Kelly Sheridan reports:
A data leak at Dow Jones
& Co. exposed the personal information of millions of customers
after a public cloud configuration error.
This marks the fifth major public cloud
leak in the past several months after similar incidents affected Verizon, the
WWE, US voter records, and Scottrade.
This mistake compromised millions
of customers’ names, account information, physical and email addresses, and
last four digits of credit card numbers. It also affected 1.6 million entries in Dow
Jones Risk and Compliance, a collection of databases used by financial
companies for compliance with anti-money laundering regulations.
Read more on Dark
Reading.
[From the
article:
All of this information was left exposed in an Amazon Web
Services S3 bucket, which had its permission settings configured to let any AWS
Authenticated User download data using the bucket's URL. Amazon defines "authenticated user"
as anyone who has a free AWS account,
meaning the data was available to more than one million users.
Kind of generic warning, unless they know something
specific they don’t want to reveal.
UK Spy Agency Warns of State-sponsored Hackers Targeting
Critical Infrastructure
The U.K. Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ),
Britain's secret eavesdropping agency, warns that 'a number of [UK] Industrial Control System engineering and services
organisations are likely to have been compromised' following the discovery of
'connections from multiple UK IP addresses to infrastructure associated with
advanced state-sponsored hostile threat actors.'
The warning comes
from a National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) memo obtained by Motherboard
and confirmed by the BBC.
NCSC is part of the UK's primary cyber
intelligence agency, GCHQ.
From the little
information available, it doesn't appear as if there are any specifically known
compromises -- NCSC might simply be working from the statistical probability
that if enough phishing attacks are launched, at least some will inevitably
succeed.
I read this as, “We’re gonna do something as soon as we
figure out what that might be.” Looks
like they will reiterate basic security guidelines. Nothing on “Fake News?”
Former Clinton and Romney campaign chiefs join forces to
fight election hacking
… The bipartisan
project aims to develop ways to share key threat information with political
campaigns and state and local election offices; create “playbooks” for election
officials to improve cybersecurity; and forge strategies for the United States
to deter adversaries from engaging in hacks and information operations, among
other things.
… “This project
will find practical solutions to help both parties and civic institutions that
are critical to our elections better secure themselves.”
Attacking more subtly than with nukes.
AI Could Revolutionize War as Much as Nukes
In 1899, the world’s most
powerful nations signed a treaty at The Hague that banned military use of
aircraft, fearing the emerging technology’s destructive power. Five years later the moratorium was allowed to
expire, and before long aircraft were helping to enable the slaughter of World
War I. “Some technologies are so
powerful as to be irresistible,” says Greg Allen, a fellow at the Center for
New American Security, a non-partisan Washington DC think tank. “Militaries around the world have essentially
come to the same conclusion with respect to artificial intelligence.”
Allen is coauthor of a 132-page new report on the effect of artificial intelligence on
national security.
… The report also
says that the US should soon be able to significantly expand its powers of
attack and defense in cyberwar by automating work like probing and targeting
enemy networks or crafting fake information.
(Related). And
zombies! Don’t forget the zombies!
Top US general warns against rogue killer robots
The second highest-ranking general in the U.S. military on
Tuesday warned lawmakers against equipping the military with autonomous weapons
systems that humans could lose control of and advocated for keeping the
"ethical rules of war" in place.
… "I don't
think it's reasonable for us to put robots in charge of whether or not we take
a human life," Selva told the committee.
Peters mentioned that the directive expires later this
year, and told Selva that America's enemies would not hesitate to employ such
technology.
Social Media as a tool…
How Brands Can Engineer Social Media Content
In the world of social media advertising, the biggest
win for firms is when consumers are delighted by the content they see, want to
engage with it and eventually buy something. Kartik Hosanagar,
Wharton professor of operations, information and decisions, has co-authored
research that takes a closer look at brand posts on Facebook to determine the
type and mix of content advertisers should aim for to get results. The paper, “Advertising
Content and Consumer Engagement on Social Media: Evidence from Facebook,”
which was co-authored with Dokyun Lee of Carnegie Mellon University and
Stanford University’s Harikesh Nair, is forthcoming in the journal Management
Science. Hosanagar recently joined
Knowledge@Wharton to discuss his findings.
We knew this, right?
Study: 1 in 4 U.S. Jobs At Risk of Offshoring
Researchers at Muncie, Indiana's Ball State University
recently published an illuminating – and concerning – dive into expectations
for the future health of the U.S. labor market in a paper titled "How Vulnerable Are American Communities to Automation, Trade
and Urbanization?"
The answer: Pretty vulnerable.
Drawing on new and existing research focused on job
movement and potential displacement in the U.S., the researchers indicated as
many as 25 percent of American jobs could be offshored in the years ahead, at
risk of replacement by foreign competition. And half of all low-skill jobs could
eventually be automated, potentially displacing millions of U.S. workers.
… Since the
recession that ended in 2009, researchers estimate "half the net
establishment growth [or business formation] in the United States … occurred in
just 0.64 percent of the more than 3,100 U.S. counties." [Okay, that
I didn’t know. Bob]
Interesting.
Perhaps we should change our Presentation course?
Does a presentation’s medium affect its message? PowerPoint,
Prezi, and oral presentations
by on
Moulton ST, Turkay S, Kosslyn SM (2017) Does a presentation’s medium affect its
message? PowerPoint, Prezi, and oral presentations. PLoS ONE 12(7):
e0178774. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0178774
“Despite the prevalence of PowerPoint in professional and
educational presentations, surprisingly little is known about how effective
such presentations are. All else being
equal, are PowerPoint presentations better than purely oral presentations or
those that use alternative software tools? To address this question we recreated a
real-world business scenario in which individuals presented to a corporate
board. Participants (playing the role of
the presenter) were randomly assigned to create PowerPoint, Prezi, or oral
presentations, and then actually delivered the presentation live to other
participants (playing the role of corporate executives). Across two experiments and on a variety of
dimensions, participants evaluated PowerPoint
presentations comparably to oral presentations, but evaluated Prezi
presentations more favorably than both PowerPoint and oral
presentations. There was some evidence
that participants who viewed different types of presentations came to different
conclusions about the business scenario, but no evidence that they remembered
or comprehended the scenario differently. We conclude that the observed effects of
presentation format are not merely the result of novelty, bias, experimenter-,
or software-specific characteristics, but instead reveal a communication
preference for using the panning-and-zooming animations that characterize Prezi
presentations.”
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