Somehow, this does not give me that warm fuzzy
feeling.
Hackers hit
U.S., Russian banks in ATM robbery scam: report
A previously undetected group of Russian-language
hackers silently stole nearly $10 million from at least 18 mostly
U.S. and Russian banks in
recent years by targeting
interbank transfer systems, a Moscow-based security firm
said on Monday.
Group-IB warned that the attacks, which began
18 months ago and allow money to be stolen from banks’
automated teller machines (ATMs), appear to be ongoing and that banks
in Latin America could be targeted next.
… The firm said it was continuing to
investigate a number of incidents where hackers studied how to make
money transfers through the SWIFT banking system, while stopping
short of saying whether any such attacks had been carried out
successfully.
SWIFT said in October that hackers were still
targeting its interbank messaging system, but security controls
instituted after last year’s $81 million heist at Bangladesh’s
central bank had
thwarted
many [but not
all? Bob] of those attempts. (
reut.rs/2z1b7Bo)
Group-IB has dubbed the hacker group “MoneyTaker”
after the name of software it used to hijack payment orders to then
cash out funds through a network of low-level “money mules” who
were hired to pick up money from automated teller machines.
… The average amount of money stolen in each
of 14 U.S. ATM heists was $500,000 per incident. Losses in Russia
averaged $1.2 million per incident, but one bank there managed to
catch the attack and return some of the stolen funds, Group-IB said.
Should there be a law to protect LinkedIn’s
data? How could you write that to keep my researching students from
violating it every day?
EFF to
Court: LinkedIn is wrong about accessing publicly available
information online
… The social networking giant wants violations
of its corporate policy against using automated scripts to access
public information on its website to count as felony “hacking”
under the
Computer Fraud
and Abuse Act, a 1986 federal law meant to criminalize breaking
into private computer systems to access non-public information.
EFF, together with our friends DuckDuckGo and the
Internet Archive, have
urged
the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to reject LinkedIn’s request to
transform the CFAA from a law meant to target “hacking” into a
tool for enforcing its computer use policies. Using automated
scripts to access publicly available data is not “hacking,” and
neither is violating a website’s terms of use. LinkedIn would have
the court believe that all “
bots”
are bad, but they’re actually a common and necessary part of the
Internet. “
Good
bots” were responsible for 23 percent of Web traffic in 2016.
Using them to access publicly available information on the open
Internet should not be punishable by years in federal prison.
So what do we do about it? Rather simplistic and
opinionated.
How Russia
Hacked America—And Why It Will Happen Again
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Russian
hackers attacked the U.S. on two fronts: the psychological and the
technical. Hackers used classic propaganda techniques to influence
American voters, bought thousands of social media ads to propagate
fake news, and broke into Democratic party email servers to steal
information.
They talk to the people who should know.
Deloitte’s
tech predictions for 2018: More AI, digital subscriptions, AR, and
live events
Accounting and tech consultant
Deloitte
released its predictions for the technology industry in 2018,
covering topics from the growth of augmented reality to the triumph
of live programming on the Internet.
I wonder if detailed analysis of signatures in
those little screens or the signatures by finger suggests that
nothing matches?
American
Express and MasterCard are quietly killing one of the most annoying
things about buying things in stores
In 2018, major credit card companies including
MasterCard, Discover, and American Express will no longer require
customers to sign their receipts.
… With the rise of online shopping and new
tech like EMV chips in credit cards, signatures have become less
necessary as a safety measure, American Express said in a press
release.
For my Statistics class: There is such a thing as
“Wisdom of the Crowd.” What else could we do with it?
Crowdsourcing
Accurately and Robustly Predicts Supreme Court Decisions
“
ABSTRACT:
Scholars have increasingly investigated “crowdsourcing” as an
alternative to expert-based judgment or purely data-driven approaches
to predicting the future. Under certain conditions, scholars have
found that crowd-sourcing can outperform these other approaches.
However, despite interest in the topic and a series of successful use
cases, relatively few studies have applied empirical model thinking
to evaluate the accuracy and robustness of crowdsourcing in
real-world contexts. In this paper, we offer three novel
contributions. First, we explore a dataset of over 600,000
predictions from over 7,000 participants in a multi-year tournament
to predict the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States.
Second, we develop a comprehensive crowd construction framework that
allows for the formal description and application of crowdsourcing to
real-world data. Third, we apply this framework to our data to
construct more than 275,000 crowd models. We find that in
out-of-sample historical simulations, crowdsourcing robustly
outperforms the commonly-accepted null model, yielding the
highest-known performance for this context at 80.8% case level
accuracy. To our knowledge, this dataset and analysis represent one
of the largest explorations of recurring human prediction to date,
and our results provide additional empirical support for the use of
crowdsourcing as a prediction method.” (via
SSRN)
Something for my geeks?
Microsoft
Launches Free Preview Version Of Its Quantum Development Kit
Back in September, we talked about the
groundwork
Microsoft was laying for quantum computing with a new programming
language in development. Not even three months later,
Microsoft
is ready to toss a free preview version of that new language to the
public and it's called the
Quantum
Development Kit. That dev kit includes the
Q#
programming language, a quantum computing simulator, and other
resources for people who want to write apps for quantum computers.
