Tuesday, February 11, 2014

How big is the biggest breach ever?
Target Breach Cost Credit Unions $30M: NAFCU
The trade organization’s February Economic & CU Monitor survey also found that among those surveyed, the average credit union cost for the Target data breach was $45,000.

(Related)
Banks spent $172m on reissuing credit cards affected by Target breach
The report by CBA highlights that approximately 110,000,000 customers were affected until now, nearly 17,206,844 cards have been replaced, which cost them $172,068,440.

(Related)
Fraud hits one in three data-breach victims
According to a report released Wednesday by market-research firm Javelin Strategy & Research, there was a new identity fraud victim roughly every two seconds in 2013; identity fraud is the “unauthorized use of another person’s personal information to achieve illicit financial gain,” according to the report, and can range from using a stolen credit card to opening a new account in another person’s name. What’s more, there were 500,000 more fraud victims in 2013 than in 2012 (13.1 million vs. 12.6 million)—the second highest number since the study began in 2006.


Can it be done? Certainly. Why would anyone do it? Clearly there is no value in doing this, or companies would already be doing it. Will the government ask companies to voluntarily save the data? Are they that detached from reality? If not, would they be willing to make it profitable to store data? If not, would they (we taxpayers) at least pay the actual costs? (Can I buy all the storage you already have and lease it back to you profitably? Look for Google to offer just that!)
John Ribeiro reports:
The U.S. government has asked industry for information on whether commercially available services can provide a viable alternative to the government’s holding bulk phone records for a program of the National Security Agency.
The government’s collection of bulk phone records under Section 215 of the Patriot Act has been at the center of a privacy controversy since June last year when former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the agency was collecting bulk telephony metadata in the U.S. from Verizon.
Read more on Computerworld.
Related: RFI – Telephony Metadata Collection Program (Office of the Director of National Intelligence)


“Permissible uses” require you to have the data, so collection is not reduced. I don't see any change, do you?
If you’ll recall last month, in conjunction with his January 17th speech on U.S. signals intelligence reform, President Obama issued Presidential Policy Directive/PPD-28 – Signals Intelligence Activities. Generally speaking, PPD-28 set forth guiding principles for the U.S. signals intelligence collection. If you’re interested in reading more in depth about the directive, Ben Wittes provided a helpful overview of PPD-28 over at Lawfare last month.
Among other things, PPD-28 directed the Director of National Intelligence to “maintain a list of permissible uses of signals intelligence collected in bulk” and further to make the list “publicly available to the maximum extent feasible, consistent with the national security.” Today, at IC on the Record (the Office of the DNI’s official Tumblr page), DNI Clapper publicly released the List of Permissible Uses of Signals Intelligence Collected in Bulk (entire statement is reprinted after the jump). So for what purposes can the government use bulk collected data? Here is the complete list:
  • Espionage and other threats and activities directed by foreign powers or their intelligence services against the United States and its interests;
  • Threats to the United States and its interests from terrorism;
  • Threats to the United States and its interests from the development, possession, proliferation, or use of weapons of mass destruction;
  • Cybersecurity threats;
  • Threats to U.S. or allied Armed Forces or other U.S. or allied personnel; and
  • Transnational criminal threats, including illicit finance and sanctions evasion related to the other purposes named above.


For my geeky students... It's like having a portable desktop computer on your thumb drive. (I prefer option 3)
Running Linux from USB: Are You Doing It Right?
You’ve probably heard about live Linux environments on USB drives, but did you know that you can also keep data persistent or even do a full install on the USB drive? Here are your three options for carrying Linux in your pocket. Find out which method is best for you.
Write a Live ISO to USB
Enable Persistent Data
Do A Full Install to USB


Something to harass my Math students with.
– How good are you at mental arithmetic? That’s what a site like Speedsums aims to find out. It will ask you a rapid-fire set of arithmetic questions, and you have to answer as fast as possible and beat the timer. Apparently anything below 30 is “embarrassing”. It becomes slightly addictive as you go on, and it suddenly makes math interesting.

(Related) An Android App for my students who hate fractions. Shows step-by-step solutions! (We could run these on our desktops using the BlueStacks emulator.
– is a free smart step-by-step fractions calculator that solves any fraction operations in the same way you would do.
Considered the best fractions calculator, DLD Calc develops and simplifies fractions in the best possible way, saving you a lot of time solving extremely large problems. You can use it to solve your mathematics problems in your school.


I don't think they will bankrupt us, but we should keep a Coast Guard ship nearby in case this “Brown Water” navy finds the blue waters of the Atlantic a bit much to handle. (See the picture accompanying this article) Think of them sailing into an ice storm off the Georgia coast.
Iran sending warships close to US borders

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