Mossack Fonseca: we were hacked
On April 4, the Panamanian law firm at the center of a
huge scandal issued a statement saying, among other things, that the media has
misrepresented what they do, that everything they do is perfectly aboveboard,
and they regret – but are not responsible for – any clients who may have
misused their services despite their due diligence.
Yesterday, Reuters reported that the law firm announced
that they were the victim of an external hack, and have filed a complaint with
state prosecutors.
“We rule out an inside job. This is not a leak. This is a hack,” Fonseca, 63, said at the
company’s headquarters in Panama City’s business district. “We have a theory and we are following it,” he
added, without elaborating.
“We have already made the
relevant complaints to the Attorney General’s office, and there is a government
institution studying the issue,” he added, flanked by two press advisers.
Read more on Reuters..
A depressing example of management inaction for my
Computer Security students.
Hackers broke into hospitals despite software flaw warnings
Tami Abdollah reports:
The
hackers who seriously disrupted operations at a large hospital chain recently
and held some data hostage broke into a computer server left vulnerable despite urgent public warnings since at least 2007 that it needed to be
fixed with a simple update, The Associated Press has learned.
The
hackers exploited design flaws that had persisted on the MedStar Health Inc.
network, according to a person familiar with the investigation who spoke on
condition of anonymity because this person was not authorized to discuss the
findings publicly. The flaws were in a
JBoss application server supported by Red Hat Inc. and other organizations, the
person said.
Read
more on Yahoo!
So far, it does not look like a high priority effort.
Eric Markowitz reports:
The story of how the FBI finally
tracked down notorious fugitive Lynn Cozart, using its brand-new, $1 billion
facial recognition system, seems tailor-made to disarm even the staunchest of
skeptics.
[…]
According to unreleased FBI data
provided to IBT in February, the agency had, as of February, processed a
total of 77,136 suspect photos and sent police 9,303 “likely candidates” since
2011. The FBI would not comment on how
many of those cases led to an arrest.
In many ways, the FBI’s biometric
program is an extension of the modern-day surveillance technologies that are
making average citizens increasingly uncomfortable.
Read more on IBT.
Soon, everyone will be getting a visit from the FBI.
Why
WhatsApp's Encryption Embrace Is a Landmark Event
The news that Facebook’s WhatsApp now supports
encryption across all its apps is nothing short of seismic.
… For privacy
advocates, this marks an enormous victory that few would have predicted would
come so soon after Snowden’s revelations.
The problem was this: Generally speaking, good end-to-end
encryption, where users rather than service providers hold the keys, is a pain
to use. Most people don’t adopt
technologies that aren’t easy to use.
Encrypted email has been around for decades, and once it
is set up, it’s not that tricky. But setting
it up requires a degree of technical knowledge that most people do not
have.
Recently, encrypted-messaging apps have made the process
of protected communications much simpler. However, none of them has the immense reach of
WhatsApp, and security experts are suspicious
of the quality of the technology in some of them, or the fact that some
default (Telegram) or occasionally switch (iMessage) to non-encrypted modes.
The answer is clearly “yes,” so how do I invest?
Meet
Africa’s First Tech ‘Unicorn’ — Are More to Come?
While tech “unicorns” coming out of Silicon Valley are
starting to sound like a dime a dozen, the first tech unicorn to come out of
Africa, Africa Internet Group (AIG), is causing a stir. Growing into a unicorn — a privately held
technology company valued at $1 billion or more — is a significant milestone
for AIG, says Wharton management professor David Hsu.
“It’s a highly visible, symbolic and substantive marker,”
Hsu notes. “It shows that there’s enough
by way of demand, as well as a platform that [AIG] is able to put in place to
justify that marker.”
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