Microsoft Goes After Russian Election Hacker Group Fancy Bear
Seizing Control Of 70 Domains
… To make their
attacks seem as normal as possible, Fancy Bear uses a control center that
heavily utilizes URLs meant to mimic Microsoft's own; eg:
"livemicrosoft.net". Often,
control centers will use explicit IPs to avoid issue, but because Fancy Bear
decided to infringe on Microsoft's trademarks, it screwed itself over. Microsoft ordinarily wouldn't have had much
control here, but when the domains use its trademarks, that changes everything.
… Ultimately, Microsoft
severely disrupted [??? Bob]
Fancy Bear's network by ceasing over 70 domains. Microsoft will now be able to reconfigure
these domains to route elsewhere, while at the same time gaining insight into
the people or organizations Fancy Bear has been targeting.
Even with its trademarks being infringed upon, Microsoft's
journey here has not been easy. In
total, it had to submit 52 subpoenas, 46 informal inquiries abroad, and had to
go through the effort of tracking down domain names that are hugely obfuscated
through the use of Tor and even Bitcoin.
The best part in all of this is how much it disrupts Fancy
Bear's work. The group will have to work
around this severing, which won't happen quickly (or easily). Microsoft is being proactive, too, seeking
approval to seize 9,000 domain names that its algorithms believe Fancy
Bear will register next.
For my Computer Security (and many other) students.
From the Federal Trade Commission:
As part of its ongoing efforts to help businesses ensure
they are taking reasonable steps to protect and secure consumer data, the
Federal Trade Commission is publishing a series of blog posts using
hypothetical examples based on lessons from closed investigations, FTC law
enforcement actions, and questions from businesses. These new posts will build on the FTC’s Start
with Security guide for businesses.
FTC Acting Chairman Maureen K. Ohlhausen pledged
earlier this year to be more transparent about the lessons learned from the
FTC’s closed data security investigations and to provide additional information
for businesses about practices that contribute to reasonable data security,
culminating in this “Stick with Security” Initiative.
In the first blog
post published today, the FTC highlights some of the themes that have
emerged from an examination of closed FTC data security investigations. For example, while news reports might call
attention to a data breach, they might not focus on the fact that the company
that suffered the breach had encrypted the data, which substantially reduces
the risk of consumer injury. Another
lesson gleaned is that security researchers’ valuable work can alert us to new
vulnerabilities, but sometimes the risk of a vulnerability being exploited to
cause consumer injury is more theoretical than likely. Another key lesson is that in almost every
closed case, the entities involved used the same common-sense security
fundamentals outlined in the FTC’s Start
with Security guide for businesses.
The FTC’s Business Blog will publish an additional post
each Friday.
The Federal Trade Commission works to promote competition,
and protect
and educate consumers. You can learn more about consumer topics and
file a consumer complaint online or
by calling 1-877-FTC-HELP (382-4357). Like the FTC on Facebook(link is external),
follow us on Twitter(link is external),
read our blogs and subscribe to press releases for
the latest FTC news and resources.
PRESS RELEASE REFERENCE:
It’s a grey area and this doesn’t really clear this up,
but they do offer some tips.
… if you want to
keep their eyes off of your data, it’s a good idea to not have much data on
your phone when you travel. Switching
your SIM over to a burner phone is easy, and keeps all of your private
information elsewhere. You can also
backup and wipe your phone before you travel. Fully encrypting your device will make copies
less useful, and keeping sensitive documents and photos in the cloud instead of
on your device makes them harder to get to.
Again, remember that these actions might raise the
suspicions of border agents. And that
could cause you a lot of inconvenience. That
doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing — just remember that you’re making a
trade-off.
If not new law, at least new questions.
Lawmakers push regulators on how Amazon's Whole Foods deal
could affect 'food deserts'
… In a letter
spearheaded by Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio) following
her meeting Amazon, the lawmakers said the DOJ and FTC should look at the
acquisition “beyond the normal antitrust process that only examines competitive
impact.”
