This could work with any nationality if scammers
can tell visitors from citizens. I wonder of it works in other
countries?
Don’t
give money to the “Chinese Consulate,” FTC says in scam-busting
report
Scammers are using a combination of phishing
techniques and social engineering to trick people with Chinese last
names into handing over their personal information and even make
direct payments to the scammer.
The scheme isn’t new, with reports going back as
early as 2015 when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) told
phone carriers to start using robocall-blocking services.
Now the Federal Trade Commission has had it too.
A
statement by the FTC said it has recently recorded a surge in
complaints from customers claiming that scammers are purporting to
call from the Chinese Consulate asking them for personal information
and even cash.
Do many people still use Internet Explorer?
Internet
Explorer zero-day alert: Attackers hitting unpatched bug in Microsoft
browser
A well-resourced hacking group is using a
previously unknown and unpatched bug in Internet Explorer (IE) to
infect Windows PCs with malware.
… According to the firm, the vulnerability
affects the latest versions of IE and other applications that use the
browser.
National Health Systems are large targets.
Sue Dunleavy reports:
The sensitive health
data of Australians is subject to a data breach every two days and
the organisations and governments that fail to protect it are facing
no financial penalties.
As outrage builds over
Facebook’s failure to protect privacy, a News Corp investigation
has uncovered health data that shows if Australians have a sexually
transmitted disease, mental illness, HIV or an abortion, even whether
they’ve used a prostitute, is not properly protected.
A new mandatory
notification scheme that requires businesses to report to the Office
of the Australian Information Commissioner when there is a data
breach shows in the first 37 days of the new regime a data breach
occurred every two days in the health sector.
Cities with inadequate backups are also easy
targets.
City of
Atlanta Ransomware Attack Proves Disastrously Expensive
City
of Atlanta Ransomware Attack Showcases Ethical Problem in Whether to
Pay a Ransom or Not
Over
the course of the last week, it has become apparent that the City of
Atlanta, Georgia, has paid out nearly
$3 million dollars in contracts
to help its recovery
from a ransomware attack on March 22, 2018 – which (at the time
of writing) is still without resolution.
Precise
details on the Atlanta contracts are confused and confusing – but
two consistent elements are that SecureWorks is being paid $650,000
for emergency incident response services, and Ernst & Young is
being paid $600,000 for advisory services for cyber incident
response. The total for all the contracts
appears to total roughly $2.7 million. The eventual cost will likely
be more, since it doesn't include lost staff productivity nor the
billings of a law firm reportedly charging Atlanta $485 per hour for
partners, and $300 per hour for associates. The
ransom demand was for around $51,000.
… Also
worth considering is the SamSam attack
on Hancock Health reported in January this year. Hancock chose
to pay a ransom of around $55,000, and recovered its systems within a
few days. It later admitted that it would not have been able to
recover from backups since the attackers – which sound like the
Gold Lowell group – had previously compromised them.
Is it possible that this a rogue AI?
Some Gmail
Users Are Getting Spam Apparently Sent By Themselves
It's bad enough that several Gmail
accounts are reporting unexplained spam in their inbox, but
what's worse is they're apparently sent by themselves, even though
most of the accounts employ hard-to-crack two-factor authentication.
Google's spam
filtering technology is typically excellent at separating
legitimate emails from spam, which makes the incident an odd
aberration from Gmail's
otherwise sterling security protections. However, a spam variant was
successful at bypassing those protections, possibly by making it seem
as if the spam recipient is also the sender.
More thoughts on Facebook.
Facebook in
the Spotlight: Dataism vs. Privacy
JURIST Guest Columnist Chris
Hoofnagle of Berkeley
Law, discusses the policing of Facebook’s privacy policies and
FTC enforcement: “Are our institutions up to the challenge of
protecting users from information-age problems? This is the
high-level question emerging from the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica
debate.
While on one hand Facebook and similarly-situated companies will pay
some regulatory price, our public institutions are also in the
crosshairs. In the U.S., the much-praised and admired Federal Trade
Commission (“FTC”) approach is suffering
a crisis of legitimacy. Facebook’s European regulator, the Irish
data protection commissioner, is losing both control over its
supervision of American companies and the respect of its regulatory
colleagues. In a recent press
release, the Article 29 Working Party announced that it was
creating a working group focusing on social media, never mentioning
the Irish in its statement. In
this essay I explain the challenges the FTC faces in enforcing its
2012 consent agreement against Facebook and suggest ways it could
nonetheless prevail. In the long run, everyone wins if our civil
society institutions can police Facebook, including the company
itself. While Facebook’s privacy problems have long been dismissed
as harmless, advertising-related controversies, all now understand
Facebook’s power over our broader information environment. After
Brexit, the 2016 U.S. election, and violence in Myanmar, if consumer
law fails, we risk turning to more heavy-handed regulatory tools,
including cyber
sovereignty approaches, with attendant consequences for civil
society and internet freedom…”
Perhaps a wax (resin, whatever) mold of the
finger/thumb prints should be mandatory?
Florida
Detectives Tried Using Dead Man’s Finger to Unlock Cellphone
A pair of Florida detectives visited a funeral
home last month in an attempt to unlock a cellphone belonging to a
deceased man by using his fingerprint.
… They gained access to the corpse and held
his fingerprint to the phone’s sensor but, according to the Tampa
Bay Times, which first reported the case, the move was
ultimately unsuccessful. Largo police lieutenant Randall Chaney said
that the two detectives needed access in order to preserve data
stored on the handset that was potentially tied to a separate drug
inquiry involving the deceased suspect.
Chaney told the Tampa Bay Times there
is typically a 48 to 72-hour period to open a cellphone that has been
locked using a fingerprint. While Largo police officers got the
device back within that period, Phillip’s body had already been
transferred from state custody to the funeral home. Detectives
believed a warrant was not needed because the suspect had little
expectation of privacy, Chaney added.
