This
is kind of a big deal. Sit at home and install malware on credit
card readers anywhere this company has clients? Sounds like a major
hole to me.
Bill
Smith reports:
Parking service provider SP Plus says its equipment at Evanston’s
three downtown municipal parking garages was hacked to steal credit
card data from drivers.
In a
statement issued today, SP Plus says that the three Evanston
garages, along with 10 more in Chicago and four in other cities, were
affected by the security breach.
It says its payment card
vendor notified it early this month that an unauthorized person had
used that company’s remote access tool to connect to computers that
process payment cards in the garages and install malware on the
systems to steal the card data.
Read
more on Evanston
Now.
[From
the article:
The
company says the security breach at the Evanston garages started on
Oct. 8 and that the last at-risk dates were Oct. 26 at the Church
Street Garage, Nov. 1 at the Sherman Plaza Garage and Nov. 10 at the
Maple Avenue garage. [Late
notice again? Why? Bob]
If
you have no idea what happened to your “security,” you could look
for a way to spin the story to promote your latest movie. Next
they'll claim the “Hacked by #GOP” translates to the “Geeks of
Pyongyang!”
Sony
Pictures Suspects North Korean Hand Behind Cyberattack
Sony Pictures still has no idea who is behind the catastrophic attack
that rendered its company-wide computer system useless on Monday, but
the company is not taking out the possibility that hackers from North
Korea, possibly operating out of China, are behind the attack.
Re/code cites people familiar with the matter who say that Sony is
investigating this particular line of thinking because of "The
Interview", a soon-to-be-released comedy film about the
assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un. The film, which
stars actors Seth Rogers and James Franco, features two journalists
who win a one-in-a-million interview with Kim Jong-Un, played by
Randall Park. The journalists are then enlisted by the CIA to kill
the North Korean leader.
As Kim Myong-chol, director for the Center for North Korea-U.S. Peace
told the Daily Telegraph after seeing the film's trailer said, Kim
Jong-Un is not happy about being the target of assassination attempts
in a movie and warns that those behind "The Interview" will
suffer "merciless
retaliation". [It
may appear that way to the managers at Sony! Bob]
Includes some security “Best Practices.” (Perhaps we should send
a copy to Sony?)
Internet
Security Threat Report 2014
…
This
year’s ISTR once again covers the wide-ranging
threat landscape, with data collected and analyzed by Symantec’s
security experts. In this summary, we call out seven areas that
deserve special attention…
…
If 2011 was the year of the breach, then 2013 can best be described
as the Year of the Mega
Breach. The total number of breaches in 2013 was 62
percent greater than in 2012 with 253 total breaches. It was also
larger than the 208 breaches in 2011. But even a 62 percent increase
does not truly reflect the scale of the breaches in 2013. Eight of
the breaches in 2013 exposed more than 10 million identities each.
“Hey! I see you have added a “smart refrigerator” to your
kitchen! I also notice that your Veggie-to-Beer ratio is a bit low.”
My Ethical Hackers will be pleased that they no longer have to
stumble upon the devices they hack.
Search
engine for the Internet of Things
“Thingful®
is a search engine for the Internet of Things, providing a unique
geographical index of connected objects around the world, including
energy, radiation, weather, and air quality devices as well as
seismographs, iBeacons, ships, aircraft and even animal trackers.
Thingful’s
powerful search capabilities enable
people to find devices, datasets and realtime data sources by
geolocation across many popular Internet of Things
networks, and presents them using a proprietary patent-pending
geospatial device data search ranking methodology, ThingRank®. If
you are concerned about asthma, find out about any air quality
monitors in your neighbourhood; somebody working with a Raspberry Pi
can find others round the corner using the same computing platform;
if you notice a ship moored nearby, discover more about it by
tracking it on Thingful, or get notified of its movements; a citizen
concerned about flooding in a new neighbourhood can look up nearby
flood monitors or find others that have been measuring radiation.
You might even watch the weekly movements of a shark as it explores
the oceans. The possibilities are unbounded! Thingful
also enables people and companies to claim and verify ownership of
their things using a provenance mechanism, thereby giving them a
single web page that aggregates information from all their connected
devices no matter what network they’re on, in categories that
include health,
environment,
home,
transport,
energy
and flora
& fauna. Users can
also add objects to a Watchlist in order to keep track of them,
monitor their realtime status and get notifications when they change.
