I don't bother blogging about small breaches,
except when I can lump a bunch together like this.
Maryland’s Attorney General’s list for 2015
contains over 500 breach reports, many of which were never covered by
the media. Here are two involving health or medical entities or
health data, followed by some from the education sector that you may
not have known about:
Dharani Jasthi DMD PC dba
Today’s
Dental Associates reported
that they:
received an anonymous fax after close of business on June 24, 2015. The anonymous source stated that it found a document containing names, ages, social security numbers and dates of birth of 6 of Today’s Dental patients during a search of the apartment of a former Today’s Dental employee and was notifying Today’s Dental because the source understood it to be sensitive information.
N. Stephen Delgado O.D. of Columbia
Eye Care (Columbia, MD) notified
20 Maryland customers after their safe was stolen:
Meanwhile, in the education sector:
-
Boston University, who reported a server breach in July, had another incident later in the year when an employee fell for a phishing scheme that came from a Nigerian IP address. This time, 174 students had their names, SSN, and in some cases, driver’s license numbers, acquired.
-
Nova Southeastern University, who first discovered a 2013 hack in 2014, reported another breach in November involving student and employee name, address, phone number, and SSN.
-
Wabash College reported that malware both exfiltrated personal information and locked up all files (ransomware). The personal information of 49 people who were alumni or friends of the college was exfiltrated, including SSN, credit card information, and/or bank account information. The college was able to restore files from backup, and did not pay the ransom demand.
-
Brandeis University notified 193 students after two computers were stolen from the Registrar’s office in October, 2015. The types of information involved included names, dates of birth, permanent and email addresses, phone numbers, student records information, and in some cases, SSN. The total number of students impacted was not disclosed.
You knew this was going to happen.
Justice
Dept. Appeals Ruling in Apple iPhone Case in Brooklyn
In the latest volley in its high-profile fight
with Apple,
the Justice Department said on Monday that a federal judge in
Brooklyn had erred last week in refusing to order the company to
unlock a drug dealer’s iPhone.
… The two
cases are very different in some ways — one involves a high-level
terrorism investigation, the other an inquiry into a low-level drug
dealer — but both center on whether the Justice Department can use
a 1789 statute to force Apple to unlock an iPhone.
Unlocking the iPhone in the Brooklyn case would be
far easier for Apple, because it involves a device running an older
operating system with simpler encryption.
The NSA will have several, perhaps the FBI could
invest in one?
MIT's new
5-atom quantum computer could make today's encryption obsolete
Much of the encryption world today depends on the
challenge of factoring large numbers, but scientists now say they've
created the first five-atom quantum computer with the potential to
crack the security of traditional encryption schemes.
… The results of the new work were published
Friday in the journal Science.
… A functional quantum computer large enough
to crack traditional RSA encryption may still be in the future, but
the U.S. National Security Agency is taking the possibility
seriously. In January, it posted an FAQ
on the technology's potential.
"If you are a nation state, you probably
don’t want to publicly store your secrets using encryption that
relies on factoring as a hard-to-invert problem,” said Chuang.
“Because when these quantum computers start coming out,
[adversaries will] be able to go back and unencrypt all those old
secrets.”
Wow! The hack gets simpler as the technology
matures? Looks like we're going backward here. NOTE: Any repository
of unencrypted fingerprint data just became a much more valuable
target!
Fake
Fingerprints From an Inkjet Printer Can Fool Your Smartphone
Last year, when the Office of Personnel Management
notified 22 million people that their personal information was
compromised in a massive data breach, one in four received especially
nasty news. For most hack victims, the sensitive personal data that
was exposed included Social Security numbers, health and financial
records, names of relatives, and past addresses. But
5.6 million people learned that their fingerprints were also stolen.
At the time of the announcement, OPM downplayed
the importance of the stolen fingerprints. “Federal experts
believe that, as of now, the ability to misuse fingerprint data is
limited,” an OPM statement read. “However, this probability
could change over time as technology evolves.”
That was in September. Now, researchers have
developed a cheap and easy way to print out an image of a fingerprint
with enough accuracy to fool commercially available fingerprint
readers—using just a
standard inkjet printer.
The method, outlined in a
paper published last month, is certainly not the first one to
produce fake fingerprints that are able to fool readers. But where
earlier methods required more time and specialized materials, this
new method is replicable in just about any home office.
I suspect Apple knew it was going to lose this
one.
Supreme
Court Denial Closes Apple's E-Book Case
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday denied without
comment Apple's petition for a review of a lower court ruling that it
engaged in price-fixing of e-books.
The company now must comply with a US$450 million
settlement
it reached with 33 states and territories and a private class of
e-book purchasers that, together with the U.S. Department of Justice,
sued it over the issue.
However, e-book purchasers who were overcharged
won't get their hands on any of the $450 million -- most of them
would be reimbursed through automatic credits at e-book retailers.
The credits could be used for future purchases, the DoJ said.
Okay, I was not expecting that!
Jury Awards
Erin Andrews $55 Million in Nude Video Civil Suit
After two weeks in court, a Nashville jury has
awarded sportscaster Erin Andrews $55 million on Monday, according to
Law360.