(Related)
Florida
police failed to unlock phone using a dead man's finger — but
corpses may still help in hacking handsets
… Though it's not clear what brand of phone
Phillip owned, Engadget years ago concluded that a finger from a
corpse would not unlock
an iPhone.
The Touch ID system uses two methods to sense and
identify a fingerprint, capacitive and radio frequency. "A
capacitive sensor is activated by the slight electrical charge
running through your skin," wrote Engadget in 2013. "We
all have a small amount of electrical current running through our
bodies, and capacitive technology utilizes that to sense touch."
And the radio frequency waves in an iPhone sensor
would also not open unless living tissue was present.
Should we all have this App?
This app
maker says his work saved thousands during Hurricane Harvey — and
he’s not done yet
… His idea was to create an application where
a family in distress could quickly submit a call for help containing
their location and information, which would instantly appear on a
map. A responder could pull the location in order to execute the
rescue. Once the family was safe, the information would be taken
down so rescuers could focus on those still in need.
… At least 25,000 people were rescued in
Houston using the app, Marchetti says.
… The service — now
known as CrowdSource
Rescue (CSR) — was meant to fill the deficit of public services
during a time of immense, dizzying catastrophe. CSR reduced the
redundancy created by reposting and sharing across multiple
platforms. It crowdsourced every part of the operation: posting,
dispatching, rescuing, and updating. It allowed Houstonians and
outside volunteer organizations such as the Cajun Navy to work hand
in hand with public officials.
Perspective. Well, perhaps Texas has a different
perspective.
Emma Platoff reports:
An appeals court has struck down Texas’ “revenge porn” law, ruling that the statute is overly broad and violates the First Amendment.
The 2015 state law targets what author state Sen. Sylvia Garcia, D-Houston, called “a very disturbing internet trend” of posting a previous partner’s nude or semi-nude photos to the web without the partner’s permission, often with identifying information attached. Inspired in part by the testimony of Hollie Toups, a Southeast woman whose intimate photos were posted online, the law made posting private, intimate photos a misdemeanor, carrying a charge of up to a year in jail as well as a $4,000 fine.
Read more on Texas
Tribune.
Perspective.
The future
of e-commerce in India increasingly looks like an all-American affair
India’s technology industry is bracing itself
for the next era of e-commerce warfare, which looks set to be waged
and bankrolled by two gigantic corporations located halfway across
the world: Amazon
and Walmart.
Amazon is already deeply committed to the country,
where it has pledged to deploy over $5 billion to grow its business,
and now U.S. rival Walmart
is said to be inching closer to a deal to buy Flipkart.
Bloomberg
reports that Walmart is poised to acquire 60-80 percent of the
company for $12 billion.
(Related) Is that why Amazon didn’t complete
their bid for Flipkart?
Amazon
expects groceries to account for over half of India business in the
next 5 years
… Amit Agarwal, the India head of Amazon, said
in an interview on Friday that groceries and goods such as creams,
soaps and cleaning products, were already the largest product
category on Amazon in terms of number of units sold in India.
“I would not speculate on when we would launch
AmazonFresh but, absolutely, if you ask me the next five years of
vision – from your avocados to your potatoes, and your meat to your
ice cream – we’ll deliver everything to you in two hours,” he
said.
For my History nerds.
Papers of
Benjamin Franklin Now Online
“The papers of American scientist, statesman and
diplomat Benjamin
Franklin have been digitized and are now available online for the
first time from the Library of Congress. The Library announced
the digitization in remembrance of the anniversary of Franklin’s
death on April 17, 1790. The Franklin papers consist of
approximately 8,000 items mostly dating from the 1770s and 1780s.
These include the petition that the First Continental Congress sent
to Franklin, then a colonial diplomat in London, to deliver to King
George III; letterbooks Franklin kept as he negotiated the Treaty of
Paris that ended the Revolutionary War; drafts of the treaty; notes
documenting his scientific observations, and correspondence with
fellow scientists. The collection is online at:
loc.gov/collections/benjamin-franklin-papers/about-this-collection.”
Looks like it might be useful for topics you are
not already familiar with.
Peekier –
privacy-oriented search engine
“Peekier
(pronounced /’pi·ki·er/) is a new way to search the web. Peek
through search results fast and securely on a search engine that
respects your privacy. Faster information discovery – Peekier
shows you a website preview of the search results.
Clicking on a result will maximize the preview and allow you to
scroll through the website. You can then decide if the information
displayed on the website interests you or not before clicking on the
link. Here is what a normal search engine looks like on a widescreen
monitor: 2/3rds of the screen real estate remain unused. Peekier
utilizes 100% of your monitor, giving you all the information you
need to know before you visit a website. This is the way searching
will be done in the future.
… websites are loaded on our servers and we
only send the rendered image to your browser, we deal with malware
and other threats while protecting your privacy and providing a safe
and secure experience while you stay on our website. You can still
choose to visit a website that interests you―the choice is yours.
Strict privacy policy – We take your privacy very seriously. We’re
pretty sure we’re the search engine with the most privacy oriented
features in the world. Peekier does not log your personal info or
track you throughout your browsing sessions. For more information on
how we protect your privacy click
here…”
Tools.
In all the ruckus about the ban on torrent sites,
we forget that there are many more
legal uses for torrents than illegal ones.
Still not convinced?
-
Go to BitTorrent Now to see how creatives used torrent files to distribute their work to you.
-
Amazon S3 supports the BitTorrent protocol so that developers can save costs when they want to transfer large amounts of data.
-
Sites like Academic Torrents and even the Internet Archive use the BitTorrent protocol to help you download educational and historical files.
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