Dan Adams reports:
Marijuana shops across the
country, including seven medical dispensaries in Massachusetts, are being
affected by the apparent hack of a sales and inventory system widely used in
the cannabis industry.
[…] MJ Freeway, a Denver company whose
“seed-to-sale” tracking software is used by hundreds of marijuana companies to
comply with state regulations, said its main servers and backup system each
went down Sunday morning and remained offline as of Monday afternoon.
[…] A spokeswoman for MJ Freeway
said the outage, first reported by the industry publication Marijuana Business Daily, was the work of
unknown hackers.
[…] Ward said encryption
prevented the hackers from reading data about MJ Freeway’s retail clients,
which include five nonprofits in charge of seven medical dispensaries in
Massachusetts, or those shops’ patients and customers. But the
attackers did succeed in corrupting, or garbling, the data and making it
unusable. The company has not
received a demand for ransom or any other communication from the alleged
hackers, she added.
Read more on Boston
Globe.
Okay, this is interesting. Did the hacker(s) intend to corrupt the data
or was that a byproduct of a failed attempt to access/exfiltrate encrypted
data? What was the motivation behind
this attack? To get data for extortion? To interfere with access to marijuana? To try to cross-match with another database
for political purposes? Something else?
Searching is Okay if required to solve a problem for the
customer, sharing isn’t.
Cory Doctorow reports:
Last October, an Apple Store in
Brisbane, Australia terminated some of its employees after they were accused of
searching customers’ devices for sexually explicit selfies and sharing them
with colleagues, rating them on a scale of 1-10.
The employees were also accused
of covertly photographing female customers and co-workers, including “upskirt”
photos.
Though Apple fired the employees,
it denied that they engaged in these activities. The Australian privacy commissioner is
investigating the allegations.
Read more on BoingBoing.
For my Data Management students. Another business whose product is data.
FarmLogs raises $22 million to help farmers improve crop
yield with big data
… FarmLogs uses
data science and machine learning smarts to help farmers garner insights into
what’s happening in their fields in order to maximize their yield, reduce
waste, and increase profitability. The
platform monitors metrics such as crop health, rainfall, nitrogen levels, and
more, while enabling users to record and share scouting notes with photos from
specific locations in a field. Farmers
can access this data through native mobile apps for Android and iOS.
Today, FarmLogs claims its platform is used by more than a
fifth of row crop farms in the U.S.
For my Computer Security students. Be worthy of the high paying ones.
1 million cybersecurity job openings in 2017
A Forbes story in January 2016 reported there were 1 million cybersecurity job openings in
2016. Some things are worth
repeating. There are 1 million
cybersecurity job openings in 2017, give or take. Not much has changed over the past year.
Can armies of interns close the cybersecurity skills gap? asked
a Fast Company story in September of 2016. Not likely. In the U.S., and internationally, there's not
enough cybersecurity grads -- or computer science grads with cyber credits. In the U.S., students can graduate from some
of the top computer science programs with little to no cybersecurity courses.
For every cybersecurity grad, there's a job.
… Then fire away
with the best of these 200 most commonly asked IT security interview questions,
posted as a free resource by Skyhigh Networks.
This will help narrow down to the IT workers who can think like hackers,
and who possess the soft skills to combat them.
Another fun tool I can use to harass my students?
TinyTap Talk or Type - Voice Response Activities
TinyTap
is a service that lets you create educational games for your students to play
on their iPads, Android tablets, and in their web browsers. For the most part the style of games that are
created on TinyTap are identification activities in which students either
choose an answer or type an answer to a question. Recently, TinyTap added the option for
students to speak responses to game questions.
TinyTap's Talk or Type feature lets you create activities
that your students can interact with by speaking.
For the toolkit.
(Ditto).
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