Lawmakers said the deals impacts could be far reaching and
potentially affect “food deserts” or underserved communities that don’t have
access to fresh, affordable groceries. They
want to know if the deal would contribute to this problem
Fudge and the other lawmakers clarified that they’re not opposed to the deal, but that
they are concerned with its impacts on African-American communities across the
country that are disproportionately affected by food deserts.
… Many antitrust
experts expect the acquisition won't run afoul of antitrust regulators. Whole Foods and Amazon generally operate in
different retail spaces, with Amazon dominating the digital market and Whole
Foods serving mainly as a brick-and-mortar, high-end grocer.
Perspective. How to
predict the jobs AI (or other technology) will (and maybe should) replace?
When Jobs Become Commodities
We don’t typically think of the jobs that we perform as
commodities. The Merriam-Webster entry
on commodity describes it as “a mass-produced unspecialized product.” But most of us view our jobs as specialized or
somehow differentiated. We typically
believe that we do them differently, and often better, than anyone else with
the same job. In fact, we’d probably
argue that no one does exactly the same job we do — that we perform at least a
slightly different set of tasks, or perform them in a slightly different way,
than any coworker.
We may well be right about that, but the world of business
and management increasingly feels otherwise. Jobs are increasingly viewed as
undifferentiated and interchangeable across humans and machines — the very
definition of a commodity.
… A recent Bloomberg Businessweek visual analytic
suggests that jobs that disappeared in the first four months of 2017 compared
with the same period in 2016 were not lost to
automation, but were lost because fewer customers wanted to buy the
products and services they produce. They
include jobs in wired telecommunications, department stores, and coal mining.
For many organizations today, the next big driver of job
commoditization is automation driven by smart machines. Simply put, if a job is viewed as a commodity,
it won’t be long before it is automated. My research on automation through artificial
intelligence (AI) or cognitive technologies suggests that if a job can be
outsourced, many of the tasks typically performed by the jobholder can probably
be automated — even by relatively “dumb” technologies like robotic process
automation.
I wonder how many of my students (all of whom have
smartphones) know this?
… your smartphone
probably has an FM radio receiver built right into it. You just need to activate it, and we’re here
to help you do just that.
Tools for my students.
… Reading the news
today isn’t as simple as it used to be. There
is an information overload that you need to counter. Plenty of sites have their own biases that you
have to manoeuvre. And lots of smaller
news outlets have the most interesting articles.
So change how you read news: take small bites, track a
single subject, or read the most trending articles. These sites and apps will
give you an interesting way to consume news.
1. Tenreads
4. Gong
5. Top.st
For my Software Architecture students.
I wish Amit posted to his blog more often.
How to Write a Twitter Bot in 5 Minutes
Twitter Bots can do interesting things. For instance, a grammar bot can monitors
tweets containing misspellings and tweet the correct spelling. You can tweet questions to @DearAssistant and
the Twitter bot responds like
Siri. The @HundredZeros bot tweets links to
eBooks that are free on Amazon. @WhatTheFare will tell you the Uber fare
between any two locations.
… Writing a Twitter bot is easy, you do not need
any coding
skills and you can make one live in under 5 minutes. While most Twitter bots on the Internet
require some understanding in Python, Node.js or Ruby, our bots are hosted on
Google servers and require “zero” programming.
Visit digitalinspiration.com/bots to get started. The Twitter Bots are internally written
using Google
Scripts.
Things all our students should know?
Survey says Python is tops with developers
Python … is used by nearly 20 percent of respondents, giving
it the top spot. The report echoes Python’s
high rankings in language popularity indexes from Tiobe, PyPL, and RedMonk,
which all have the language finishing in their recent top five rankings.
… The top 10
ranking tools according to the report were as follows:
- Python programming language
- The Git software version control system
- Microsoft’s Visual Studio IDE
- Eclipse IDE
- Java programming language
- The Notepad++ code editor
- Linux
- R statistical language.
- Docker container system
- Microsoft Excel
Just an observation. Note how many of these stories are about
financial technology start-ups. That
seems to be the new “hot market.”
These were the 10 biggest European tech stories this week
