have a really huge
bureaucracy until we can cavity search anyone, anywhere, at any
time!”
"CNET has a story on DHS'
whole car X-ray scanners and their potential cancer risks.
The story focuses on the Z Portal scanner, which appears to be a
stationary version of the older Z
Backscatter Vans. The story provides
interesting pictures of the device and the images it produces, but it
also raises important questions about the devices' cancer risks. The
average energy of the X-ray beam used is three times that used in a
CT scan, which could be big trouble for vehicle passengers and
drivers should a vehicle stop in mid-scan. Some studies show the
risk for cancer from CT scans can be quite high.
Worse still, the DHS estimates of the Z Portal's radiation dosage
are likely to be several orders of magnitude too low. 'Society
will pay a huge price in cancer because of this,'
according to one scientist."
If she is right, I see a business
opportunity and competition...
January 15, 2012
Commentary:
Libraries Succeed by Constantly Evolving
Susan
H. Hildreth, Director of the Institute of Museum and Library
Services: "People depend on libraries now
more than ever. Not only do visits and circulation continue to rise,
the role of public libraries in providing Internet resources to the
public continues to increase as well. Public libraries have also
increased their program offerings to meet greater demand and provide
more targeted services. In the business world, such
demand for an industry's services would mean big profits for that
sector. But despite the demonstrated ability of libraries
to adjust to meet the growing needs of the public, many libraries
across the country face severe budget cuts. There is no doubt that
the future success of libraries depends on their ability to change
and evolve to meet the changing ways that people access and use
information. As director of the Institute of Museums and Library
Services, the federal voice for library and museum service in the
U.S. -- I see three big goals for libraries: provide
engaging learning experiences, [Supplement schools? Bob]
become community anchors, and provide access to
content even as the devices for accessing that content change
rapidly."
Cool! Now I can design and build those
drones I've been thinking about.
"At the American Institute for
Aeronautics and Astronautics Aerospace
Sciences Meeting in Nashville, NASA
engineers unveiled the newly open sourced OpenVSP,
software that allows users to construct full
aircraft models from simple parameters such as wing
span and fuselage length, under the NASA
Open Source Agreement. Says the
website, 'OpenVSP allows the user to create a 3D model of an aircraft
defined by common engineering parameters. This model can be
processed into formats suitable for engineering analysis.'"
Keep Current! Someone (and she
knows who she is) should expand this theme into a more useful
paper...
Monday, January 16, 2012
How do you keep up with all of this?
That's a question I am often asked after giving a presentation
or when I meet people at conferences. One of the ways I keep up and
learn about new things is through Twitter.
In a guest post last winter Steven Anderson offered some great
advice about using Twitter. Google+ is
increasingly becoming a good way to keep up with what the people in
my circles are sharing. The other way, in fact the
primary way, that I keep up is through my RSS
reader.
I am currently subscribed to 273 blogs
and websites in my RSS reader. Those 273 subscriptions account for
more than 1,000 daily posts. If I had to visit each one of those
sites individually I would never have time for anything else (like
walking
Morrison). So what is an RSS reader and how does it help me
efficiently process 1,000 or more blog posts per day? Watch the
Common Craft video below to
find out.
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