Wednesday, May 03, 2017

Access via HR gives you access to personnel records.  Why can’t they tell if there was access?  Apparently, they don’t bother to log the access.  Would there be advantage in knowing what news will be reported before it hits the papers? 
Elizabeth Weise reports:
A phishing email attack potentially compromised the accounts of as many as 18,000 current and former employees of media company Gannett Co.
As of Tuesday there was no indication of access to or acquisition of any sensitive personal data from employees’ accounts, said the company.
Gannett Co. (GCI) is the owner of USA TODAY, the publisher of this report, and 109 local news properties across the United States.
The attack was discovered on March 30 and investigated by Gannett’s cybersecurity team.  It appeared to originate in emails to human resources staff.
Read more on USA Today.
From Gannett’s notification letter, a copy of which was uploaded to the California Attorney General’s site:
On Thursday, March 30, 2017, we discovered that several members of our HR department were victims of a phishing attack that compromised their Office 365 account login credentials, including their Gannett email.  The perpetrator used those credentials to send further phishing emails from some of the impacted personnel’s accounts, and also attempted to use an account for a fraudulent corporate wire transfer request.  This attempt was identified by our finance team as suspicious and was unsuccessful.
Upon discovering this incident, we took immediate action to lock down the impacted accounts and alert other Gannett employees about the phishing email to prevent others from being victimized by the phishing scheme as well.  We also began an investigation to understand the scope of the incident, confirmed that other Gannett systems were unaffected, and contacted federal law enforcement.
At this time, there is no indication that there was any acquisition of any sensitive personal data.  Nevertheless, we are providing this notice out of an abundance of caution because your information was available through some of the affected HR account login credentials, and potential access to or acquisition of that information, before the accounts were locked down, could not be definitively ruled out.


I guess they are frightening the terrorists away…
As challenges mount, FBI issues fewer secret subpoenas
   In the annual transparency report published Tuesday by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the FBI issued fewer secret subpoenas -- so-called national security letters -- than in recent years.
In total, 12,150 letters were issued, compared to 12,870 letters during the previous year, a decrease of more than 5 percent.  The number has been steadily decreasing over the past decade, with the number of letters issued peaking at 56,507 letters in 2004.


Interesting tool for my students.  (Free account, but they want a credit card number.)  However, it raises a question: If lawyers used an AI tool to summarize Big Data and introduced that summary as evidence, could it be tossed out because they could not explain the summary process? 
Microsoft invests in Agolo, a startup that’s fighting information overload with automated summarizations
   Founded in 2012, Agolo in its original guise was all about helping users curate their Twitter feed to focus on tweets and conversations that were most relevant to their preferences.  But that early beta, it seems, was more of a proof of concept, showing how it’s possible to crunch vast swathes of information to zoom in on the data that matters most.  And so today Agolo is pitched as the “world’s most advanced summarization software,” connecting news, documents, data, and more to create real-time summaries more quickly.
   “Summarization is essentially algorithmic reading and writing of content, which is as much a pillar of artificial intelligence as it is of human intelligence,” said Sage Wohns, CEO and cofounder of Agolo.


I really want this to be untrue. 
Grounding your kids from social media doesn’t do much — and could hurt them
It all used to be so simple: Break the rules, get grounded and be forbidden from hanging out with your friends.  These days, of course, social media makes anywhere a teen hangout, and parents looking to ground their kids might choose to cut off access to social media instead.  But that punishment might not have its desired effect — and could even have some harmful consequences for teenagers, according to a new study published Thursday.

(Related).  Dilbert illustrates this problem perfectly.


Warning!  If we have to listen to this for the next four years, we may have to listen for the next eight years.
‘I would be your president’: Clinton blames Russia, FBI chief for 2016 election loss


Why my students (had better) study hard.
The 25 Highest-Paying Internships Right Now
The unpaid internship, and all the coffee-making, dry clean-fetching cliches that come with it, has fallen out of favor.
In its place, a new summer job has emerged -- one with real responsibility, and a real paycheck.
Job reviews site Glassdoor's released the 25 best-paying internships in the U.S. that are currently taking applications, and every opening is better compensated than the average American job.

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