We
might have a chance to learn something! (As will every Class Action
lawyer in the country.) Is there a way to get copies of the exhibits
from both sides? For Academic purposes of course. My Computer
Security (and Ethical Hacking) students would find it quite
interesting.
From
the yay-a-judge-standing-up-for-transparency dept.:
R.
Robin McDonald reports:
A federal judge in Atlanta has put lawyers in litigation over credit
and debit card security breaches at The Home Depot that he will
reject attempts to seal large portions of the court record.
“The first 10 years I was on the bench pretty much we just went
along with whatever y’all wanted to do about sealing documents. At
least I did,” U.S. District Chief Judge Thomas Thrash Jr. told the
lawyers at a Jan. 16 status conference on the multi-district
litigation. “And then in these big commercial cases it became clear
that things were just getting out of hand, and the lawyers were
wanting to seal virtually everything.”
Read
more on Daily
Report.
We
have learned something here. Processor contracts need to be
rewritten! (Roughly $0.20 per card?)
Tracy
Kitten reports:
A breached retailer has won a court ruling against its payments
processor and merchant bank, setting a $500,000 cap on how much it
must pay for a point-of-sale breach it suffered in late 2012. Now
the processor and bank must pick up the rest of the breach-related
tab.
[…]
On Jan. 15, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of
Missouri ruled
that the St. Louis-based grocery chain Schnuck
Markets Inc. was not the sole party responsible for covering
losses and expenses associated with its payments breach, which is
estimated to have compromised some 2.4 million credit and debit
cards.
Read
more on BankInfoSecurity.com,
Can
it be? A government that does computer security right? Wow!
Claudia
Lauer reports:
The Arkansas Department of Information Systems blocked all .zip files
from the state’s email system after a malware attack was
identified.
The department sent out notice over email and social media about
10:30 a.m. Wednesday. Department spokesman Janet Wilson said only a
fraction of the more than 15,000 computers on the state’s computer
network were affected.
“There were less than 50 machines that were actually infected,”
she said. “We have multiple layers of defensive mechanisms. Some
of them are malicious traffic filters and there are other measures as
well. Those filters caught
the malware attack. We ran a test on the computers in the
network, and those 50 were
identified quickly and taken off of the state network and replaced.”
Read
more on Northwest
Arkansas Democrat Gazette.
What?
You thought these things were secure? How do you think my Ethical
Hackers can guarantee a 20% reduction in your insurance rates? Or
consistently prove it's the other guy's fault?
Swati
Khandelwal writes:
…. Since 2008, US-based Progressive
Insurance has used the SnapShot device in more than two
million vehicles. The little device monitors and tracks
users’ driving behavior by collecting vehicle location and speed
records, in order to help determine if they qualify for lower rates.
However, the security researcher Corey Thuen has revealed that
the dongle is insecure and performs
no validation or signing of firmware updates. [In
other words, it does not check to see if modifications are authorized
Bob] It has no secure boot mechanism, no cellular
communications authentication, and uses no secure communications
protocols, possibly putting the lives of people inside the
vehicle in danger.
Read
more on The
Hacker News.
This
reads rather funny...
Mark
Govaki reports:
The attorney for a former defense contractor employee accused of
stealing sensitive government data questioned the timing and scope of
federal agents’ search and why the FBI would erase surveillance
video.
John M. Sember, 28, is accused in a complaint filed in Dayton’s
U.S. District Court of either destroying or taking sensitive
information from government computers after his defense contractor
job ended at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
Read
more on Dayton
Daily News.
[From
the article:
…
Sometimes conflicting testimony from Fairborn police officers,
federal agents and Sember himself was given in U.S District Court
Judge Thomas Rose’s courtroom Friday during a hearing on defense
motions to suppress and to dismiss the indictment.
…
A wide array of computer and electronic equipment was seized from
Sember’s Fairborn residence after a search warrant was served March
28, 2014. Items taken included a surveillance system DVR located in
a small room behind a book case in his bedroom.
…
Sember answered a question from assistant U.S. attorney Dwight
Keller by saying he initiated the discussion about what may be found
on the surveillance footage when FBI Special Agent Andrew J. Eilerman
was going to return the surveillance DVR last fall.
…
He also testified he didn’t think the footage — including a time
stamp — would be erased before the outcome of his case.
