Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai reports:
On March 19 of this year, Hillary
Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta received an alarming email that
appeared to come from Google.
The email, however, didn’t come
from the internet giant. It was actually
an attempt to hack into his personal account. In fact, the message came from a group of
hackers that security researchers, as well as the US government, believe are
spies working for the Russian government. At the time, however, Podesta didn’t know any
of this, and he clicked on the malicious link contained in the email, giving
hackers access to his account.
Read more on Motherboard.
“We don’t know what happened but we’re ‘improving
security.’” Sounds like they had waited
on some security measures they knew they should have implemented. Typical.
Weebly Breach Affects Over 43 Million Users
Hackers have managed to
steal information associated with more than 43 million accounts belonging to
customers of Weebly, a San Francisco-based web hosting service that provides a
drag-and-drop website builder.
According to LeakedSource, the
attackers stole 43,430,316 accounts after breaching the company’s systems in
February. The compromised information
includes usernames, email addresses, IPs and password hashes.
Weebly has been in touch with LeakedSource and confirmed that
the exposed information is genuine. The
company has notified affected users and reset their passwords. On its website, Weebly claims to have more
than 40 million users, which indicates that the breach has affected a large
majority, if not all, of its customers.
Weebly is
still trying to determine the cause of the breach, but the company
says it has already started improving network
security.
Update. On
Wednesday I posted they had lost a mere 600,000. Funny how these breaches seem always to grow
worse.
Millions of Indian debit cards 'compromised' in security
breach
A number of major Indian banks are taking safety measures
amid fears that the security of more than
3.2 million debit cards has been compromised.
Some of the affected banks have been asking their
customers to change security codes. They
are also blocking and replacing debit cards.
The breach is thought to have
been caused by malware on an ATM network.
Some customers are complaining that large sums of money
have been taken from their accounts.
Indian banks have issued nearly 700 million debit cards.
… But while the
government has been trying to sell cards as a risk free method of payment
compared to using physical money, not many are convinced that banks are taking
enough cyber security measures. [Exactly
what my students told me. Bob]
Hackers learn. Do
businesses?
Twitter and Much of The Internet Suffered a Meltdown on
Friday
… Twitter users reported getting a DNS error
message. But the DNS snafu was much
bigger than Twitter. On its status page, Amazon Web Services said it was looking into “elevated errors
resolving DNS host names used to access some AWS services” in its massive U.S.
east region operating out of data centers in Northern Virginia.
… Popular tech
site Hacker News
reported many other sites were affected including Etsy, Spotify, Github,
Soundcloud, Dyn, and Heroku were also affected.
Blockchain is the new “big thing.”
Visa Taps Blockchain for Cross-Border Payment Plan
Visa Inc. is
putting a bitcoin-style network to work as it aims to take on a new market, the
large and complex cross-border payments made between businesses.
The new offering, Visa B2B Connect, will use technology
developed in partnership with Chain Inc., a tech startup in which Visa is an
investor. Chain is one of a handful of
firms aiming to use the same type of network that records moves of cryptocurrency
bitcoin, known generally as a blockchain, for other assets such as stocks and
payments.
… Visa and Chain’s
system represents a new
effort to challenge the Swift messaging network as the dominant method for
moving large sums of money across borders between banks on behalf of
businesses. Swift has been the subject
of recent high-profile hacks and is under intensive regulatory scrutiny.
(Related) Something my students can play with.
R3's Corda Blockchain Platform Goes Open-Source
Blockchain is variously described as the future of
computing or a hype bubble that has already burst, depending on which author
you read. In the Fiancial Times (FT), 14 October, 2016, Oliver
Bussmann wrote, "As the former group chief information officer
of UBS, where we championed blockchain early on, and as an adviser to banks and
fintech companies today, I am cautious. My experience tells me it may be a while
before we see large-scale adoption in the financial industry." This is not the hope of R3, a finance
technology firm that includes a consortium of more than 70 of the world's
leading financial institutions.
This week R3 announced that its Corda platform source code will be released
as open-source to the Hyperledger project -- a Linux Foundation Collaborative
Project seeking to advance blockchain technology.
The new politics? Support
you candidate by writing a bot?
A third of pro-Trump tweets are generated by bots
University researchers who track political activity on
Twitter have found that traffic on pro-Trump hashtags was twice as high as
pro-Clinton hashtags during the first
presidential debate.
But the team of academics, led by Oxford University
professor Philip Howard, also found that 33% of pro-Trump traffic was driven by
bots and highly automated accounts, compared to 22% for Clinton.
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