Wednesday, March 22, 2017

Same crime, different country.  OR, learn crime from global news, act locally? 
Ex-DBS Trader Gets Jail in Singapore's First Spoofing Case
A former trader at DBS Group Holdings Ltd.’s brokerage unit was sentenced to 16 weeks in jail after being convicted in Singapore’s first criminal spoofing case.
Dennis Tey Thean Yang, 33, was given the sentence on Wednesday.  The former DBS Vickers Securities (Singapore) Pte broker had pleaded guilty to eight of 23 charges, including attempts to artificially move prices through fraudulent securities orders and misusing other people’s trading accounts without consent.  He made a profit of S$30,239 ($21,572) from October 2012 to January 2013.


Has there been a breach?  Has anyone notified account holders? 
Joseph Cox reports:
A hacker or group of hackers is apparently trying to extort Apple over alleged access to a large cache of iCloud and other Apple email accounts.
The hackers, who identified themselves as ‘Turkish Crime Family’, demanded $75,000 in Bitcoin or Ethereum, another increasingly popular crypto-currency, or $100,000 worth of iTunes gift cards in exchange for deleting the alleged cache of data.
Read more on Motherboard.


A different type of extortion?  
Microsoft Modifies Windows 10 for China’s Government
BEIJING—Microsoft Corp. has finished development of a Windows 10 version customized for Chinese government use, which could boost its China prospects after sales were hit by Beijing’s cybersecurity crackdown.
Microsoft declined to say how the software was modified, but in general China’s government is concerned about technology products that could contain hidden “back doors” to enable foreign surveillance.


Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.  Teach a man to phish and he can retire in luxury!
Joon H. Kim, the Acting United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and William F. Sweeney Jr., the Assistant Director-in-Charge of the New York Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”), announced criminal charges against EVALDAS RIMASAUSKAS for orchestrating a fraudulent business email compromise scheme that induced two U.S.-based internet companies (the “Victim Companies”) to wire a total of over $100 million to bank accounts controlled by RIMASAUSKAS.  RIMASAUSKAS was arrested late last week by authorities in Lithuania on the basis of a provisional arrest warrant.  
   Acting U.S. Attorney Joon H. Kim said: “From half a world away, Evaldas Rimasauskas allegedly targeted multinational internet companies and tricked their agents and employees into wiring over $100 million to overseas bank accounts under his control.  This case should serve as a wake-up call to all companies – even the most sophisticated – that they too can be victims of phishing attacks by cyber criminals


Fragile.  Something my Computer Security students will have to address. 
Glitch at NYSE Arca hits hundreds of exchange traded funds
A technical problem at NYSE Arca, the Big Board’s listing venue for exchange traded funds, stymied the end of the trading day on Monday, hindering the closing auction for 341 securities, NYSE said on Tuesday.
In a letter to clients on Tuesday, NYSE attributed the problem to a new version of software. Trading on the exchange has recommenced normally.
   The latest glitch in the US market plumbing highlights how reliant trading has become on technology, forcing traders and investors to adapt to periodic technical problems.


Badges? Warrants?  We don’t need no stinking badges! Warrants!”
Border agents must obtain a warrant to search travelers’ phones, tablets, and laptops, which contain a vast trove of sensitive, highly personal information that is protected by the Fourth Amendment, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) told a federal appeals court yesterday.
Searches of devices at the border have more than doubled since the inauguration of President Trump—from nearly 25,000 in all of 2016, to 5,000 in February alone.  This increase, along with the increasing number of people who carry these devices when they travel, has heightened awareness of the need for stronger privacy rights while crossing the U.S. border.
While the Fourth Amendment ordinarily requires law enforcement officials to get a warrant supported by probable cause before searching our property, in cases that predate the rise of digital devices, courts granted border agents the power to search our luggage without a warrant or any suspicion of wrongdoing.
But portable digital devices differ wildly from luggage or other physical items we carry with us to the airport because they provide access to the entirety of our private lives, EFF said in an amicus brieffiled at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in the border search case U.S. v. Kolsuz. 
   “The border isn’t a constitution-free zone,” said Adam Schwartz, EFF senior staff attorney.  
For EFF’s new border pocket guide:   https://www.eff.org/document/eff-border-search-pocket-guide


For my Computer Forensics students.  Obvious, wasn’t it? 
iCloud may have doxxed a journalist’s Twitter attacker
In theory, it was the perfect setup: an anonymous Twitter account on a prepaid SIM card, bought with cash.  With no credit card or other identifiable info tied to the account, there should have been no way to trace tweets back to a human.
But on Friday, after taking all those precautions, a man named John Rivello was arrested for sending seizure-inducing tweets to Newsweek journalist Kurt Eichenwald.  The arrest came three months and a day after the initial incident, and a newly unsealed complaint reveals how police tracked the man down.
First, police sent a court order to Twitter, which agreed to hand over all its data on @jew_goldstein, the account that had sent the seizure-inducing image.  But that data showed only a dummy email address, along with an IP address and phone numbers linking to a prepaid Tracfone.  But since Tracfone didn’t have any subscriber information associated with the number, police were left with few leads.
The break came thanks to AT&T, which was supporting Tracfone’s SIM card.  While AT&T didn’t have any directly identifying data, the company’s toll records showed that the SIM card had been used by an iPhone 6.  That sent investigators looking for an iCloud account linked to the same number.  After another search warrant to Apple, they got what they were looking for. According to the complaint, the number was linked to a five-year-old iCloud account owned by John Rivello of Salisbury, Maryland.  A search of iMessages and photos in the account provided further evidence of Rivello’s interest in Eichenwald.


