“We're
your government and we are hip to all that computer security jive!”
(I feel a Forrest Gump quote coming on...)
Obamacare
Website Hacked as U.S. Says Data Wasn’t Taken
The
HealthCare.gov website that had an error-plagued debut last year was
hacked in July, although no
personal data appear to have been taken, according to the
U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
The
attack, discovered
Aug. 25 and disclosed yesterday, marks the first
known intrusion
into the federally run website.
…
“Our review indicates that the server did not contain consumer
personal information,” Aaron Albright, an agency spokesman, said
yesterday in an e-mailed statement. “We
have taken measures to further strengthen security.” [Translation:
“We didn't implement all the security we should have... Bob]
…
The July
attack exploited a test server used to support the
website and was never intended to be connected to the Internet,
Albright said. The server
was protected with only a default
password.
“Shame
on the U.S. government for allowing this to happen,” Jon Clay, a
security manager with the network security company Trend Micro Inc.,
said in a phone interview. “We paid how many millions to put this
thing up and a default password was used on a server?”
(Related)
I doubt that China is the only country where criminal activity is
growing.
China's
Cybercrime Marketplace Boomed in 2013: Trend Micro
By
all indications in the report, China's cyber crime market was
bustling in 2013. Between March 2012 and December 2013, Trend Micro
monitored nearly 500 chat groups communicating via the QQ instant
messaging service.
By
the end of 2013, the firm had obtained 1.4 million publicly available
messages from the groups it was monitoring. According to the report,
the number of messages in the groups doubled in the last 10 months of
2013 compared to the same period in 2012 - a sign of serious growth
in cybercrime activity.
"Based
on the ID of the senders, we also believe that the number of
participants has also doubled in the same period," blogged
Lion Gu, a senior threat researcher at Trend Micro.
…
"In
sum, the Chinese underground market players are keeping pace with the
developments in the security landscape," the report states.
"They no longer just peddle malicious wares to attack PC users
but also to attack the rapidly growing mobile device market. This
should serve as another reminder to all [computers] or any
Internet-connected device to always be security-aware to live a
threat-free digital life."
The
report can be
read here.
Perspective.
My Disaster Recovery class will have to consider a scenario where
the Broncos are playing in the SuperDuperBowl and terrorist are
starting to flood Denver cellphone towers at the same time. What
might they be planning to do next?
City
of Seattle asks people to stop streaming videos, posting photos
because of football
…
Jeff Reading, a communications director for Mayor Ed Murray, told
MyNorthwest.com that the city wants people to limit their
“non-essential mobile conversation” so that cell networks can
stay unclogged in case of emergencies.
…
The fact that one too many Snapchat videos may delay emergency
response tonight in Seattle is quite frankly a little ridiculous —
and extremely concerning.
This
also brings up an interesting dilemma — is it reasonable for City
to ask its citizens to restrict social media use solely based on the
fact that private networks can’t handle the amount of bandwidth
being used during an event like tonight’s game?
…
This isn’t the first time that city officials have asked people to
ease off on their personal technology use. During the Seahawks Super
Bowl parade in February, the Seattle Emergency Operations Center sent
an alert that asked people to wean off cell phone use to keep 911
lines open. Then at the Torchlight Parade in July, Seattle
Police asked citizens to text friends and family instead of
calling.
Inevitable
I suppose.
Rebecca
Rose writes:
A gallery in Florida is planning to stage an exhibit featuring nude
images stolen from women including Scarlett Johansson and Jennifer
Lawrence.
Oh, you thought that horrible
charity drive was the worst, most misguided decision to come out
of the celeb photo leak? Nope, not by a long shot. An artist who
goes by the name XVALA,
which stands for “Someone who is clearly mad at himself for not
getting cast on Work of Art” is planning to put the images
on display at a gallery in St. Petersburg, Florida.
Read
more on Jezebel.
Apart
from incredibly poor taste, how is this not copyright infringement
and/or appropriation of name or likeness? Are lawyers lining up to
go after XVALA and the art gallery? I hope so.
Perspective.
Breaking
Down the Freelance Economy
The
American workforce is now 34% freelancer, according to a new
study commissioned by the Freelancers Union and the
recently-merged
Elance-oDesk. Well, sort of: 14.3 million of the 53 million
freelancers counted in the survey are “moonlighters” (people with
full-time jobs doing independent work in their spare time). Another
5.5 million are temp workers.
“We've
already tested the video equipment in Afghanistan, so let's be
politically correct rather than run a comprehensive test.” It is a
test, right?
Army
now says it won’t put cameras on surveillance aircraft in Maryland
Military
surveillance aircraft slated to be set aloft
over suburban Baltimore this year were originally designed to
carry video cameras capable of distinguishing between humans and
wheeled vehicles from a distance of at least five kilometers,
according to
documents the Army has newly released to a privacy group.
Good.
Matt
Cooper reports:
A judge improperly tried to rip the cloak of anonymity from a blogger
who lambasted a software maker online, the Texas Supreme Court ruled.
The dispute stems from an online attack that a blogger calling
himself “the Trooper” launched against Reynolds & Reynolds
Co., a developer of automotive-dealership software.
Read
more on Courthouse
News.
My
students might find this useful. (Windows, Mac, Linux)
–
is your own personal wiki, where you can store everything from quick
notes, to detailed checklists for work, to the outline for that next
bestseller novel. With Scribbleton, you can easily create clickable
links between words, phrases, and pages, allowing you to quickly
locate cross-reference information. Your
Scribbleton wiki files live on your local machine.
Nothing is sent to any outside servers.
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