For my Computer Security students.
The Biggest
Digital Heist in History Isn’t Over Yet
As night fell in Taipei on July 10, 2016, most
people in the city were hunkered down to ride out the end of a
typhoon. Not Sergey Berezovsky and Vladimir Berkman. The two
Russians made their way through the rain to an ATM at First
Commercial Bank, one of Taiwan’s top lenders. Wearing hats and
antipollution masks, they loitered at the machine for a moment.
Then, as the astonished couple in line behind them later told the
police, the ATM started disgorging cash without either man touching
it. The men shoved the bills into a satchel and brushed past them.
As the Russians drove off in a black sedan, the couple spotted
something on the ground: One of the guys had dropped his bank card.
By the time detectives traced Berezovsky and
Berkman to the nearby Grand Hyatt the next day, the Russians had
already jetted off to Moscow by way of Hong Kong. And they were just
two of 15 “money mules” who’d hit 41 ATMs at 22 branches of
First Commercial over that stormy weekend, the cops learned, taking
83 million New Taiwan dollars (NT$), or about $2.6 million. Hackers,
investigators discovered, had forced the machines to spit out cash.
The Carbanak gang had struck again.
… Since late 2013, this band of cybercriminals
has penetrated the digital inner sanctums of more than 100 banks in
40 nations, including Germany, Russia, Ukraine, and the U.S., and
stolen about $1.2 billion, according to Europol, the European Union’s
law enforcement agency.
Is this really helpful?
Top Tech
Companies Met With Intelligence Officials to Discuss Midterms
Eight of the tech industry’s most influential
companies, in anticipation of a repeat of the Russian meddling that
occurred during the 2016 presidential campaign, met with United
States intelligence officials last month to discuss preparations for
this year’s midterm elections.
The meeting, which took place May 23 at Facebook’s
headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., was also attended by
representatives from Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Oath, Snap and
Twitter, according to three attendees of the meeting who spoke on
condition of anonymity because of its sensitive nature.
… But the people who attended described a
tense atmosphere in which the tech companies repeatedly pressed
federal officials for information, only
to be told — repeatedly — that no specific intelligence would be
shared.
The tech companies shared details about
disinformation campaigns they were witnessing on their platforms, but
neither the F.B.I. nor the Department of Homeland Security was
willing or able to share specific information about threats the tech
companies should anticipate, the people said.
One attendee of the meeting said the encounter led
the tech companies to believe they would be on their own to counter
election interference.
Time to upgrade.
WiFi's
tougher WPA3 security is ready
WiFi security is finally getting an upgrade after
14 years. The Wi-Fi Alliance has officially
launched WPA3,
the next-generation standard that promises to tackle many of the
vulnerabilities that have persisted in wireless networking. Most
notably, it brings individualized data encryption that should protect
your data against eavesdropping from within the WiFi network. You'll
also get tougher password-based sign-ins through Simultaneous
Authentication of Equals, a key establishment protocol that reduces
the chances of someone guessing your password -- even if
it's lousy.
If you're using professional-grade WPA3-Enterprise
security, you'll get the "equivalent" to 192-bit encryption
strength that should make it tougher to crack secure data. There's
also easier setup for smart home devices through Easy Connect, which
lets you use your phone to set up WiFi on devices that have either a
tiny display or no display at all.
“Well, you don’t
want us to tap individual phones, do you?”
… Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, New
York City, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. In each of
these cities, The Intercept has identified an AT&T facility
containing networking equipment that transports large quantities of
internet traffic across the United States and the world. A body of
evidence – including classified NSA documents, public records, and
interviews with several former AT&T employees – indicates that
the buildings are central to an NSA spying initiative that has for
years monitored billions of emails, phone calls, and online chats
passing across U.S. territory.
Valuing personal data?
Personal
Data v. Big Data: Challenges of Commodification of Personal Data
Canellopoulou-Bottis, Maria and Bouchagiar,
George, Personal Data v. Big Data: Challenges of Commodification of
Personal Data (May 11, 2018). Open Journal of Philosophy, 2018, 8,
pp. 206-215. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3186347
“Any firm today may, at little or no cost, build
its own infrastructure to process personal data for commercial,
economic, political, technological or any other purposes. Society
has, therefore, turned into a privacy-unfriendly environment. The
processing of personal data is essential for multiple economically
and socially useful purposes, such as health care, education or
terrorism prevention. But firms view personal data as a commodity,
as a valuable asset, and heavily invest in processing for private
gains. This article
studies the potential to subject personal data to trade secret rules,
so as to ensure the users’ control over their data without limiting
the data’s free movement, and examines some positive scenarios of
attributing commercial value to personal data.”