Is this a Trade Secret?
Matthew Renda reports:
A federal judge refused to sign off on a settlement between a class of email users and Google, sending the parties back to the drawing board to come up with a more detailed disclosure of how Google intercepts and uses emails for targeted advertising.
U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh issued the order Thursday, saying the class did not demand enough concessions from the tech giant its practice of scanning incoming and outgoing emails for information that it uses for targeted advertising.
Specifically, Koh wanted to see disclosures hosted on a website or somehow publicly disseminated that clearly spell out how Google intercepts, scans and uses the information from non-Gmail users.
Read more on Courthouse News.


“Fake News” in real time!  Why wait for Journalist to publish the facts?  Is this not a taste of things to come? 
What Happens When the President Is a Publisher, Too?
   on Twitter, it’s possible to be sitting in a room full of your colleagues, surreptitiously scrolling on your mobile phone, and notice that, hey, whaddya know, President Donald Trump is tweeting again.
At a House Intelligence Committee hearing on Monday, Jim Himes decided to share some of those tweets with the men who were there being questioned—the FBI director James Comey and the NSA director Mike Rogers—along with the rest of the room, and the public.


Everyone Tweets, not just the President.
Twitter Suspends More Accounts Linked to 'Terrorism'
Twitter said Tuesday it suspended 376,890 accounts in the second half of 2016 for "promotion of terrorism," an increase of 60 percent over the prior six-month period.
The latest suspensions bring the total number of blocked accounts to 636,248 from August 2015, when Twitter stepped up efforts to curb "violent extremism," the company announced as part of its latest transparency report.


But, is it good for golf?
Costco vs. Acushnet: Who has the upper hand?
The burgeoning legal battle between Costco and Acushnet over the cult favorite Kirkland Signature ball is sounding more and more like a game of courthouse chicken.
But that can be an expensive game, with occasionally terminal consequences.
In layman’s terms, Costco’s suit for what’s called a declaratory judgment against Acushnet is essentially a preemptive strike, a lawsuit aiming to prevent a lawsuit.  In actuality, it’s probably not going to work that way.


Disruption.  Back in the day, small town grocery stores employed teens or (in my home town) the village idiot to deliver groceries.  Are we returning to that time but now using ‘delivery services’ or robots?
Soon, You’ll Be Able to Get Costco Groceries Delivered in 50 Different Cities
Costco Wholesale is ramping up its home grocery delivery in a major way.
The bulk retailer is teaming up with Shipt, a startup delivery service, to make runs to Costco stores and bring orders back to customers' homes, moving further into one of most complex and costly fronts in the e-commerce wars while also building on Costco's delivery to business clients.
   Grocers are scrambling to find ways to offer home delivery as a way to win customers, despite a threat to already razor-thin margins.  Delivery services like Instacart (which is doing a test with Costco), AmazonFresh, Google Express, and FreshDirect have proliferated, while some major chains like Kroger and Walmart have teamed up with services like Uber and Lyft on a test basis.  Costco rival Sam's Club has focused its efforts on ramping up drive-by pick up at its stores.


Disruption.  Firing the Marketing team is probably a good thing. 
Meet Tinyclues Action™, the Revolutionary AI That Enables Marketers to Put Their Ideas into Action
   Put very simply, Tinyclues Action™ does three things very smartly.  Firstly, it predicts ANY customer’s likelihood to buy ANY item (or brand, or category) in the next few days, even in the absence of a prior intent.  This deep targeting capability outshines intent-driven rules (which rely on retargeting customers based on their past behavior and become ineffective after a few interactions.)  Secondly, it gives instant feedback on the right volume or pressure to put behind a campaign.  And thirdly, it offers intelligent planning capabilities which enable marketers to build a comprehensive marketing agenda over the next days and weeks, activating customers on all channels (email, mobile, social – even print), while making sure that everyone receives the best messages and that the overall plan is balanced and consistent.  In other words, it combines intelligent targeting, intelligent pressure management and intelligent planning.
For more information, visit http://www.tinyclues.com.


Yet another Disruption!
How Facebook’s Big Bet on Video Could Change TV
Facebook is aggressively ramping up its video strategy, cultivating content whether it comes from users, advertisers or Hollywood, or is developed internally.  With its nearly two billion monthly users, the social network could make a big dent in traditional TV and help usher in a major shift towards social TV, Wharton experts say.
   CEO Mark Zuckerberg is also tipping his hat to a fast-growing trend: Digital video viewing is exploding.  According to Cisco Systems, video accounted for 60% of mobile data traffic in 2016 and should rise to 78% by 2021.


No more “Did too!  Did not!” 
   We’ve shared how web resources can help you stay updated on politics.  Another great site that can help you make political decisions is VoteSmart.  This completely bipartisan site holds a wealth of information for over 40,000 US politicians, both local and federal.
Type in your ZIP code or a politician’s name and you can check out their biography, recent votes, and positions on various issues.  Rounding out their data set are ratings from various activist groups and recent speeches.  You can also review their funding information, including top donors.

No comments: