Nick Vlahos reports:
A cyberattack last weekend has
been forcing students, teachers and administrators at Pekin Community
High School to forgo its computer systems.
That hasn’t been easy.
“You really quickly realize how
much you rely on technology when you don’t have access to it for a couple of
days,” Danielle Owens, the District 303 superintendent, said Wednesday.
Pekin officials discovered the
problem Monday. Sometime Sunday, a
hacker apparently used malware to infect the school’s computers. Pekin officials have no idea who it was; Owens
believed it might even be a non-American entity.
The hacker used encryption to
make it impossible for Pekin representatives to access information stored in
the system. In return for unlocking it,
the saboteur demanded a ransom — $37,000, according to Owens. It was not paid.
Read more on Journal
Star.
How to steal Billions.
Hackers Ran Through Holes in Swift's Network
The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial
Telecommunication has James Bond-level security at the facilities it uses to
move millions of bank-payment orders around the world every day.
Visitors to a Swift operations center in Culpeper, Va.,
say their car trunks were inspected upon arrival by armed guards, who used
mirrors to check under the chassis. Security
inside included a fingerprint scan, a test for chemical weapons and an iris
scanner in the most restricted areas.
“It’s like Fort Knox,” says Mohan Murali, chief executive
of Axletree Solutions Inc., which helps banks and companies connect to Swift.
That isn’t
where the thieves hit. In the
past year, a spate of cyberattacks has penetrated banks along Swift’s
less-defended perimeter, shaking confidence in the dominant network used by
banks for cross-border transactions. While
Swift diligently locked down that network’s core, customers were left mostly
responsible for their own security, creating an opportunity for hackers.
Targets included banks in India, Vietnam, Ecuador and
Bangladesh. Thieves made off with a
total of about $90 million from Bangladesh’s central bank and a commercial bank
in Ecuador. The other cyberattacks were
unsuccessful.
… Swift will likely
need more time to fully win back confidence. The New York Fed stopped making payments on
the strength of Swift messages alone and adopted a policy of double-confirming
orders from Bangladesh by phone.
A New York Fed official complained last June that the
arrangement “is not sustainable,” according to a letter reviewed by the
Journal. It isn’t clear if the policy is
still in effect. The New York Fed
declined to comment.
Another collection.
2017 Data Breach Investigations Report
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on Apr 30, 2017
Verizon: “Welcome to the 10th anniversary of the Data Breach
Investigations Report (DBIR). We
sincerely thank you for once again taking time to dig into our InfoSec
coddiwomple that has now culminated in a decade of nefarious deeds and
malicious mayhem in the security world. 2016
was an extremely tumultuous year, both in the United States and abroad. Political events, such as a divisive
presidential election and the United Kingdom European Union membership
referendum (aka Brexit), raised many a blood pressure reading, while memes
focused on getting through the year without the loss of another beloved
celebrity flooded social media. Despite
the tumult and clamor, cybercrime refused to take a year off, and added to the
feelings of uncertainty with numerous breaches being disclosed to the
public—thereby debunking the “no such thing as bad publicity” myth…”
For my Computer Security students.
New on LLRX – The Challenges of a Workplace Bring Your Own
Device Policy
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on Apr 30, 2017
Via LLRX– The Challenges of a Workplace Bring Your Own Device
Policy – John Hawthorne lays out the pros
and cons of BYOD policies in the workplace as well as reviewing challenges that
arise between employees and IT regarding securing operational data, the lack of
clearly articulated and managed use of devices for non work related activities
and risks associated with employee activities conducted on personal devices.
Like Security, Ethics is not an early consideration in new
technologies.
The Internet of Things Needs a Code of Ethics
In October, when malware called Mirai took over poorly
secured webcams and DVRs, and used them to disrupt internet access across the
United States, I wondered who was responsible. Not who actually coded the
malware, or who unleashed it on an
essential piece of the internet’s infrastructure—instead, I wanted to know if anybody could be held
legally responsible. Could the
unsecure devices’ manufacturers be liable for the damage their products?
Right now, in this early stage of connected devices’ slow
invasion into our daily lives, there’s no clear answer to that question. That’s because there’s no real legal framework
that would hold manufacturers responsible for critical failures that harm
others. As is often the case, the
technology has developed far faster than policies and regulations.
But it’s not just the legal system that’s out of touch
with the new, connected reality. The
Internet of Things, as it’s called, is also lacking a critical ethical
framework, argues Francine Berman, a computer-science professor at Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute and a longtime expert on computer infrastructure. Together with Vint Cerf, an engineer
considered one of the fathers of the internet, Berman wrote an article in the
journal Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery
about the need for an ethical system.
How not to train your AI?
Someone scraped 40,000 Tinder selfies to make a facial
dataset for AI experiments
… A user of
Kaggle, a platform for machine learning and data science competitions
which was recently acquired by Google, has uploaded a facial data set
he says was created by exploiting Tinder’s API to scrape 40,000 profile
photos from Bay Area users of the dating app — 20,000 apiece from profiles of
each gender.
The data set, called People
of Tinder, consists of six downloadable zip files, with four
containing around 10,000 profile photos each and two files with sample sets of
around 500 images per gender.
… The creator of
the data set, Stuart Colianni, has released it under a CC0:
Public Domain License and also uploaded his scraper
script to GitHub.
They may need this as part of their “suicide warning”
promise, but passing it to advertisers probably does not help their image. They have the ability to determine most
emotional states. Should they ignore
this or find more appropriate responses?
Facebook targets ‘insecure’ young people
Facebook is using sophisticated algorithms to identify and
exploit Australians as young as 14, by allowing
advertisers to target them at their most vulnerable, including when
they feel “worthless” and “insecure”, secret internal documents reveal.
A 23-page Facebook document seen by The Australian
marked “Confidential: Internal Only” and dated 2017, outlines how the social
network can target “moments when young people need a confidence boost” in
pinpoint detail.
By monitoring posts, pictures, interactions and internet activity
in real-time, Facebook can work out when young people feel “stressed”,
“defeated”, “overwhelmed”, “anxious”, “nervous”, “stupid”, “silly”, “useless”,
and a “failure”, the document states.
After being contacted by The Australian, Facebook
issued an apology, and said it had opened an investigation, admitting it was
wrong to target young children in this way.
… “Anticipatory
emotions are more likely to be expressed early in the week, while reflective
emotions increase on the weekend,” the document discloses. “Monday-Thursday is about building confidence;
the weekend is for broadcasting achievements.”
Everyone is now equipped with an evidence gathering
device.
Instagram and Twitter posts become evidence in Fyre Festival
$100 million class action lawsuit
… “Defendants
promoted their ‘Fyre Festival’ as a posh, island-based music festival featuring
‘first-class culinary experiences and a luxury atmosphere.'”
But: “Instead, festival-goers were lured into what various
media outlets have since labeled a ‘complete disaster’, ‘mass chaos’, and a
‘post-apocalyptic nightmare.'” And: “The
festival’s lack of adequate food, water, shelter, and medical care created a
dangerous and panicked situation among attendees — suddenly finding themselves
stranded on a remote island without basic provisions — that was closer to The
Hunger Games or Lord of the Flies than Coachella.”
… Fortunately, in
the face of hellish conditions, the uber rich still managed to post their
experience on Instagram and Twitter. And
so the chief eyewitness in this case will be social media.
Jung’s lawsuit draws on those real-time posts to bolster
his claim. Of course, the number of postings
about the disaster on Twitter is limitless at this point. The lawsuit includes several posts from the
account of William N. Finley IV,
who chronicled hilariously and scarily his ordeal while on the island, trying
to find food and shelter, and then trying to get home:
Have we reached a tipping point? Will all new startups need an Artificial
Intelligence component?
In Europe’s Election Season, Tech Vies to Fight Fake News
In the battle against fake news, Andreas Vlachos — a Greek
computer scientist living in a northern English town — is on the front lines.
Armed with a
decade of machine learning expertise, he is part of a British start-up that will soon release an
automated fact-checking tool ahead of the country’s election in early June. He also is advising a global competition that pits
computer wizards from the United States to China against each other to use
artificial intelligence to combat fake news.
… “Algorithms will
have to do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to fighting
misinformation,” said Claire Wardle, head of strategy and research at First Draft News, a nonprofit
organization that has teamed up with tech companies and newsrooms to debunk
fake reports about elections in the United States and Europe. “It’s impossible to do all of this by hand.”
Perspective. Competition
for President Trump or simply ‘follow the leader?’
Twitter to launch 24/7 news streaming service with Bloomberg
Twitter’s transformation into a TV network is edging ever
closer with the company’s announcement that it is teaming up with Bloomberg to
create a 24/7 news streaming service directly on the social network.
The move comes as little surprise given Twitter’s recent
escapades in the video-streaming realm. The
company announced
last week that 800 hours of live premium video were watched by 45 million
viewers in Q1 2017, up 31 percent on the previous quarter, with myriad video
partnerships over the past 12 months helping drive new users to the platform. Last year, Twitter won the rights
to stream Thursday night NFL games, and it also partnered
with BuzzFeed for a U.S. presidential election livestream and nabbed
some PGA
golf coverage. More recently,
it has signed video deals across
sports, esports,
and politics, and it’s also preparing
to begin producing original content.
Perspective. You
mean it’s not just Western Union?
... For a long
time, economists tended to overlook these dollars, but recently they’ve come to
appreciate their importance. Remittances,
which totaled $429 billion in 2016, are worth three times as much as all the foreign aid doled out by governments
worldwide, and it’s likely the money is more effective
dollar-for-dollar. Unlike aid, which is
notorious for passing through corrupt middlemen and inefficient
bureaucracies, remittances go directly to recipients, where they pay for
schooling, medical expenses, and new fridge-freezers. In some poor countries, like Somalia or Haiti,
remittances make up more than a quarter of national income.
… Currently, it’s
expensive to send money overseas, which is especially damaging for the
immigrants sending small savings home to the developing world. The World Bank says transaction fees average 7.45% globally, and, in many
remittance corridors, they’re a lot higher than that. Sending money to Africa from the U.S. or
Europe sometimes costs an extra 15%, and within Africa, the fees can
be stupendous. To
transfer 33,000 Angola Kwanza (about $200) from Luanda to Namibia costs
about $50, according to the World Bank’s price database.
Perspective.
Real books are back. E-book sales plunge nearly 20%
New data suggest that the reading public is ditching
e-books and returning to the old fashioned printed word.
Sales of consumer e-books plunged 17% in the U.K. in 2016,
according to the Publishers Association. Sales of physical books and journals went up
by 7% over the same period, while children's books surged 16%.
The same trend is on display in the U.S., where e-book
sales declined 18.7% over the first nine months of 2016, according to the
Association of American Publishers. Paperback
sales were up 7.5% over the same period, and hardback sales increased 4.1%.
… Experts say that
many people are also trying to limit their screen time.
U.K. regulator Ofcom found that one third of adults had
attempted a "digital detox" in 2016 by limiting their use of
smartphones, tablets and other devices.
… According to the
Pew Research Center, 65% of Americans reported reading a printed book in the
past year, compared to only 28% who read an e-book.
A quarter of the population hadn't read a book of any
kind, whether in print, electronic or audio form.
Perhaps my one of my students will start a “Geeks Only”
social media site.
Elite social media: where the internet’s 1 percent hangs out
On the internet, no one can see your Rolex
The social network Best of All Worlds is five years old
(ancient by Silicon Valley standards) and has just a tiny fraction of the users
its contemporaries like Facebook and Twitter have. But Best of All Worlds isn’t failing. In fact, the social network’s founder doesn’t
really want any more members. Best of
All Worlds (or BOAW, as its members call it) is one of several exclusive social
networks for the internet’s 1 percent — an elite, close-knit group that most
likely does not include you.
… The company is
not yet profitable, but Wachtmeister says he expects to break even by
partnering with commercial sponsors (who will advertise on the app, as well as
offer deals and host events for members) for the launch of Best of All Worlds’
new iOS app in the coming weeks. The
app’s tagline will be “Hang out with people you can trust.”
… BOAW’s promises
of trust and escape are echoed by Andrew Wessels, founder of the UK-based
social media platform The Marque. The
Marque is mostly an online directory, where members can meet like-minded (and
like-bank-accounted) people. The website
is a jumping-off point for IRL connections: members usually organize events
where they can talk freely among people of a similar social tier — without
interruption from outsiders looking to elevator pitch their way to success.
The price of relaxation? £1,000 per year.
But all my students want to watch is more comic book
movies.
There are quite a few movie recommendation platforms out there, but one of the newer sites, Movix, uses artificial
intelligence and deep learning to suggest the next movie you should watch.
With Movix, all you have to do is click a few movie titles
you wouldn’t mind watching right now, and the site will offer up
recommendations. Rather than tailoring
itself to a profile of your tastes, Movix bases its recommendations only on
those few clicks. This means you don’t
have to sign up for an account.
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