India telecom operator Reliance Jio investigating claims of
data breach
India's Reliance Jio is investigating whether personal
data of over 100 million of its customers had leaked onto a website, in what
analysts said could be the first ever large-scale breach at an Indian telecom
operator.
Jio, India's newest
telecoms entrant, said that the data on the website, "Magicapk.com",
appeared to be "unauthentic" and that its subscriber data was safe
and maintained with the highest security.
But people complained on Twitter about personal
information of Jio users being publicly available on Magicapk.com, and some
Indian media said that their checks had led them to believe the leak was real.
Campaigns will need to be faster in their identification
of “fake news” and ready with a factual counter-message. Do we need a “fact checking” service for all
political messages? How would that
work?
Study: Bots have turned Twitter into a powerful political
disinformation platform
As if Twitter’s reputation hasn’t been battered enough, a new study sheds light on how the
social media platform can be hijacked by bots to spread political
disinformation during election campaigns.
A researcher at the University of Southern California
found that almost 20 percent of Twitter bots that were engaged in spreading
propaganda against Emmanuel Macron during the recent French presidential
election had been used to spread misinformation in favor of Donald Trump last
year during the U.S. elections.
… Bottom line, according to the study by Dr. Emilio
Ferrara, a research assistant professor at USC Computer Science Department:
“Account usage patterns suggest the possible existence of a black-market for
reusable political disinformation bots.”
… Ferrara’s study
is called: “Disinformation and Social Bot Operations in the Run Up to the 2017
French Presidential Election.” The study
was published as an open source document, and the full version is here.
I expect more managers to eventually wake up, but this is
rather typical.
75 Percent of U.S. Companies Think GDPR Doesn't Apply to Them
A new report focusing on Europe's General Data Protection
Regulation (GDPR) preparedness shows a worrying disconnect between Business and
Security. GDPR will come into effect in May 2018, and
perhaps more than any other security regulation will require close cooperation
between Business, IT and Security to enable and ensure regulatory compliance
across the whole organization. The
penalty for failure is severe: up to €20 million or 4% of global turnover --
and the reach of the regulation is effectively global.
NTT Security interviewed 1,350 non-IT decision-makers
across the globe. It sought to
understand GDPR awareness across the business, and measure how well information
security policies are being communicated across the business. The results (PDF),
it suggests, are mixed. While there is
some improvement in general security policies, there is poor understanding of
security-related regulations in general, and GDPR in particular.
This was an accident but as AI improves, this might become
common. Big Brother indeed?
We’re gradually learning that smart home devices can be
quite valuable for police. Following a
recent case in which Amazon
handed over data from its Echo device to police investigating a murder, a
Google Home called the police when a couple was allegedly involved in a violent
domestic dispute.
According to ABC News, officers were called to a home outside
Albuquerque, New Mexico this week when a Google Home called 911 and the
operator heard a confrontation in the background. Police say that Eduardo Barros was house-sitting
at the residence with his girlfriend and their daughter. Barros allegedly pulled a gun on his
girlfriend when they got into an argument and asked her: “Did you call the
sheriffs?” Google Home apparently heard
“call the sheriffs,” and proceeded to call the sheriffs.
… In a different
incident in January, a local TV news broadcast involving a dollhouse reportedly
triggered multiple Amazon Echo devices in the area to start ordering
dollhouses. It’s easy to imagine police
getting tired of being called to citizen’s homes every time they watch the
latest episode of Law and Order.
For my Computer Security students.
Cybersecurity: The cold war online
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on Jul 9, 2017
Cybersecurity: The cold war online, Steven Aftergood.
Nature 547, 30–31 (06 July 2017) doi:10.1038/547030a. Published online 05 July
2017.
“The Internet is under attack, and not just by hackers,
thieves and spies. As Alexander Klimburg
reports in The Darkening Web, governments that insist on their own
primacy are increasingly assaulting the idea of this digitized landscape as a
transnational commons. Cyberspace is
becoming a war zone in a new era of ideological combat. Klimburg — director of
cyber policy at the Hague Centre for Strategic Studies in the Netherlands —
sees the combatants as belonging to two groups. The forces of the ‘free Internet’ favour the
unconstrained flow of information, independent of national borders or cultural
barriers. The ‘cybersovereignty’ camp,
led by Russia and China, demands greater government control of the Internet and
of information. To sustain its massive
censorship operation, China’s
‘Great Firewall’ employs more people than serve in the country’s armed forces…
[Estimated 1.6 to 2.3 million. Bob]
For my Systems students. Was this system designed to be unmanageable?
Wells Fargo says closer to reaching $142 mln phony accounts
settlement
A California judge has granted a preliminary approval for
Wells Fargo & Co's agreement to pay $142 million, and perhaps more, to
customers whose credit scores were harmed by its employees creating fake
accounts in their names, the bank said on Sunday.
… Wells Fargo has
previously said thousands of branch employees created as many as 2.1 million
bank and credit card accounts in individuals' names without their permission to
artificially hit sales goals.
(Ditto). Is any
system failure proof?
India's biggest stock exchange grapples with system fault
ahead of IPO
A technical glitch shut down India's National Stock
Exchange (NSE) for five hours on Monday, dealing the country's biggest stock
exchange an embarrassing blow ahead of its plans to list and leading to a surge
in volumes on a rival bourse.
… In a statement
late in the day, the NSE attributed the disruption to an unidentified
"technical problem". [“We don’t know what happened?” OR “We’re not going to
tell you what happened?” Not the best
way to inspire confidence. Bob]
Interesting, if a bit vague.
How Software Is Eating The Military And What That Means For The Future Of War
… While war is
still conducted with fighter jets, assault rifles, and roadside bombs, the
world’s governments and armed forces are increasingly bringing new kinds of
weapons and information systems to bear. And these software-based systems may soon
eclipse most others in the effect they have on the battlefield. At the very least, a shift is under way that
will see software come to have a deeper and deeper impact on almost every
aspect of conflict.
I think WolframAlpha is a great teaching tool. Perhaps some people are using it incorrectly or
not at all?
AI Is Making It Extremely Easy for Students to Cheat
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