U.S. Seeks to Protect Voting System From Cyberattacks
The Obama administration is weighing new steps to bolster
the security of the United States’ voting process against cyberthreats,
including whether to designate the electronic ballot-casting system for
November’s elections as “critical infrastructure,” Jeh Johnson, the secretary
of Homeland Security, said on Wednesday.
… a vastly complex
effort given that there are 9,000 jurisdictions in the United States that have
a hand in carrying out the balloting, many of them with different ways of
collecting, tallying and reporting votes.
[Far less than the number of
Starbucks. Bob]
… Mr. Johnson said
he was considering
communicating with state and local election officials across the country to
inform them about “best practices” to guard against cyberintrusions, and that
longer-term investments would probably have to be made to secure the voting
process.
Interesting. This
starts like a report of a breach that has nothing to do with health records,
then they are amazed to find that it does!
They have no idea how that happened, but they claim to have blocked
it?
Rajiv Leventhal reports:
Phoenix-based Banner Health,
one of the largest healthcare systems in the U.S., announced on August 3 that
it is notifying approximately 3.7 million individuals about a breach in which
cyber attackers gained unauthorized access to computer systems that process payment card data at food and beverage outlets at
certain Banner locations.
The incident was discovered by Banner Health on July 7,
though the attack was initiated on June 17, according to the health system’s
press release. The attackers targeted
payment card data, including cardholder name, card number, expiration date and
internal verification code, as the data was being routed through affected
payment processing systems. Payment
cards used at food and beverage outlets at certain Banner Health locations
during the two-week period between June 23 and July 7 may have been affected. The
investigation revealed that the attack did not affect payment card payments
used to pay for medical services, the organization said.
Then, on July 13, Banner Health
learned that the cyber attackers may have
indeed gained unauthorized access to patient information, health plan member
and beneficiary information, as well as information about physician and
healthcare providers. The
patient and health plan information may have included names, birthdates,
addresses, physicians’ names, dates of service, claims information, and
possibly health insurance information and social security numbers, if provided
to Banner Health. The physician and
provider information may have included names, addresses, dates of birth, social
security numbers and other identifiers they may use.
Read more on Healthcare
Informatics.
Banner Health has created a support site for the breach.
[From the
Healthcare article:
How the hack expanded from certain food and beverage
outlets to patient information systems is currently
unclear. But, Banner has
mailed letters to 3.7 million patients, health plan members and beneficiaries,
food and beverage customers and physicians and healthcare providers related to the
attack.
The health system said that it “worked quickly to block
the attackers and is working to enhance the security of its systems in order to
help prevent this from happening in the future.”
This makes no sense.
Why give up such valuable access for a few minutes of “fame?” The standard playbook suggests they did not
have access, but may be able to get their hooks into a hurriedly created
replacement.
JTA reports:
An Israeli cyberintelligence
company claims it has hacked Islamic State communications and learned about the
group’s plans to attack U.S. air bases in Kuwait, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.
Intsights, which is run by former
Israel Defense Forces intelligence officers and based in Herzliya, said
Wednesday it had hacked the forum on which ISIS operatives publish terror
attack plans, the Times of Israel reported citing Channel 10.
Read more on JTA.
[From the
Times article:
Arvatz said the group would doubtless be closed down now
it had been exposed on Israeli television.
Just whisper in Big Brother’s ear.
Joe Cadillic writes:
Researchers at the University of Salamanca (USAL) have
developed a ‘Sentiment Analysis’(SA) algorithm that monitors Twitter
and Facebook.
Psychologist, Paul Ekman has worked with the CIA,
DOD and DHS for years, helping develop facial emotion
detection, click here to
read more.
Our government is also using ‘Emotive
Analytics‘ (EA), to arrest and imprison innocent people!
Ekman
has provided training to a whole series of people who were guards at Abu
Ghraib prison, too, in how to extract information and truth without torture. “They used my [facial analysis] work, and it
was very successful,” Ekman said.
It’s only a matter of
time, before police use Emotive Analytics to arrest Americans.
American policing of a person’s
sentiments, is this a joke?
Sadly, this is no joke.
Read more on MassPrivateI.
What can my students learn for this? I’ll have them hack in and see. (They’ll want to leave their resumes on the
group’s desktops in any case.)
IBM Unveils "X-Force Red" Pen Testing Group
The new "IBM X-Force Red" team is a group of ethical hackers
that will pound the virtual walls of companies in an effort to discover
vulnerabilities in their networks, hardware, and applications.
Led by pen testing guru Charles Henderson, who previously
served as VP of Managed Security Testing at Trustwave, the X-Force Red team
consists of hundreds of security professionals scattered across dozens of
locations around the world.
In addition to searching for software vulnerabilities and
misconfigurations, the team will help test the human element, by performing
phishing and social media attack simulations, along with physical security
tests to determine the risks associated with in-person interactions.
IT Architecture.
A new set of relationships is being formed within
companies around how people working in data, analytics, IT, and operations
teams work together. Is there a “right”
way to structure these relationships?
Perhaps “brick and mortar” isn’t enough anymore?
Will Walmart Really Buy Jet.com?
… Jet.com is new,
available to the general public for only a little over a year. A year that has been a turbulent one – Jet.com
had to reset its business model away from memberships early on and its
valuation got a quick resetting from a targeted $2 billion to the $1.34 billion
valuation eventually settled on in November of last year. But on the other hand, it did hit that
unicorn valuation in less than six months – the firm found itself involved in
some high profile partnerships (like this one with the White House) and has ended its years with
numbers trending toward the black – but not there yet.
But differences aside, they have a common enemy in Amazon
– the firm that disrupted Walmart out of being the biggest retailer on Earth by
market cap, and the undisputed leader in U.S. eCommerce that Jet.com entered
the field to disrupt. In some sense the
firms were always natural friends despite being competitors.
And now, if recent reports are to be believed, it may be the case
that Jet.com and Walmart are going to be more than friends with a common enemy,
and instead may become a single firm with a common cause – retail dominance in
store and online.
The very definition of unpredictable? “I can’t win because everything is rigged
against me?”
'A sense of panic is rising' among Republicans over Trump,
including talk of what to do if he quits
Donald Trump’s relations with the Republican Party – and
his political fortunes – worsened dramatically Wednesday, as party leaders
fretted openly about the inability of his campaign staff to control him and
even began to discuss what to do
if their unpredictable nominee suddenly quit the race.
… “The bottom line
is that he has to get more disciplined,” said Bennett, still a Trump supporter.
“There’s no doubt about it. We can’t have unforced errors.”
Trump showed no signs he would heed that advice.
… He ran through a
long list of other grievances, insisting the media had unfairly criticized him
at every turn.
For our Networking students?
Israel’s SolidRun creates open networking kit inspired by
Raspberry Pi
SolidRun, a
developer of electronic modules and PCs, said it is launching ClearFog Base kit,
an off-the-shelf open development kit that enables do-it-yourself hardware
enthusiasts to create their own telecom-grade routers.
I often feel like Wally after teaching a class.
No comments:
Post a Comment