$5 Device Can Hijack Your Computer And Steal Your Data
If you follow security news at all, you’ve seen Samy
Kamkar’s name before. He’s got a knack
for building incredibly inexpensive gadgets that can inflict serious harm to
electronic systems. Hotel room locks. Cars. Garage doors. Cash registers. If it
has a digital pulse, Kamkar can probably hack it.
His latest creation is PoisonTap, a device he built using a $5 Raspberry Pi
Zero that can hijack a computer and steal data from it. All he has to do to make that happen is to
shove it into a USB port. What makes
PoisonTap particularly frightening is that it can do what it does even if you’ve locked your computer and protected it
with a password.
… PoisonTap works
by tricking a computer into thinking it’s an ordinary network adapter. Once it digs its claws into a system it can
wreak all kinds of havoc, like stealing all the cookies that are stored on your
computer. That, Kamkar says, allows an
attacker to break into a victim’s website accounts — even if they’re protected
by two-factor authentication or accessed via an SSL connection. It can also intercept network traffic and
re-route requests.
Perspective.
As it has done in past months, Protenus has compiled a monthly report on
health data breaches in the U.S. that were disclosed during October. Their analyses are based on data and
information provided by this site and blogger.
… Many of the
incidents, but not all, were reported on this site and can be found by using
the “search” function.
You can find Protenus’s Breach Barometer for
October here.
And after you’ve read the report, also read HIStalk’s
interview of Robert Lord, CEO of Protenus, as he really articulates the
challenges beautifully, e.g.:
You’ve been looking at Facebook, now Facebook wants to
look back?
Facebook acquires facial image analysis startup FacioMetrics
Facebook has acquired FacioMetrics, a facial image
analysis company, as it tries to give users new features to add special effects
to photos and videos.
The technology developed by the startup also includes
capabilities for face tracking and recognizing emotions, which could
potentially open up other applications for Facebook.
Guidelines for the next campaign? How do they know ‘engagement’ didn’t mean ‘look
at this nonsense?”
Viral Fake Election News Outperformed Real News On Facebook
In Final Months Of The US Election
In the final three months of the US presidential campaign,
the top-performing fake election news stories on Facebook generated more
engagement than the top stories from major news outlets such as the New York
Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, NBC News, and
others, a BuzzFeed News analysis has found.
During these critical months of the campaign, 20
top-performing false election stories from hoax sites and hyperpartisan blogs
generated 8,711,000 shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook.
… For details on
how we identified and analyzed the content, see the bottom of this post. View our data here.)
About time. “Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.”
Microsoft joins The Linux Foundation as a
Platinum member
At its Connect();
2016 developer event in New York City today, Microsoft announced it is
joining The Linux Foundation. And the company isn’t joining just to say it
did: Microsoft is joining at the Platinum level, the highest level of
membership, which costs $500,000 annually. John Gossman, architect on the Microsoft Azure
team, will sit on the foundation’s Board of Directors and help underwrite
projects.
How rude.
Whatever you might have previously thought about the
notion of President Barack Obama pardoning Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden,
the election of Donald Trump changes everything. The stunning new reality, and the threat it
poses to Americans and non-Americans, shifts and strengthens the case for Obama
to take this extraordinary step before he departs: pardoning these two most
visible critics for their illegal disclosures. The
rationale: to empower and embolden whistleblowers over the next four years and
beyond.
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