Strange
that China is only now looking at “what's next” in security. Or
maybe they have been looking as long as I have, but haven't been
caught until now.
Chinese
hackers target US national security think tanks
The
Chinese cyberattack group Deep Panda has compromised national
security think tanks using sophisticated techniques designed to steal
confidential data concerning US foreign policy, according to security
researchers at CrowdStrike.
The
CrowdStrike team say that "several" national security-based
think tanks have been compromised in the defense, finance, legal and
government arenas by the group, which the security researchers call
"one of the most advanced Chinese nation-state cyber intrusion
groups." Cyberattacks have been launched by the hackers for
almost three years now, but it is only in recent times that Deep
Panda's focus has changed.
… "This is undoubtedly related to the recent Islamic State
of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) takeover of major parts of Iraq and the
potential disruption for major Chinese oil interests in that country.
In fact, Iraq happens to be the fifth-largest source of crude oil
imports for China and the country is the largest foreign investor in
Iraq’s oil sector. Thus, it wouldn’t be surprising if the
Chinese government is highly interested in getting a better sense of
the possibility of deeper U.S. military involvement that could help
protect the Chinese oil infrastructure in Iraq.
In fact, the shift in targeting of Iraq policy individuals occurred
on June 18, the day that ISIS began its attack on the Baiji oil
refinery."
Deep
Panda's cyberattacks (.PDF) consist of exploiting vulnerabilities
in Windows operating systems which allows the group to deploy
powershell scripts as scheduled tasks.
Okay,
maybe large corporations are not the best answer to hacking botnets.
Next time, a judge won't be so easily convinced that “nothing can
go wrong.”
Microsoft
Returns Domain Names Seized From No-IP
All
of the 23 domain names recently seized by Microsoft from No-IP as
part of an operation against the Bladabindi (njRAT) and Jenxcus
(NJw0rm) botnets have been returned.
When
it announced the operation, Microsoft said No-IP domains were used
93% of time for Bladabindi and Jenxcus infections, and accused the
Dynamic Domain Name Service (DNS) provider of failing to take steps
to prevent abuse.
Microsoft
routed bad traffic to a sinkhole in an effort to classify the
threats, and worked with A10 Networks to configure a system to manage
the high volume of connections generated by the Bladabindi-Jenxcus
botnets. Legitimate
traffic should not have been impacted, but something went wrong and
millions of legitimate users experienced service outage.
No-IP
representatives said Microsoft's actions were "heavy-handed"
and lashed out at the company for not contacting them before seizing
their domains.
…
Microsoft
representatives apologized for the incident and claimed that
legitimate No-IP users experienced a temporary loss of service "due
to a technical error." The company said all services should
have been restored on July 1 at 6AM Pacific time, but on Twitter,
many No-IP customers reported
downtimes long after that. During the debacle, a distributed
denial-of-service (DDoS) attack was launched against No-IP, but the
company insisted
that the attack didn't have anything to do with the prolonged outage
since it was aimed at its website, not its DNS infrastructure.
We
know it is coming. All we need to do is get the budget, plan the
changes and implement them. My guess is that 80% of businesses will
fall behind – driving customers into the hands of those who don't.
Internet
of Things to Stress Enterprise Networks
While
many enterprises feel prepared for the impending era of the Internet
of Things (IoT), there may not be enough network capacity to handle
the demand that will accompany an anticipated explosion in the number
of connected devices, according to a survey by Infoblox.
For
instance, more than half (57 percent) of survey respondents reported
their current network is already at full capacity and a similar
number (54 percent) see network infrastructure management as a high
priority for their organizations.
…
The market for IoT, excluding PCs, tablets and smartphones, is
expected to grow to 26 billion units in 2020—an almost
a 30-fold increase from 0.9 billion units in 2009,
according to a recent report from IT research firm Gartner.
[More
on the survey:
http://www.infoblox.com/company/news-events/press-releases/2014/the-enterprise-is-ready-for-the-internet-of-things-but-5-of-networks-are-not
(Related)
Or perhaps it's already here?
Home
Depot expands stock of smart home gadgets
Boosting
your home's IQ got easier Monday as Home Depot began selling a
collection of nearly 60 gadgets that can be controlled by mobile
devices, including light bulbs, lawn sprinklers and water heaters.
…
Two years ago, Home Depot sold 100 of them but now offers 600, said
Jeff Epstein, the retailer's vice president for home automation
merchandising.
…
The products can be operated via a Wink app — available for free
on Android or iOS
…
With the app alone, consumers can control Wi-Fi-enabled items such
as a Chamberlain garage-door opener, a Honeywell smart thermostat or
certain LED light bulbs by Philips and General Electric. The
software will also be offered on products by Bali, Dropcam, Kidde,
Kwikset, Leviton, Lutron, Rachio, Rheem Leviton, Rheem and Schlage.
Perspective.