FBI
Special Agent James Howley testified he
seized the DVR from Sember’s home because it could contain
classified information and for “officer safety.”
Hawley also said he didn’t ask anyone at the FBI to look at the
footage and they did not
know of any protocol allowing or disallowing the destruction of
evidence without a court order before a case was decided.
Howley
said an FBI forensic lab
worker erased the DVR — believing the worker didn’t
view it — at the request
of Eilerman.
This
isn't really a new idea, is it?
Article:
The Conforming Effect: First Amendment Implications of Surveillance,
Beyond Chilling Speech
If
you’re interested in surveillance – and curbing it – add this
to your must-read list:
Kaminski,
Margot E. and Witnov, Shane. The Conforming Effect: First Amendment
Implications of Surveillance, Beyond Chilling Speech (January 2015).
University of Richmond Law Review, Vol. 49, 2015. Available for free
download at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2550385
(article is .pdf, 54 pp)
Abstract:..
First Amendment jurisprudence is wary not only of direct bans on
speech, but of the chilling effect. A growing number of scholars
have suggested that chilling arises from more than just a threat of
overbroad enforcement — surveillance has a chilling effect on both
speech and intellectual inquiries. Surveillance of intellectual
habits, these scholars suggest, implicates First Amendment values.
However, courts and legislatures have been divided in their
understanding of the extent to which surveillance chills speech and
thus causes First Amendment harms.
This article brings First Amendment theory into conversation with
social psychology to show that not
only is there empirical support for the idea that surveillance chills
speech, but surveillance has additional consequences that
implicate multiple theories of the First Amendment. We call these
consequences “the conforming effect.” Surveillance
causes individuals to conform their behavior to perceived group
norms, [Ask any
dictator Bob] even when they are unaware that they are
conforming. Under multiple theories of the First Amendment — the
marketplace of ideas, democratic self-governance, autonomy theory,
and cultural democracy — these studies suggest that surveillance’s
effects on speech are broad. Courts and legislatures should keep
these effects in mind.
I
admit I can't figure out what Putin is doing here. Perhaps a bit of,
“Yes, our economy is collapsing but our military is still strong?”
Perhaps, “We really, really want the Ukraine?” Perhaps, “How
dare they defy me?”
Ukraine
says more Russian troops crossed border; fighting escalates
Ukraine's
president on Wednesday accused Russia of moving additional troops and
military hardware into his country, a charge the Moscow quickly
denied amid intense fighting in eastern Ukraine.
…
“The situation is getting worse because now we have information
that more than 2,000 additional Russian troops are crossing our
border together with 200 tanks and armored personnel carriers,”
Poroshenko said in a Bloomberg TV interview. He did not say when the
incursion occurred.
The
troops and hardware were in addition to about 8,000 Russian soldiers
and 300 tanks and armored vehicles already deployed in the country's
coal-mining region of Donbas, he said.
…
Russia had recently amassed more than 50,000 troops “in full
combat readiness” and hardware close to Ukraine's borders, the
Ukrainian Foreign Ministry said on its website Wednesday.
When
all else fails, RTFM! (I find a simple Google search works fine.)
5
Sites To Find & Download User Manuals
Tools
for my geeky students.
Need
A Disk Cleanup? Visualize What Takes Up Space On Your Windows PC
Perhaps
we can analyze this data to see if we get the same results? (If we
do, perhaps some of the local PDs will be interested?)
Jeremy
Gillula and Dave Maass write:
Police cars mounted with automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) wind
their way through the streets of Oakland like a “Snake” game on
an old cell phone. Instead of eating up pixels of food, these
cameras gobble down thousands of license plates each day. And
instead of growing a longer tail, ALPRs feed into a giant database of
locational data as they conduct surveillance on every driver within
the city limits, and sometimes beyond.
This is the portrait that emerged when EFF
analyzed eight days of ALPR data provided by the City of
Oakland in response to a request
under the California Public Records Act.
Read
more on EFF.
[From
the EFF:
Want
to take a look at the data yourself? Do you have a better analysis
method? Want to draw your own conclusions? Please do! You can find
the ALPR
data here and the crime
data here, both in CSV format, or here
in a Google Fusion Table.
More
reading for my students. We'll discuss at least a dozen of them...
9
Business Intelligence and Analytics Predictions for 2015
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