[What a great
tool for stalkers! Bob] Some of the well-known Internet
of Things services that Thingful
currently indexes include Weather
Underground, Smart
Citizen, the UK
Met Office Weather Observations Website, and Netatmo,
as well as others like Thingspeak,
Air
Quality Egg, The
International Soil Moisture Network and The
Sea Turtle Conservancy.”
Interesting
(and huge) report.
Measuring
the Information Society 2014
“The
MIS Report, which has been published annually since 2009, features
key ICT data and benchmarking tools to measure the information
society, including the ICT Development Index (IDI). The IDI captures
the level of ICT developments in 166 economies worldwide and compares
progress made during the last year.
…
The 6th edition of the ITU Measuring the Information Society (MIS)
Report was launched on November 24th, in Tbilisi, Georgia, at the
World
Telecommunication/ICT Indicators Symposium (WTIS) 2014.”
- Download the free publication (pdf format) (excluding Annex 4*) or order the full report
For
the Game Club database of “All Things Game!”
5
Sites For The Mario Lover In Us
My
industry, God help me...
…
The US Department of
Education announced
a plan to “strengthen teacher preparation.” The new guidelines,
writes
The Chronicle of Higher Education, “would require states to
evaluate teacher-training
programs based, in
part, on how many of their graduates get and keep jobs and how much
their graduates’ future students learn. Only programs deemed
effective by their states would be eligible to award Teach Grants,
which provide students with up to $4,000 a year.” [So
best case we evaluate the education teaching students received based
on the income of their students. Isn't that looking at what happened
5 or 10 years ago? Bob]
…
Students in Finland
will no
longer learn handwriting,
but will learn typing skills instead. I look forward to the
responses from those who hail Finland as the model for all education
reforms .
Don't
have much trouble with my Math classes...
7
Good Resources for Avoiding, Preventing, and Detecting Plagiarism
Thanks
to an email from a kind reader I discovered that a couple of the
resources about plagiarism that I reviewed in the past are no longer
as good as they once were. Therefore, I have created this updated
collection of resources for teaching students to how to avoid
plagiarism along as well as resources for preventing and detecting
plagiarism.
Education
is the best prevention:
Purdue's
OWL website is the number
one place I refer students and parents to for questions not only
about plagiarism, but also for questions about all parts of the
writing process.
A
Magical Guide to Avoiding Plagiarism is an infographic guide
created by Kate Hart. A Magical Guide to Avoiding Plagiarism uses a
Harry Potter theme to succinctly explain to students when and why
they need to properly cite the sources of their information. I've
embedded the infographic below, but I encourage you to visit
Kate Hart's blog post about it as she goes into more depth on the
topic of plagiarism.
Plagiarism.org,
produced by the same people that produce the commercial plagiarism
detection software Turn It In,
has a free learning
center for students and
teachers. Plagiarism.org's learning center includes tips about
avoiding plagiarism, definitions of plagiarism, and explanations of
when you do or do not have to cite a reference. Plagiarism.org also
hosts two recorded webinars addressing the topic of plagiarism in
schools and how teachers can educate their students about
plagiarism.
Tools
and methods for detecting plagiarism:
The
first thing I do when I want to check a student's work for plagiarism
is to do a quick search onGoogle.
If you notice that a student has strung together some phrases that
you don't think they've written, put the suspected phrase inside
quotation marks and search. You may also want to search on Google
Scholar.
Plagiarism
Checker created as a project for the University of Maryland,
is an easy-to-use tool for detecting plagiarism. Simply enter a
chunk of text into the search box and the Plagiarism Checker will
tell you if and from where something was plagiarized.
Paper
Rater is a free service designed to help high school and college
students improve their writing. Paper Rater does basic spelling and
grammar checks, but the real value of Paper Rater is that it tells
students if their papers have elements of plagiarism. Paper Rater
scans students' papers then gives students an estimate of the
likelihood that someone might think that their papers were
plagiarized.
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