Thursday, August 02, 2018

Interesting. US only for now? Not clear. Only for Microsoft clients? Even then, they have to invite you?
Microsoft AccountGuard Service Offers Protection for Political and Election Orgs
Microsoft has launched a pilot program aimed at providing cybersecurity protection for political campaigns and election authorities.
The pilot program —named AccountGuard— was launched at the end of July, Bleeping Computer has learned, and was set in motion for the 2018 US midterm elections.
According to the pilot's website, AccountGuard "provides additional security and threat monitoring for Microsoft accounts belonging to participating US campaigns, political committees, campaign tech vendors, and their staff, who are likely to be at a higher risk in the lead up to elections."
… Microsoft is now running a website where participants in the 2018 US midterm elections can sign up for this increased protection.
According to the website, this service is part of Microsoft's "Election Defense Technologies" and is offered on a non-partisan basis by invitation only. Users from the following organizations are eligible to participate:
  • US-based political campaigns
  • US-based political committees
  • Select campaign technology vendors
  • Select individuals may also participate, if invited by eligible campaigns and affiliated organizations




So, can I have a copy? Or is it a secret?
US Department of Justice creates software blacklist to prevent foreign attacks
The US Department of Justice wants to educate its contractors and military software buyers about malicious software that could infiltrate the country’s infrastructure.
For fear of nation state attacks and cyberespionage attempts, the Pentagon has released a “Do Not Buy” software list that has been in development for approximately six months, writes Defense One. The list includes all software that is not according to “national security standards,” said Ellen Lord, defense undersecretary for acquisition and sustainment, and looks at companies with suspicious links to Russia and China.




Any new law (or new technology) swings a pendulum one way or another. There is always an immediate push to swing it back the other way.
Why Market Regulators Are Hunting Around for GDPR Exemptions
As soon as the new European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went into effect at the end of May, it was almost inevitable that organizations, companies and regulators located outside of the EU would begin looking for exemptions. And that’s exactly what has happened – a group of financial market regulators from outside the European Union (including the very influential SEC in the United States as well as regulators in both Japan and Hong Kong) are now asking for GDPR exemptions from some of the strict privacy guidelines put into place by the GDPR.
When is data privacy not in the public interest?
Of particular concern for these regulators is that fact that a long-time loophole for sharing data across borders appears to have been closed – or at least, narrowed significantly – by the GDPR. That loophole – known as the “public interest” exemption, enables regulators to freely share bank and trading account data with each other across national borders as long as they are doing so in the public interest.
Such types of GDPR exemptions, they say, are absolutely vital to doing their jobs properly. For example, if they are trying to crack down on securities fraud, and the paper trail takes them out of Europe and into North America or Asia, they need to be able to do so without dealing with all the encumbrances created by the GDPR. The same thing is true if they are trying to crack down on cryptocurrency fraud, or trying to prevent a group of banks from banding together to rig key market rates (such as the LIBOR rate, which is used to determine interest rates charged on loans).




Time to get those lawyers trained?
Cybersecurity Role, Spend on the Rise for Corporate Legal
Association of Corporate Counsel: “More than 40 percent of in-house lawyers stated their companies plan to change data security standards, breach notification procedures, and incident response plans as a result of the upcoming European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and 63 percent in the United States strongly favor the implementation of a federal law that sets uniform data security and breach notification expectations, according to the Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) Foundation: The State of Cybersecurity Report. Released by the ACC Foundation, which supports the mission of ACC, and underwritten by Ballard Spahr LLP, the report incorporated data and insights from more than 617 in-house lawyers at over 412 companies in 33 countries.
In-house lawyers anticipate their role in cybersecurity prevention and response, as well as cybersecurity budgets, to increase over the next 12 months. In fact, 63 percent of respondents noted growth in company funds dedicated to cyber incidents, compared to 53 percent in 2015. Chief legal officers (CLO) and general counsel (GC) at large companies are also more likely to serve as members of a data breach response team, compared with those at smaller companies.
“With the rising number of high-profile data breaches and increased focus on technology, it’s no shock to see protection of corporate data become the fastest rising area of concern for legal and business executives,” said Veta T. Richardson, ACC president and CEO. “Data can be a company’s most valuable and most vulnerable resource. Legal departments play an essential role in formulating policies and procedures to mitigate cyber risk.”




How do you make money with a free App. (I bet governments will never use this.)
WhatsApp finally earns money by charging businesses for slow replies
Today WhatsApp launches its first revenue-generating enterprise product and the only way it currently makes money directly from its app. The WhatsApp Business API is launching to let businesses respond to messages from users for free for up to 24 hours, but will charge them a fixed rate by country per message sent after that.
Businesses will still only be able to message people who contacted them first, but the API will help them programatically send shipping confirmations, appointment reminders or event tickets. Clients also can use it to manually respond to customer service inquiries through their own tool or apps like Zendesk, MessageBird or Twilio. And small businesses that are one of the 3 million users of the WhatsApp For Business app can still use it to send late replies one-by-one for free.




Oracle was never a competitor, now they can’t keep up as a vendor?
Amazon plans to move completely off Oracle software by early 2020
Amazon's emergence as a major provider of data center technology has turned many of its longtime suppliers, including Oracle, into heated rivals.
Now Amazon is dealing yet another blow to Oracle. The e-commerce giant, having already moved much of its infrastructure internally to Amazon Web Services, plans to be completely off Oracle's proprietary database software by the first quarter of 2020, according to people familiar with the matter.
… Meanwhile, Oracle is about the same size it was four years ago and the stock is just above where it was trading at the end of 2014. Oracle shares dropped by about 1 percent after the initial report Wednesday.
… The primary issue Amazon has faced on Oracle is the inability for the database technology to scale to meet Amazon's performance needs, a person familiar with the matter said. Another person, who said the move could be completed by mid-2019, added that there hasn't been any development of new technology relying on Oracle databases for quite a while.




I think this nails it!
What Russia Understands about Trump
… I’d be very surprised if Trump was a standard intelligence recruit, the type of guy who’d meet his handler under a bridge in Vienna and who’d be paid for influence. There’s almost a commercial aspect to how the Russians deal with him rather than an asset-running one. It’s a trusted relationship with someone they can nudge without having to instruct or order.
Burton Gerber, a thirty-nine-year veteran of the CIA and mentor to both Hall and Sipher, agrees with this assessment. The notion of Trump in certain precincts of the media as a Manchurian candidate, a Russian asset owned and run by the Kremlin, is ridiculous, he argues:
Trump is basically a man with low self-esteem, which he has worked against by being a bully and a narcissist. His actions scream, “Take me, I’m yours if you’ll admire and compliment me.” The Russians would never want to recruit him, just continuously have access to him and be able to influence him.




Perspective. How sad.
U.S. adults now spend nearly 6 hours per day watching video
If you’ve been wondering why every major media platform has been doubling down on its video efforts in recent months, Nielsen’s new report has the answer. According to the firm’s research, U.S. adults are now spending almost 6 hours per day on video, on average. That includes time spent watching both live and time-shifted TV, watching videos in an app or mobile website on a smartphone or tablet, watching video over a TV-connected device like a DVD player, game console or internet device such as Roku, and watching videos on a computer.
That data on video viewing was collected during the first quarter of 2018 – and accounts for a sizable chunk of the 11 hours per day Americans spend listening to, watching, reading or otherwise interacting with media.


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