Microsoft's
Windows to aid PC market revival in 2015
…
The “revival” of the PC market will be driven by upgrades of old
business PCs with Windows XP, which are no longer supported by
Microsoft, said Ranjit Atwal, research director at Gartner. He
estimates that roughly 60 million PCs will be upgraded this year.
Businesses
are largely upgrading to Windows 7 and avoiding Windows 8, which is
viewed more as a tablet OS.
…
After the first iPad shipped in 2010, tablets were increasingly
adopted as alternative computing devices to PCs. Gartner is
projecting tablet shipments to increase to 256 million this year, up
from 207 million last year. Tablet shipments will reach 321 million
in 2015, overtaking PCs, Gartner said.
Tablets
will get cheaper and more functional, Atwal said, adding that these
trends will continue to drive adoption in the coming years.
…
Android will continue to be the dominant OS across devices,
according to Gartner.
Being
the founder of Facebook gets you a spot on the editorial page, but
can't guarantee that you can paint a coherent picture of the future.
Mark
Zuckerberg on a Future Where the Internet Is Available to All
The
“mouse” continues to tweek the “cat.”
Kim
Dotcom extradition hearing delayed again
…
The next hearing would be in February 2015, Mr Dotcom said on
Monday. He is currently on bail and living in New Zealand. He has
denied the charges.
The
reason for the latest extradition hearing delay is not yet known.
…
Earlier this year, a New Zealand court ruled that the raid was
legal, but that the US's cloning of electronic evidence was not.
More
recently, the court decided that Mr Dotcom did not have to hand over
access codes to hard-drives seized in the raid.
Additionally,
the entertainment industry has launched multiple lawsuits to run
alongside the criminal case.
One,
from a number of film studios, alleges that Mr Dotcom cost the
industry $500m (£320m) in lost revenue.
Mr
Dotcom told the BBC earlier this year that he believed the civil
lawsuits were a sign the industry believed the criminal case was
faltering.
For
all my students.
by
Sabrina I.
Pacifici on Jul 7, 2014
“In
the Digital Age, the ultimate check against the spread of rumor,
pernicious falsehood, disinformation, and unverified reports
masquerading as fact, will never be just more and better-trained
journalists and professional gatekeepers, these scholars argue.
Instead, it
will require a generation of astutely educated news consumers,
as well as native producers and distributors, who will learn to be
their own editors and identify for themselves fact- and
evidence-based news and information. James
Klurfeld and Howard Schneider survey the ways in which Stony
Brook attempted to meet this pedagogical goal and found that the
program did have positive outcomes. Stony Brook compared students
who took the News Literacy course vs those who didn’t. The News
Literacy students routinely consumed more news from more sources,
rated keeping up with the news as more important, registered to vote
in higher numbers, could deconstruct some video news stories more
effectively, had a higher regard for the “watchdog function” of
the press and had a more nuanced view, in general, of the news media.
For example, at the outset of the semester only 17 percent of those
taking the course felt the media treated both sides of a story
fairly; by semester’s end the number had jumped to 52 percent,
report the scholars.”
For
my Disaster Recovery students.
The
Faulty ‘Mental Models’ That Lead to Poor Disaster Preparation
As
Hurricanes Isaac and Sandy were bearing down on the South and East
Coasts of the United States, respectively, in the summer and fall of
2012, Wharton marketing professor Robert
Meyer and his research team took to the phone lines to survey
people in the storms’ crosshairs about what they perceived the
greatest threats to be, and how they were preparing to face them.
Through
this and several other studies, Meyer — who is also co-director of
the Wharton
Risk Management and Decision Processes Center
— and his colleagues find that most
people fail to adequately understand the threats
they face as a result of natural and other disasters, and often those
poor “mental models” lead to insufficient preparation. The
findings are outlined in “The
Dynamics of Hurricane Risk Perception: Real Time Evidence from the
2012 Atlantic Hurricane Season,” by Meyer, Jay Baker of Florida
State University, Kenneth Broad of the University of Miami and Ben
Orlove of Columbia University, which will appear in the Bulletin
of the American Meteorological Association;
“Dynamic
Simulation as an Approach to Understanding Hurricane Risk Response:
Insights from the Stormview
Lab,” by Meyer, Broad, Orlove and Nada Petrovic of Columbia,
which appeared in Risk
Analysis, and Meyer’s
article, “Why
We Fail to Learn from Disasters,” which appeared in the book,
The Irrational Economist: Overcoming Irrational
Decisions in a Dangerous World.
Why
my Ethical Hackers want Google Glasses...
Google
Glass wearers can steal your password
Cyber
forensics experts at the University of Massachusetts in Lowell have
developed a way to steal passwords entered on a smartphone or tablet
using video from Google's face-mounted gadget and other
video-capturing devices. The thief can be nearly ten feet away and
doesn't even need to be able to read the screen -- meaning glare is
not an antidote.