Andrews filed a $75 million lawsuit against
Michael David Barrett, the stalker who posted a nude video of the
journalist he captured through a peephole, as well as the owner and
operator of the Nashville Marriott where the crime took place. Over
time, the video has been viewed nearly
17 million times. The stalker -- Michael David Barrett -- has
since been sentenced to 30 months of jail time.
Overall, the jury found Windsor Capital 49 percent
at fault and Barrett 51 percent at fault.
An Infographic for both my Computer Security and
Data Management students.
Why Can’t
We Buy a Self-Driving Car Yet?
For my Data Management students. Facebook was
banned from providing free (Facebook oriented) Internet. Does Google
have the right idea?
Google to
provide internet connectivity in India through Project Loon in
partnership with telecom companies
… Months after Google CEO Sundar Pichai
partnered with Indian Government to provide WiFi internet access to
400 railway stations, the tech firm has now come up with an
innovative method to provide internet connectivity through ‘Project
Loon’, where by internet would be beamed in areas through air
balloons floating hundreds of feet above the ground.
The news has been confirmed by
Google’s managing director for South East Asia and India Rajan
Anandan during an interview with The Economic Times.
… However, based upon the success of Project
Loon trials in Sri Lanka and Indonesia, Google is now in talks with
telecom companies, along with the Telecom Regulatory Authority of
India (TRAI) to bring the internet service in parts of India on trial
basis.
However, it is worth to know that
the internet services would not be offered by Google from a
philanthropic point of view. The services for the same would be
charged.
(Related)
Balloon-Powered
Internet For Everyone
Perspective. Being rather anti-social myself, I
struggle to understand how all this social stuff works. Would this
be something that politicians could use?
Ben
Horowitz backs rapper Ryan Leslie’s SMS commerce startup Superphone
… Here’s how Superphone works. Celebrities
and other clients can distribute a special phone number connected to
their Superphone account. Any time a fan calls or texts it, or buys
something on one of their online stores and fills out a form, they
get a welcome message prompting them to provide some personal info.
That could include location, biographical info, or any data type the
client wants to segment their audience by.
Superphone creates a next-generation phone book
that’s actually more of a customer relationship management tool.
For now it’s a web tool but the Superphone team hopes to have
native apps available in the next few weeks. The Superphone
dashboard lets clients view charts and graphs of who is paying for
what so they can hone in on their most important fans.
… While everyone else buys ads, plays nice
with the press, and, blasts out social media trying to reach fans,
Superphone
lets creators simply talk to the directly like they would any of
their friends.
A little history of technology for all my
students.
… in 1876, Alexander Graham Bell patented the
telephone.
… by 1904, people worried that telephones were
creating a race of left-eared people.
It’s easy to take for granted just how much the
invention of the telephone changed cultural norms. For instance,
take the art of eavesdropping. As Mark Twain wrote in our
June 1880 issue, “I consider that a conversation by
telephone—when you are simply sitting by and not taking any part in
that conversation—is one of the solemnest curiosities of this
modern life.”
Twenty-five years later, The Atlantic
published
a piece by Frederick W. Coburn on the development of the phone.
“Once a community, like a family, has acquired the telephone habit,
its members are never satisfied to revert to primitive conditions,”
he observed.
… When other phone companies began to pop up,
“the Bell Company brought infringement suits against all persons or
concerns manufacturing or using telephones, save those operating
under proper licenses from itself,” Weik wrote. What were called
“the telephone cases” eventually reached the Supreme Court, which
ruled in favor of Bell:
By the slender majority of one in the vote of the judges the claims of Alexander Bell had now secured the indorsement of the highest judicial tribunal in the land. From that decree there could be no appeal. By virtue of it every rival or competitor of the Bell Company was driven from the field, and that corporation rested, serenely content, in the undisputed ownership of one of the greatest benefactions that ever came to bless mankind.
More ways to waste time online.
5 Places to
Watch TV Online You’ve Never Heard Of
For my gamers.
Internet
Archive Revives 500 Classic Apple II Programs To Play In Your Web
Browser
What would we do without the Internet
Archive? In the past few months alone, the Internet Archive has
posted a virtual
museum of old 80s and 90s era malware and resurrected
over 2,300 MS-DOS games — all of which were playable through
your browser. Today, the non-profit is upping the ante with the
release of 500 Apple
II games that you can play for free (as always).
… As with previous software made available via
the Internet Archive, the programs can be played using its JSMESS
“play-in-a-browser” emulator.
You don’t need to install any additional software mess around with
emulators — you simply click on a screenshot of the title you wish
to run and “presto” you’re transported 30 years into the past
to relive a small slither of computing history.
Now I can put my handouts in a Kindle ready
format! I bet they still won't get read.
Google Docs
now lets you export files as an EPUB ebook
If you’re on the hunt for an easy way to convert
your online documents to an ebook-friendly format, Google has quietly
announced
that it will now let you save your documents directly to .epub
(EPUB).
Sort of the history of spreadsheets. For my
Spring spreadsheet students to play with.
From
VisiCalc to Google Sheets: The 12 Best Spreadsheet Apps
Just go to the VisiCalc
page, press the Play button and wait for it to load, then
get a blast from the past with a DOS-style interface with a real,
working copy of VisiCalc.
… It might not be the tool you'll want to use
to make your next budget, but with the VisiCalc
manual in hand, it's a fun way to peek back at where it all
started.
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