Never
a good idea. Leave this to the pros.
Cisco
Switches in Iran, Russia Hacked in Apparent Pro-US Attack
Cisco
devices belonging to organizations in Russia and Iran have been
hijacked via their Smart Install feature. The compromised switches
had their IOS image rewritten and their configuration changed to
display a U.S. flag using ASCII
art and the message “Don’t mess with our elections…”
The
hackers, calling themselves “JHT,” told Motherboard
that they wanted to send a message to government-backed hackers
targeting “the United States and other countries.” They claim to
have only caused damage to devices in Iran and Russia, while
allegedly patching most devices found in countries such as the U.S.
and U.K.
Iran’s
Communication and Information Technology Ministry stated
that the attack had impacted roughly 3,500 switches in the country,
but said a vast majority were quickly restored.
Kicking around some scenarios with my Computer
Security class.
The Moscow
Midterms
The following is a
rendering of what a worst-case Election Day scenario could look like,
based on FiveThirtyEight’s interviews with voting and cybersecurity
experts and state election officials, along with news reports and
documents in the public record.
(Related)
(How) Will
Facebook Self-Regulate “Issue Ads” Intended to Affect U.S.
Elections? The Details Matter a Lot
Via the NY Times comes
news that Facebook will not only support passage of the Honest
Ads Act (currently pending in committee where it may stay), but
will also self-regulate “issue ads.” The self-regulation is
important, because it may be that some government regulation in this
area is unconstitutional.
… But Facebook is not a government actor, and
it can choose to exclude these ads if paid for by foreign
governments, or require disclosure of them. There’s no First
Amendment problem with that at all, but it’s not clear exactly how
this will work.
Free is good!
Berkeley
offers its fastest-growing course – data science – online, for
free
Berkeley
News: “The fastest-growing course in UC Berkeley’s history —
Foundations of Data Science — is being offered free online this
spring for the first time through the campus’s online education
hub, edX. Data science is becoming important to more and more people
because the world is increasingly data-driven — and not just
science and tech but the humanities, business and government.
“You’ll learn to program when studying data science — but not
for the primary purpose of building apps or games,” says Berkeley
computer science Professor John DeNero. “Instead, we use
programming to understand the world around us.” The
course — Data 8X (Foundations of Data Science) — covers
everything from testing hypotheses, applying statistical inferences,
visualizing distributions and drawing conclusions, all while coding
in Python and using real-world data sets. One lesson
might take economic data from different countries over the years to
track global economic growth. The next might use a data set of cell
samples to create a classification algorithm that can diagnose breast
cancer. (Learn more from a
video on the Berkeley data science website.)
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