The
security researchers created software that maps the shadows from
fingertips typing on a tablet or smartphone. Their algorithm then
converts those touch points into the actual keys they were touching,
enabling the researchers to crack the passcode.
I
told you funding your project was easy! (It's now $44.000+)
Kickstarter
Project to Make $10 Potato Salad Raises $20,000-Plus
…
His elaborate project description: “Basically I'm just making
potato salad. I haven't decided what kind yet.” That, evidently,
was a recipe for success. As of Monday, with 25 days to go before
the end of the pledge period, Brown had raised well over $21,000 from
1,600-plus backers.
For
my students.
Email
Alerts Services That You Should Use
- Follow your World – The is a Google service that allows you to track satellite images of various locations within Google Maps and Google Earth. You’ll get an email alert each time Google releases new and updated aerial imagery for the various locations that you are tracking.
- Newsle – The service tracks news websites and alerts you when any of your friends or people in your social network appear in news stories. It analyzes your LinkedIn and Facebook accounts to determine your friends and colleagues.
- Brook – Your Twitter timeline is a never-ending stream of tweets and sometimes good tweets get lost in the noise. Brooks sends you a daily email digest of the five best tweets from your favorite tweeters so you’ll never miss what they say.
- Visual Ping – You can visually mark an area on any web page and the service will send an email alert when the web page changes. You can also set the trigger to go only when there are major modification to the page.
- Earthquake Alerts – The USGS website offers a free earthquake notification service that sends you email alerts when earthquakes are reported in your area. You can mark your area on a Google Map and it will notify you of any seismic activity around that area.
- Domain Tools – This service allows you to monitor web domains and alerts you via email when any of the monitored domains are nearing expiration, when they are renewed or if there any crucial changes in the Whois records of the domain. Explore more tools to know everything about websites.
- Book Alerts – You can use the search feature of Amazon to track the release of upcoming books by your favorite authors. Just enter the book publication date somewhere in the future.
- Follow-up Gmail – The “starred” folder of your Gmail is a dumping ground of email messages that require follow-up. This Google Script sends a daily digest of 10 random messages, picked from your starred items, that may require follow-up.
- Talkwalker – Get email alerts when your name, your brand or your website gets mentioned in news stories, websites and forums. This may be a good alternative to Google Alerts.
- Wikipedia Watch – You can put one or more Wikpedia pages in your watchlist and the website will send you email notification when the content of these articles is edited. The changes are also available as RSS feeds.Also see: Email Alerts for Website Downtime
- Mention – While Google Alerts track mentions on websites, the Mention service monitors the social media websites and commenting platforms, Disqus for example, for your search terms. Also, it only monitors freshly-baked content that has been published in the past 24 hours.
- Timehop – Every morning you’ll get an email with a photograph or a status update that you may have published on your Twitter, Instagram or Facebook account an year ago. Timehop is avilable as an app for Android and iOS devices.
- IFTTT – The popular IFTTT service offers several email alerting services rolled into one. You can receive email alerts for severe weather conditions, get notified about stock price fluctuations, monitor Craigslist and more.
- Amazon Price Tracker – Create a list of one or more items available on the Amazon website and you’ll get daily email alerts when the price of your monitored items goes up or down.
- MouseLock – This is a unique service that monitors your unattended computer and send your an email alert with the picture of the person who tried to use the computer in your absence.
Looks
like a great tool for programming (in many languages) in groups.
–
is a tool that enables you to simultaneously work on code alongside
your team. Each user has a colored cursor in order to identify
easily to other users. If you need to discuss something, just chat
with your team or activate you microphone with a one click for talk.
Once the code is ready, you can download it in a file.
Reproducing
this in Excel/C++/Java should make an interesting challenge for my
students.
Is
It Better to Rent or Buy?
The
choice between buying a home and renting one is among the biggest
financial decisions that many adults make. But the costs of buying
are more varied and complicated than for renting, making it hard to
tell which is a better deal. To help you answer this question, our
calculator takes the most important costs associated with buying a
house and computes the equivalent monthly rent.
For
my students. We need to support our state. Colorado didn't even
make the top 10 this year! Perhaps we could create a student “Beer
Tasting Club” with trips to the local breweries? (I'll volunteer
as the Faculty Advisor)
States
that drink the most beer
In
recent years, Americans have increasingly moved away from beer
consumption in favor of wines and spirits. U.S. beer consumption
fell slightly from 28.3 gallons per drinking-aged adult in 2012 to
27.6 gallons last year.
(Related)
We could become the healthiest state in the union! (Plus a great
Math example!)
Science
Fixes Unhealthy Grilling Problem With Beer
…
Meat marinades made with beer significantly lower the amount of
cancer-causing byproducts that result from cooking pork with
charcoal, food chemists in Spain and Portugal report.
We
repeat: pork + beer >
pork – beer. Science, 1. Cancer, 0. Thank you, food
scientists.
MakeUseOf
nails it!
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