Bangladesh Bank heist similar to Sony hack; second bank hit
by malware
Investigators probing the cyber heist of $81 million from
the Bangladesh central bank connected it on Friday to the hack at Sony Corp's
film studio in 2014, while global financial network SWIFT disclosed a
previously unreported attack on a commercial bank.
SWIFT did not say which
commercial bank it was or whether it had lost money, but cyber-security firm
BAE Systems said a Vietnamese bank, which it did not name, had been a target. It was not clear if they were referring to the
same attack and there was no immediate comment from authorities in Hanoi.
… In
Bangladesh, cyber-security experts hired by the central bank said in a report
that hackers were still inside the bank's network, monitoring the investigation
into one of the biggest cyber heists in the world.
… The report said
investigators knew little about a third group of hackers found inside the
network, referred to as Group Two, except that they were using mostly
commodity, or off-the-shelf, hacking tools. [So any teenager with an adequate allowance could hack this bank. Bob]
(Related) “It is better to look good than to feel good.” Hernando (and politicians everywhere)
Congress hits FDIC cyber breach that ‘boggles the mind’
A series of cybersecurity incidents at the federal office
safeguarding bank deposits has seriously shaken the confidence of House members
who were dismayed by agency testimony Thursday.
Lawrence Gross, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.’s
chief information and chief privacy officer, was called before the panel to
explain the removal of sensitive electronic data by employees. Members also accused the agency of obstructing
a congressional investigation into the cyber-issues.
The House
Science, Space and Technology oversight subcommittee also sought more
information on a sophisticated cybertheft of FDIC data that subcommittee
Chairman Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.) said was likely done by the Chinese.
Since October, a series of violations by seven employees
as they were leaving the agency, including five
cases The Post reported earlier this week, resulted in the breach of
personal information belonging to more than 160,000 individuals, according to
Loudermilk.
“To date, FDIC has failed to notify any of those
individuals that their private information may have been compromised,” he
added.
“This is a guideline. Only a fool would submit 99 identical subpoenas
and expect a judge not to notice.”
Alan Feuer reports:
A federal judge in Brooklyn ruled on Thursday that
prosecutors could not force Facebook to remain silent about 15 grand-jury
subpoenas involving the company’s customers.
The judge, James Orenstein, said that the prosecutors had
legitimate concerns that their investigations might be compromised, but he
added that the government’s boilerplate requests, made in identical language in
each of the 15 applications for a gag order, were insufficiently detailed.
Read more on NY
Times.
Is there an expectation that ‘social media’ is a better
forecaster of future behavior? Or merely
more trendy?
Overnight Tech: Feds pressed to review social media in
background checks
… The House
Oversight Committee has called
officials to testify from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and
the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Congress is pressing
agencies to start using social media and other public information online in
background checks. OPM has recently been soliciting vendors for a pilot project
to use software that automatically scrapes the web for information helpful in a
background check. You can read
our preview of the hearing here.
An interesting exercise. Perhaps we could automate this process to
compare all countries as the laws change?
Would be fun to try with IBM’s Watson and a few other free tools!
If These Canadians Lived in the United States, How Would They
Protect Their Privacy?
by Sabrina I. Pacifici on May 12, 2016
Regan, Priscilla M. and Bennett, Colin and Bayley, Robin,
If These Canadians Lived in the United States, How Would They Protect Their
Privacy? The Functional Equivalence of
Privacy Redress Mechanisms in Canada and the US (May 10, 2016). 2016 Privacy
Law Scholars Conference, George Washington University, June 2-3, 2016.
Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2778070
“Recent commentary has contended that, despite the fact
that the U.S. Does not have a comprehensive data protection statute nor a data
protection authority, the entire regime for the protection of privacy is
essentially and functionally equivalent to those in other advanced democratic
states. We subject that hypothesis to
empirical examination by investigating seven actual complaints and
investigations conducted under the Canadian Personal Information Protection and
Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA). These
are real cases brought by real individuals. In each case, we ask the question,
if these same fact situations occurred in the U.S. How would these individuals try to advance
their privacy rights and seek redress? We examine cases from different sectors:
credit reporting, insurance, online advertising, online dating, banking, hotels
and cellular communications. The cases
are not representative. Nevertheless,
our results highlight the advantages of a single point of contact, a
comprehensive legal framework, and of a system that relies less on litigation.”
As a concerned citizen, I might start an independent LLC
to gather funds earmarked for all potential political hot buttons. I would take a modest 98% administration
fee.
The Rise of Dark Money in US Elections
by Sabrina I. Pacifici on May 12, 2016
“Dark
Money Watch, a project of MapLight,
is a hub for information about dark money in U.S. elections. Our goal is to support investigations of dark
money in order to help the public understand how hidden donors can influence
our political system…. Dark money comes
from groups that are not required to disclose their donors. It pays for ads and other efforts to influence
elections, but voters often don’t know who is behind those efforts.”
For my geekier students.
Meet Google's cool new natural language tool, Parsey
McParseface
Google announced a new SyntaxNet open-source neural network framework
that developers can use to build applications that understand human language. As part of that release, Google also
introduced Parsey McParseface, a new English language parser that was trained
using SyntaxNet.
The launch is a move to democratize the tools for building
applications powered by machine learning.
Perspective. This
is why we’re adding bots to our course offerings.
Half the Web's traffic comes from bots
Roughly half of all Web traffic comes from bots and
crawlers, and that's costing companies a boatload of money.
Non-human sources accounted for 48 percent of traffic to
the sites analyzed for DeviceAtlas's Q1 Mobile Web Intelligence Report,
including legitimate search-engine crawlers as well as automated scrapers and
bots generated by hackers, click fraudsters and spammers, the company said.
… "We used to think of bots as passive ambient
noise," Cremin said. "That's now changed to the point where they
actually interact with the sites they visit and mimic human traffic
exactly."
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