Another biometric tool.
Last week, Interpol held a final project
review of its speaker identification system, a four-year, 10 million
euro project that has recently come to completion. The Speaker
Identification Integrated Project, what they call SiiP, marks a major
development in the international expansion of voice biometrics for
law enforcement uses — and raises red flags when it comes to
privacy.
Speaker identification works by taking samples of
a known voice, capturing its unique and behavioral features, and then
turning these features into an algorithmic template that’s known as
a voice print or voice model. With enough voice prints and samples
collected in its global audio database, Interpol’s speaker
identification system will be able to upload an unknown voice and,
regardless of the language it is speaking, match it to a list of
likely candidates. SiiP’s database allow uploads and downloads of
samples from 192 law enforcement agencies across the world.
Perspective. Worth reading.
OpenAI
cofounder Greg Brockman on the transformative potential of artificial
general intelligence
… Ahead of a Capitol Hill hearing on
artificial general intelligence this week (which will be streamed
here
at 10:30 a.m. Eastern), Brockman spoke with VentureBeat about recent
advances in deep learning, the need for discussion and debate about
AI, and ways researchers and policymakers might solve the “AI
bias problem.”
… I think it all boils down to one core idea:
artificial general intelligence has the potential to cause extremely
rapid change. And when you have rapid change, it’s hard for the
policy machinery and social norms — how people relate and fit into
the system — to keep up.
Perspective. The trend continues…
Employees
Of Another Major Tech Company Are Petitioning Government Contracts
Employees at
Salesforce follow those at Microsoft, Amazon, and Google in pushing
back against their companies' contracts with military and government
agencies.
Perspective. Facebook is only a small part of
“Facebook”
Buying
Instagram is probably the smartest thing Facebook has ever done
In 2012, Facebook bought the 13-person
photo-sharing app Instagram. Six years later, it seems safe to say it
was the company’s smartest purchase ever, with the app now
estimated to be worth $100 billion.
… The new
price tag comes from a Bloomberg Intelligence report shared with
Quartz. Its author, analyst Jitendra Waral, also estimates that
Instagram should reach 2 billion users—catching up to Facebook
itself—in the next five years. Instagram recently
announced it reached 1 billion monthly users.
… Users are spending nearly as much time on
Instagram as they are on Facebook. According to a recent
report, that’s about 53 minutes per day for Android users.
Market analysis firm eMarketer also recently estimated that Instagram
now accounts
for nearly 30% of Facebook’s net mobile ad revenue, with that
share potentially growing to 40% by 2020.
A Big Data tool. Might be useful in my Statistics
class.
Visualizing
Data Without Coding
Center for Data Innovation: “MIT Media Lab, an
interdisciplinary research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, has published a free
data visualization and exploration tool called DIVE that allows
users to create visualizations without knowing how to code. Users
can select fields in their data they want to visualize and DIVE
recommends visualizations relevant to their dataset, which users can
aggregate to create visual narratives. Additionally, users can do
statistical analysis, such as regressions, in DIVE to explore
relationships between variables.”
For my geeks.
Google's
free class teaches you how to create AR experiences
If you have an
Android phone, of course.
If you've ever wanted to create augmented
reality experiences but had no idea where to start, Google might
have your back. It's releasing
a free Introduction to
Augmented Reality and ARCore class on Coursera that teaches you
how to develop AR content, even if you have no knowledge of the
format. Walk through the 15-hour program and you should know how to
use both ARCore
as well as resources like Google's own Poly
object library.
A new way to punish educate my
students!
How to Use
Flipgrid to Publish Instructional Videos
In Sunday's Practical
Ed Tech Tip of the Week I mentioned three ways to use Flipgrid
now that all features are free for all users. One of those ways is
to have students record and publish instructional videos. They can
do this is a few ways. They can record themselves in front of a
whiteboard, they can upload a video made with a tool like
Screencast-o-matic,
or they can record a video with the Flipgrid mobile app. In the
following video I demonstrate how to publish an instructional
video on Flipgrid.
If you must PowerPoint…
Beautiful
AI - Create Better Slideshows
Beautiful.AI is
a neat service that helps you design better PowerPoint presentations.
Beautiful.AI provides more than fifty slideshow templates that
automatically adjust when you type or add media to them.
Beautiful.AI suggests color schemes, fonts, and media placement to
make your slides easier to view. When your slideshow is complete you
can share it online and or export it as a PowerPoint file to play
from your desktop.
My students will recognize my methods!
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