Perhaps this is the birth of an interest in
Computer Security?
Taryn Luna reports on a hack and phish that may
leave you wondering whether this was a politically
motivated attack or just a garden variety attack.
Luna reports the the victim is Sen. Richard Pan,
D-Sacramento, whose re-election campaign account was robbed in a
multi-step scheme that began with a hack of his email account in
February.
The hackers appeared to study the campaign’s email pattern of approving payments, pretended to be him and sent a fake invoice to his treasurer requesting $46,000 to a vaccine-related nonprofit organization in mid-February, Pan said. He said the responsible parties were able to block communications with other people to hide their trail.
The vaccine connection is what raises the
possibility of possible political motivation. Luna explains:
Pan is a doctor and has drawn the ire of a fervent community of activists who oppose his legislative work to toughen vaccination requirements for school children. Pan said there’s no evidence to suggest anyone associated with the anti-vaccination movement was actually involved in the theft, but he’s suspicious given violent threats he’s endured and prior interactions with his opponents. Among other related legislation, Pan successfully removed personal belief exemptions for vaccines in 2015.
The senator’s treasurer was appropriately
cautious when she received the request to send the check, but she did
not know she was going back and forth in email with the criminals and
not with her boss.
As a result of this incident the campaign now uses
two-factor authentication for any such requests.
Read more here on SacBee.
This week my students are designing a data center.
Here’s something else to consider.
Loud Sound
From Fire Alarm System Shuts Down Nasdaq's Scandinavian Data Center
A loud sound emitted by a fire suppression system
has destroyed the hard drives of a Swedish data center, downing
Nasdaq operations across Northern Europe.
The incident took place in the early hours of
Wednesday, April 18, and was caused by a gas-based fire suppression
system that is typically deployed in data centers because of their
ability to put out fires without destroying non-burnt equipment.
These systems work by releasing inert gas at high
speeds, a mechanism usually accompanied by a loud whistle-like sound.
With non-calibrated systems, this sound can get very loud, a big
no-no in data centers, where loud
sounds are known to affect performance, shut down, or even
destroy hard drives.
The latter scenario is what happened on Wednesday
night, as the sound produced by the errant release of the inert gas
destroyed hard drives for around a third of the Nasdaq servers
located in the Digiplex data center.
… A Digiplex spokesperson told Bleeping
Computer that Nasdaq only rents space in the data center, and
uses its own equipment . Nasdaq
said there weren't enough servers in the whole of Sweden to replace
the destroyed ones, and had to import new machines.
Next week, we’ll be discussing encryption.
Democrats are demanding answers from the Trump
administration on steps being taken to prevent the president from
falling victim to foreign hackers, suggesting his personal cellphone
use poses a national security threat.
… “While cybersecurity is a universal
concern, the President of the United States stands alone as the
single-most valuable intelligence target on the planet,” Reps. Ted
Lieu (D-Calif.) and Ruben
Gallego (D-Ariz.) wrote.
“Our national security should not depend on
whether the President clicks on a malicious link on Twitter or his
text application, or the fortuity of foreign agencies not knowing his
personal cell number,” they wrote.
CNN reported
earlier this week that Trump has begun to more frequently use his
personal mobile device to contact those advising him outside the
White House.
Something for all my students.
Is it a Trump thing?
In Trump's
first year, FISA court denied record number of surveillance orders
In its first year, the Trump administration kept
one little-known courtroom in the capital busy.
… Annual data published
Wednesday by the US Courts shows that the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance (FISA) Court last year denied 26 applications in full,
and 50 applications in part.
That's compared to 21 orders between when the
court was first formed in 1978 and President Barack Obama's final
year in office in 2016.
I didn’t know that.
… A Manhattan judge ruled Wednesday that
there’s nothing “outrageous” about throwing
the president’s supporters out of bars — because the law
doesn’t protect against political discrimination.
Not the first time I’ve heard this argument.
The
Politicization of Our Security Institutions
The politicization of the FBI has been swift and
extreme. According to Reuters polling, just two years ago, 84
percent of Republicans viewed the FBI favorably. By February 2018,
73
percent agreed that “members of the FBI and Department of
Justice are working to delegitimize Trump through politically
motivated investigations,” according to a new Reuters poll. Thanks
to a president eroding long-standing norms and America’s extreme
political polarization, the FBI may not be alone. We
are at risk of becoming more similar to struggling democracies, where
most security and law enforcement institutions are simply assumed to
be aligned with a political party.
It is not difficult to imagine a near-future in
which the American public sees Immigration and Customs Enforcement
(ICE) agents, sheriffs, many police forces, and the military as
“Republican” institutions. In other words, the public would
expect these institutions, as a matter of course, to tilt their
analysis and actions towards helping their preferred party.
Meanwhile, the public could come to see the FBI, more cerebral
intelligence agencies such as that of the State Department and CIA,
and big city police as “Democratic,” with the same politicized
lean to their actions and public pronouncements.
Perspective. Any studies on the creation of new
jobs in AI, VR, etc?
A study
finds nearly half of jobs are vulnerable to automation
… A new working
paper by the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries, employs a
similar approach, looking at other developed economies. Its
technique differs from Mr Frey and Mr Osborne’s study by assessing
the automatability of each task within a given job, based on a survey
of skills in 2015. Overall, the study finds that 14% of jobs across
32 countries are highly vulnerable, defined as having at least a 70%
chance of automation. A further 32% were slightly less imperilled,
with a probability between 50% and 70%. At current employment rates,
that puts 210m jobs at risk across the 32 countries in the study.
A confusing meme. Was there a problem? We won’t
know until late next year.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/24/finland-set-to-scrap-free-money-experiment-after-two-year-trial.html
Finland set
to scrap free money experiment after two-year trial
The Finnish Social Insurance Institute, often
referred to as Kela, introduced a two-year trial of Universal Basic
Income (UBI) in January 2017. The scheme saw its government pay a
random sample of 2,000 unemployed citizens aged 25 to 58 a monthly
payment of 560 euros ($684).
Kela's trial did not require the recipients of
basic income to seek or accept employment, while those who took a job
during this period would still continue to receive the same amount of
cash.
However, Kela's request for extra funding to
expand the two-year pilot to a group of employees this year was
rejected by the government on Monday. Instead, the Finnish
administration said it would prioritize other schemes in an effort to
reform the Scandinavian country's social security system.
… The full results of the pilot are not
scheduled to be released until late 2019, while Kela has vowed to
stay in touch with the recipients of basic income to assess the
long-term impact of the trial.
Perspective. Will others follow suit?
Ford
dropping all but 2 cars from its North American dealerships
Ford said on Wednesday the only passenger car
models it plans to keep on the market in North America will be the
Mustang and the upcoming Ford Focus Active, a crossover-like
hatchback that's slated to debut in 2019.
That means the Fiesta, Taurus, Fusion and the
regular Focus will disappear in the United States and Canada.
Ford will, however, continue to offer its full
gamut of trucks, SUVs and crossovers.
For the student toolkit. Works on Apple phones
also.
How to scan
without a scanner
… Microsoft Office Lens app uses your phone’s
or table’s camera to take a picture of the document and then edit
it to make it look scanned and it does all of that in a few seconds
with a few steps. Another cool thing about the app is that once you
“scan” the document you can export it in a file type that suites
you or to a service of your choice. Also, using the OCR algorithm
you can scan business card to convert them into contacts as well as
photos that you need to have the text extracted.
An important tool.
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