Lonely and breached.
An adult
dating website got hacked and millions of people's sensitive details
have been leaked
…
With 63 million global users, Adult
FriendFinder is one of the largest dating and casual encounter
networks online. (For reference, there
were an estimated 50 million Tinder users in late 2014.) But 3.9
million users' accounts have allegedly been leaked online, and are
circulating in spreadsheets on forums.
The details leaked include:
- Sexual preferences
- Email addresses
- Sexual orientation
- Dates of birth
- Addresses
- Usernames
- Whether users are "seeking extramarital affairs"
… The leak is also highly embarrassing for
Adult FriendFinder in another way. Channel
4 News analysed the data and found that almost no women actually use
the adult social network. "Among the 26,939 users with a UK
email address," technology producer Geoff White writes, "there
are just 1,596 who identified as female: a ratio of one woman to
every 16 men."
For my Computer Security students. Perhaps we
should just aggregate our “Best Practices?”
Darren Pauli reports:
The Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council has created a taskforce charged with improving security among small businesses.
The prodigious task will be tackled by encouraging small businesses to adopt security best practice and simplified Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS).
Barclaycard payment security manager and taskforce chair Phil Jones says the Small Merchant Taskforce will focus on the most vulnerable business vertical.
Read more on The
Register.
The headline is somewhat insulting, isn’t it?
Some of us have argued for years that the standards weren’t
appropriate or helpful for SMBs and that they needed more help than
what they have been given. If this new task force really understands
what SMBs are dealing with in the way of resources and skills or lack
thereof, perhaps it will make a positive impact.
For an organization so concerned with projecting a
good image, stories like this are entirely too common.
The FBI took seven years to fulfill a legal
obligation that it adopt additional privacy protections for searches
under legal provisions of the Patriot Act currently up for debate in
the Senate.
A Justice Department watchdog
report released on Thursday claimed that the FBI’s 2013
implementation of “minimization procedures” for data collected
under Section 215 of the Patriot Act was too long of a wait, given
that Congress had demanded the measures in a 2006 reauthorization of
the Patriot Act.
… Additionally, the inspector general’s
report found that the FBI uses the provision to collect at least some
records about people’s activity on the Internet, that it can yield
gigabytes of information and that some of those searches also focused
on people who were not direct subjects of their investigations.
Between 2007 and 2009, agents “did not identify
any major case developments that resulted from use of the records
obtained in response to Section 215 orders,” the watchdog added.
… “The FBI is using Section 215 to collect
huge volumes of information, including metadata and electronic
records, about innocent people,” American Civil Liberties Union
attorney Jameel Jaffer wrote
on Reddit. “And despite all of this collection, the FBI is
unable to point to any case—not even one!—in which the
information it obtained turned out to be crucial to an
investigation.”
No doubt ideas like this will result in many new
laws to regulate when the messages can be sent and to whom. We'll
have to block anyone under 21. Perhaps no ads on Sunday. No ads
within 50 feet of a school. Etc., etc., and so forth.
Liquor
bottles now can talk to your cellphone
… This new use of tech means consumers can
customize messages on the bottles they are drinking. Heck, they even
can track its exact location. Distributors and bar owners can use
the same technology to track purchases and get sales data. And
global drinks company Diageo even is working on smart sensor-equipped
bottles that communicate with consumers' devices and switch gears —
recipes vs. sales promos — once the bottle is opened.
The idea is to give packaging a speaking role in
an increasingly interactive marketplace.
… And bottle tech that can harness that isn't
limited to the bottle. Currently available devices include wireless
pour spouts such as Smart Spout, from Phoenix-based BarVision, which
contains RFID technology and electronic tilt sensors to measure and
report on every ounce of liquor poured.
Too “high touch” to make the transfer to “high
tech?”
For my starving students?
The 3 Best
Online Coupon Sites to Save You Money
Everyone loves saving money, and thankfully there
are tons
of ways to save some green online. From using lesser-known
websites to price haggling, sometimes the most straightforward way to
buy something isn’t the cheapest; a little digging can go a long
way.
We’ve recently looked at tools
that give you various ways to earn cash back, but today we’re
going to flip the idea and look at ways to save before money ever
leaves your wallet. If you’ve ever seen the boxes that allow you
to enter a discount code and been puzzled, you’re in luck. Here
are the best websites to check for some sweet discounts.
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