Vera Bradley Is The Latest Retailer To Have Payment
Systems Hacked
… Vera Bradley announced this morning that, between July 25 and
Sept. 23, hackers gained access to the payment systems in its 112 stores and 44
outlets.
The breach was first discovered on Sept. 15, the company
says, when they were notified by police
of a “potential data security issue” with the retailer’s store network.
After learning of the breach, Vera Bradley says it
notified payment card networks and launched an investigation into the hack.
The probe found unauthorized access to Vera Bradley’s
payment processing system and the installation of a program that looked for
payment card data. The program was
specifically designed to find data in the magnetic strip on a payment
card that may contain the card number, cardholder name, expiration date,
and internal verification code – as the data was being routed through the
affected payment systems.
My students would not have been as generous. (I train them well!)
Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf Steps Down
Wells Fargo & Co. Chairman and Chief Executive
John Stumpf, under fire for the bank’s
sales-tactics scandal and his own handling
of its fallout, is stepping down from both roles, effective immediately,
the bank said Wednesday.
… Mr. Stumpf won’t
receive a severance package, the bank said. The board, at Mr. Stumpf’s own recommendation,
had previously decided he should relinquish
$41 million in unvested equity, one of the biggest-ever forfeitures of pay
by a bank chief. He still retires with
tens of millions of dollars earned during roughly 35 years at the bank.
… Mr. Stumpf will
walk away with total compensation during his years at Wells Fargo valued at
about $120 million, according to an estimate by Mark Reilly, a managing
director at human-resources consultancy Overture Group LLC. This estimate reflects the value of stock and
stock options as well as retirement benefits and deducts the $41 million Mr.
Stumpf has already forfeited. It is based on the bank’s Wednesday share price.
“Tis a puzzlement!”
User ids and passwords match. How
do you know if it came from you?
Catalin Cimpanu reports:
The company says that nobody
breached its servers, but that it took this step after its security staff
discovered a set of customer details posted online as part of another breach at
another company.
Amazon says those details matched the details of Amazon accounts, and since it had no
way of knowing if those customers reused the same passwords for their Amazon
accounts, it decided to air on the safe side of things and reset
those customers’ passwords, just in case.
Password reset emails started
going out last week, when several users posted screenshots on Twitter, and have
continued to reach users this week.
Read more on Softpedia.
Could we use the same tools to defeat the hackers?
Akamai Says Hackers Use ’Smart’ Devices to Test Stolen
Usernames, Passwords
Attackers are hijacking DVRs, satellite antennas and
networking devices to conduct mass tests of stolen login credentials, according
to research from Akamai Technologies Inc., the
latest sign that common household gadgets are
being remotely marshaled for malicious activity.
The network security provider on Wednesday said it has new evidence that hackers spent several months or more
manipulating as many as two million “smart” devices in homes and businesses to
test whether stolen usernames and passwords were able to access others’
websites, known as “credential stuffing campaigns.”
Ah, the power of social media!
Facebook Helped Drive a Voter Registration Surge, Election
Officials Say
A 17-word Facebook reminder contributed
to substantial increases in online voter registration across the country,
according to top election officials.
At least nine
secretaries of state have credited the social network’s voter registration
reminder, displayed for four days in September, with boosting sign-ups, in some
cases by considerable amounts. Data from
nine other states show that registrations rose drastically on the first day of
the campaign compared with the day before.
(Related) Ah, the curse of social media!
Facebook has repeatedly trended fake news since firing its
human editors
… As part of a
larger audit of Facebook’s Trending topics, the Intersect logged every news
story that trended across four accounts during the workdays from Aug. 31 to
Sept. 22. During that time, we uncovered
five trending stories that were indisputably fake and three that were
profoundly inaccurate.
… This is the
second in the series; read the
first here.
Amazon leads, everyone else scrambles?
Wal-Mart, Kroger Strive to Counter Amazon’s Grocery Challenge
More than mere disruption.
Was this any way to run a business (or industry)?
Uber and Lyft are demolishing New York City taxi drivers
The price of taxi-cab medallions in New York seem to have
hit a new low.
Early this month, a medallion — basically the right to
operate a yellow cab in New York — was listed for $250,000 on nycitycab.com.
That's a stark contrast from
2014, when the value of a medallion was listed around $1.3 million.
Medallions are tightly regulated, and you cannot
operate a taxi in New York without one. They're
losing value with the cab business taking a hit amid the
rise of rideshare apps like Uber and Lyft.
I hope my students have the natural kind…
The Administration’s Report on the Future of Artificial
Intelligence
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on Oct 12, 2016
… . This Thursday,
President Obama will host the White House Frontiers Conference in
Pittsburgh to imagine the Nation and the world in 50 years and beyond, and to
explore America’s potential to advance towards the frontiers that will make the
world healthier, more prosperous, more equitable, and more secure. Today, to ready the United States
for a future in which Artificial Intelligence (AI) plays a growing role, the
White House is releasing a report on future directions and considerations for
AI called Preparing for the Future of Artificial
Intelligence.
… A companion National Artificial Intelligence
Research and Development Strategic Plan is also being released, laying
out a strategic plan for Federally-funded research and development in AI.
(Related) Or not.
Artificial Intelligence Systems Manage More Complex Tasks
Artificial-intelligence systems can do increasingly
complex tasks but they can’t yet figure much out on their own without help from
humans.
In a paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature,
researchers at Alphabet Inc.’s Google DeepMind describe experimental
software that they say gets closer to that goal and could be more accurate and
less costly than current systems.
Similar, but different.
As businesses enter the unchartered waters of machine
intelligence – where machines learn by experience and improve their performance
over time – researchers are trying to predict its impact on jobs and work. Optimists
suggest that by taking over cognitive but labor-intensive chores the
intelligent machines will free human workers to do more “creative” tasks, and
that by working side by side with us they will boost our imagination to achieve
more. Experience with Robotic Process Automation (RPA) seems to confirm this
prediction. Pessimists predict huge levels of unemployment, as nearly
half of existing jobs appear prone to automation and, therefore, extinction.
More nuanced analysis points to a less dystopian future
where a great number of activities within jobs will be undertaken by
intelligent systems rather than humans. This view, in effect, calls for a
re-examination of what a “job” actually is: how it is structured, and how it
should be reconfigured, or perhaps redefined, in the age of intelligent
automation.
As a longtime fan, I did vote for beSpacific. I will also look at some new-to-me blogs I
found in the list of nominees.
beSpacific nominated as one of top Legal Tech Blogs – please
vote
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on Oct 12, 2016
Dear Colleagues/Readers – beSpacific has
been nominated in the The Expert
Institute’s – Best Legal Tech Blogs category. I appreciate your taking a minute to vote for
beSpacific – thank you very much.
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