Brian Krebs reports:
In December 2016, KrebsOnSecurity
broke the news that fraud experts at various banks were
seeing a pattern suggesting a widespread credit card breach across some 5,000
hotels worldwide owned by InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG).
In February, IHG acknowledged a breach
but said it appeared to involve only a dozen properties. Now, IHG has released data showing that cash
registers at more than 1,000 of its properties were compromised with malicious
software designed to siphon customer debit and credit card data.
Read more on KrebsonSecurity.com.
New rules! Better?
Michael B. Katz and Cynthia J. Larose of Mintz Levin
write:
After a quiet winter there has
been significant activity in state legislatures to enact, strengthen or clarify
their data breach notification statutes. The latest happenings are summarized below and
we have updated our “Mintz Matrix” to reflect these new and pending laws.
Read more on Privacy
& Security Matters Blog. The
authors also link to the full text of the new statutes.
Why Can’t We End Spam? Ask An Economist
Last week, Russian hacker Pyotr Levashov was arrested in
Barcelona in an operation jointly undertaken by Spain and the US FBI. Levashov is allegedly the hacker behind the
Kelihos botnet, a network of up
to 100,000 compromised computers
that have been used to run a giant, distributed spam operation (all unknownst
to the owners of the computers in the network.)
… Security
expert Brian Krebs
estimated that Levashov’s botnet was capable of
sending 1.5 billion emails a day, and attributes more than
$438,000 in revenue from online pharmacy spam sent through that botnet over a
3-year period. Economics research suggest that the
scale and the profitability of spam are inseparable: in their article on “The
Economics of Online Crime,” Moore et al. cite the results of a research
project that
infiltrated a large botnet and
altered the spam e-mails sent out so that they linked to a benign duplicate
website under the researchers’ control. They
were able to provide the first independent answer to a long-standing question:
how many people respond to spam? It turns out that 28 sales resulted from 350 million
spam e-mails advertising pharmaceuticals—a conversion rate of 0.00001 percent.
Now that is quotable!
Artificial intelligence is a hot topic right now. Driven by a fear of losing out, companies in
many industries have announced AI-focused initiatives. Unfortunately, most of these efforts will
fail. They will fail not because AI is
all hype, but because companies are approaching AI-driven innovation
incorrectly. And this isn’t the first
time companies have made this kind of mistake.
Today exit, tomorrow entry and eventually at every embassy
and consulate?
Facial recognition is coming to US airports, fast-tracked by
Trump
… Called Biometric
Exit, the project would use facial matching systems to identify every visa
holder as they leave the country. Passengers would have their photos taken
immediately before boarding, to be matched with the passport-style photos
provided with the visa application. If there’s no match in the system, it could be
evidence that the visitor entered the country illegally. The system is currently being tested on a
single flight from Atlanta to Tokyo, but after being expedited by the Trump
administration, it’s expected to expand to more airports this summer, eventually
rolling out to every international flight and border crossing in the US.
… “We currently
have everyone’s photo, so we don’t need to do any sort of enrollment. We have access to the Department of State
records so we have photos of US Citizens, we have visa photos, we have photos
of people when they cross into the US and their biometrics are captured into
[DHS biometric database] IDENT.”
… Homeland
Security estimates that roughly half a million visitors to the US overstay
their visas each year — but without a verifiable exit process, the government
has no way to determine how
many visitors are actually overstaying or who they are.
… Those systems
also raise serious civil rights questions that agencies still haven’t answered.
Under the FBI, facial recognition has
become a powerful and controversial tool for tracking criminals. If that tool extends to face photos taken at
airports, it could mean a subtle but profound change in law enforcement’s
powers at the airport.
“Right now, other than the no-fly list, you do
not have law enforcement checks on who can fly,” says Alvaro Bedoya, who
studies facial recognition at Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy &
Technology. “But once you take that
high-quality photograph, why not run it against the FBI database? Why not run it against state databases of
people with outstanding warrants? Suddenly you’re moving from this world in which you’re
just verifying identity to another world where the act of flying is cause for a
law enforcement search.”
Perspective. Is the
Internet going to the dogs?
PetSmart is acquiring Chewy.com for $3.35 billion in the
largest e-commerce acquisition ever
… The deal is a
huge one by any standard — bigger than Walmart’s
$3.3 billion deal for Jet.com last year — and especially for a retail
company like PetSmart, which was itself valued at only $8.7 billion when
private equity investors took it over in 2015.
But Chewy.com has been one of the
fastest-growing e-commerce sites on the planet, registering nearly $900 million
in revenue last year, in what was only its fifth year in operation. The company had been a potential
IPO candidate for this year or next, but was taken out by its
brick-and-mortar competitor before that. It was not
profitable last year. [My students always find this amazing. Bob]
Yet another opportunity to expand the intellect of my
students.
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Apple Makes iMovie, GarageBand, and iWork Apps for Mac and
iOS Free for All Users
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