Somehow, this does not give me that warm fuzzy
feeling.
Hackers hit
U.S., Russian banks in ATM robbery scam: report
A previously undetected group of Russian-language
hackers silently stole nearly $10 million from at least 18 mostly
U.S. and Russian banks in
recent years by targeting
interbank transfer systems, a Moscow-based security firm
said on Monday.
Group-IB warned that the attacks, which began
18 months ago and allow money to be stolen from banks’
automated teller machines (ATMs), appear to be ongoing and that banks
in Latin America could be targeted next.
… The firm said it was continuing to
investigate a number of incidents where hackers studied how to make
money transfers through the SWIFT banking system, while stopping
short of saying whether any such attacks had been carried out
successfully.
SWIFT said in October that hackers were still
targeting its interbank messaging system, but security controls
instituted after last year’s $81 million heist at Bangladesh’s
central bank had
thwarted
many [but not
all? Bob] of those attempts. (
reut.rs/2z1b7Bo)
Group-IB has dubbed the hacker group “MoneyTaker”
after the name of software it used to hijack payment orders to then
cash out funds through a network of low-level “money mules” who
were hired to pick up money from automated teller machines.
… The average amount of money stolen in each
of 14 U.S. ATM heists was $500,000 per incident. Losses in Russia
averaged $1.2 million per incident, but one bank there managed to
catch the attack and return some of the stolen funds, Group-IB said.
Should there be a law to protect LinkedIn’s
data? How could you write that to keep my researching students from
violating it every day?
EFF to
Court: LinkedIn is wrong about accessing publicly available
information online
… The social networking giant wants violations
of its corporate policy against using automated scripts to access
public information on its website to count as felony “hacking”
under the
Computer Fraud
and Abuse Act, a 1986 federal law meant to criminalize breaking
into private computer systems to access non-public information.
EFF, together with our friends DuckDuckGo and the
Internet Archive, have
urged
the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to reject LinkedIn’s request to
transform the CFAA from a law meant to target “hacking” into a
tool for enforcing its computer use policies. Using automated
scripts to access publicly available data is not “hacking,” and
neither is violating a website’s terms of use. LinkedIn would have
the court believe that all “
bots”
are bad, but they’re actually a common and necessary part of the
Internet. “
Good
bots” were responsible for 23 percent of Web traffic in 2016.
Using them to access publicly available information on the open
Internet should not be punishable by years in federal prison.
So what do we do about it? Rather simplistic and
opinionated.
How Russia
Hacked America—And Why It Will Happen Again
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Russian
hackers attacked the U.S. on two fronts: the psychological and the
technical. Hackers used classic propaganda techniques to influence
American voters, bought thousands of social media ads to propagate
fake news, and broke into Democratic party email servers to steal
information.
They talk to the people who should know.
Deloitte’s
tech predictions for 2018: More AI, digital subscriptions, AR, and
live events
Accounting and tech consultant
Deloitte
released its predictions for the technology industry in 2018,
covering topics from the growth of augmented reality to the triumph
of live programming on the Internet.
I wonder if detailed analysis of signatures in
those little screens or the signatures by finger suggests that
nothing matches?
American
Express and MasterCard are quietly killing one of the most annoying
things about buying things in stores
In 2018, major credit card companies including
MasterCard, Discover, and American Express will no longer require
customers to sign their receipts.
… With the rise of online shopping and new
tech like EMV chips in credit cards, signatures have become less
necessary as a safety measure, American Express said in a press
release.
For my Statistics class: There is such a thing as
“Wisdom of the Crowd.” What else could we do with it?
Crowdsourcing
Accurately and Robustly Predicts Supreme Court Decisions
“
ABSTRACT:
Scholars have increasingly investigated “crowdsourcing” as an
alternative to expert-based judgment or purely data-driven approaches
to predicting the future. Under certain conditions, scholars have
found that crowd-sourcing can outperform these other approaches.
However, despite interest in the topic and a series of successful use
cases, relatively few studies have applied empirical model thinking
to evaluate the accuracy and robustness of crowdsourcing in
real-world contexts. In this paper, we offer three novel
contributions. First, we explore a dataset of over 600,000
predictions from over 7,000 participants in a multi-year tournament
to predict the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States.
Second, we develop a comprehensive crowd construction framework that
allows for the formal description and application of crowdsourcing to
real-world data. Third, we apply this framework to our data to
construct more than 275,000 crowd models. We find that in
out-of-sample historical simulations, crowdsourcing robustly
outperforms the commonly-accepted null model, yielding the
highest-known performance for this context at 80.8% case level
accuracy. To our knowledge, this dataset and analysis represent one
of the largest explorations of recurring human prediction to date,
and our results provide additional empirical support for the use of
crowdsourcing as a prediction method.” (via
SSRN)
Something for my geeks?
Microsoft
Launches Free Preview Version Of Its Quantum Development Kit
Back in September, we talked about the
groundwork
Microsoft was laying for quantum computing with a new programming
language in development. Not even three months later,
Microsoft
is ready to toss a free preview version of that new language to the
public and it's called the
Quantum
Development Kit. That dev kit includes the
Q#
programming language, a quantum computing simulator, and other
resources for people who want to write apps for quantum computers.
