Last
week we discussed Backups and Disaster Recovery. Here’s another
good ‘bad example.’
Ben Coley reports:
The Davidson County government’s ability to conduct business on computers has been stopped by a software virus known as ransomware, according to County Manager Zeb Hanner.
Hanner said officials learned about the issue around 2 a.m. Friday. He noted that all the files are encrypted and that the hackers are asking for an undisclosed amount of bitcoin, a type of cyber currency gaining popularity. None of the phone systems for county offices are working, as well.
Read more on The
Dispatch.
The cost of a failure to ‘design for security?’
Intel
facing 32 lawsuits over Meltdown and Spectre CPU security flaws
Intel has revealed today that
the company is facing at least 32 lawsuits over the Meltdown and
Spectre CPU flaws. “As of February 15, 2018, 30 customer class
action lawsuits and two securities class action lawsuits have been
filed,” says Intel in
an SEC filing today. The customer class action lawsuits are
“seeking monetary damages and equitable relief,” while the
securities lawsuits “allege that Intel and certain officers
violated securities laws by making statements about Intel’s
products and internal controls that were revealed to be false or
misleading by the disclosure of the security vulnerabilities.”
Intel is also facing action
from three shareholders who have each filed shareholder derivative
actions that allege certain board members and officers at Intel have
failed “to take action in relation to alleged insider trading.”
These filings appear to be related to the concerns that have been
raised over Intel
CEO Brian Krzanich’s stock sales.
No way to tell how many Snapchat users received
the phishing email, but probably over a million.
Casey Newton reports:
In late July, Snap’s director of engineering emailed the company’s team in response to an unfolding privacy threat. A government official from Dorset in the United Kingdom had provided Snap with information about a recent attack on the company’s users: a publicly available list, embedded in a phishing website named klkviral.org, that listed 55,851 Snapchat accounts, along with their usernames and passwords.
The attack appeared to be connected to a previous incident that the company believed to have been coordinated from the Dominican Republic, according to emails obtained by The Verge.
Read more on The
Verge.
[From
the article:
The accounts compromised in
July represent a tiny
fraction of Snap’s 187 million active users. But the
incident illustrates how sites set up to mimic login screens can do
an outsized amount of damage — and how companies must increasingly
rely on machine-learning techniques to identify them in real time.
A link to the indictment (PDF).
Special
counsel Mueller: Russians conducted 'information warfare' against US
during election to help Donald Trump win
A federal grand jury has
indicted 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities
for alleged illegal interference in the 2016 presidential elections,
during which they strongly supported the candidacy of Donald
Trump, special counsel Robert
Mueller's office said Friday.
The
indictment says that a Russian organization called the
Internet Research Agency sought to wage "information
warfare" against the United States and to "sow discord"
in the American political system by using fictitious American
personas and social media platforms and other Internet-based media.
(Related). The UN is often the last to ‘notice’
trends. Who is the leader here?
Global
Powers Must Address 'Episodes of Cyberwar': UN Chief
World
leaders must lay the groundwork on how countries respond to
cyberattacks that have proven to be a daunting threat, whether by
state actors or criminal enterprises, UN secretary general Antonio
Guterres said Friday.
"It
is clear we are witnessing in a more or less disguised way cyberwars
between states, episodes of cyberwar between states,"
Guterres said during one of the opening speeches at the Munich
Security Conference.
"It's
high time to have a serious discussion about the international legal
framework in which cyberwars take place," he said.
"The
fact is we haven't been able to discuss whether or not the Geneva
convention applies to cyberwar and whether international
humanitarian law applies to cyberwar."
The
pendulum swings again!
Rejecting
years
of settled precedent, a federal court in New York has ruled [PDF]
that you could infringe copyright simply by embedding a tweet in a
web page. Even worse, the logic of the ruling applies to all in-line
linking, not just embedding tweets. If adopted by other courts, this
legally and technically misguided decision would threaten
millions of ordinary Internet users with infringement liability.
… Courts have long held that copyright
liability rests with the entity that hosts the infringing content—not
someone who simply links to it. The linker generally has no idea
that it’s infringing, and isn’t ultimately in control of what
content the server will provide when a browser contacts it. This
“server test,” originally from a 2007
Ninth Circuit case called Perfect
10 v. Amazon, provides a clear and easy-to-administer rule.
It has been a foundation of the modern Internet.
My
students were sure this would not happen for years and years.
Waymo is
readying a ride-hailing service that could directly compete with Uber
Waymo is preparing to launch a ride-hailing
service akin to Uber’s, but with driverless cars.
The self-driving carmaker spun out of Google was
approved on Jan. 24 to operate as a transportation network company
(TNC) in Arizona, the state department of transportation told Quartz.
Waymo applied for the permit on Jan. 12.
Something
for my students to ponder…
Florida
Shooter: When Social Media Foretells a Mass Shooting
Disturbing social-media posts apparently made by
Nikolas Cruz before a deadly shooting spree have rekindled questions
about what responsibilities and capabilities technology companies and
law-enforcement authorities have for detecting threats among the
billions of words, images and videos online.
Does SIRI (and similar software) know about this?
Why What
You Say Reveals More Than You Think
… People’s word choices can reveal such
things as their mental health, ability to persuade or even if they’ll
default on a loan. A company’s choice of pronouns can affect a
customer’s experience and whether it will lead to a purchase.
Words used by the media influence how the public thinks about social
issues like casino gambling. And the placement of gender — men and
women vs. women and men — affect whom the reader believes is on
top.
Something for my entrepreneurs.
55
Must-Know SEO Tricks for Business Websites (Infographic)
Something for my geeks.
Something for the Intro to Computers class?
How
Computers Work
We use computers every day. But how many of us
actually know how they work? Sure we know how to use the software,
but I'm thinking about the hardware. How does that aspect of your
computer work? Code.org
has a new video series that addresses that question and more.
Through watching the videos in How
Computers Work you can learn about memory, logic, circuits,
binary, and the interaction between hardware and software. Get
started by watching
Bill Gates introduce the series.
