It seems there are always people who didn’t get (or understand) the
word.
Suzanne Perez Tobias reports:
At least three employees of Wichita State University did not receive their paychecks recently after they were targeted by computer hackers.
The employees were victims of an e-mail phishing scheme, which asked them to type in their university ID number and password, allowing scammers to access bank account numbers, student records and other personal information, according to university officials.
Read more on Kansas.com.
I doubt we’ll have election security by 2020.
This article mentions a few of the problems we have already seen.
HR1 Bill
Includes Provisions to Improve U.S. Election Security
The Democrat-controlled House of Representatives
has unveiled its first Bill: HR1, dubbed the 'For the People Act'.
It has little chance of getting through the Republican-controlled
Congress, and even less chance of being signed into law by President
Trump.
Nevertheless, HR1 lays down a marker for current
Democrat intentions; and it is likely that some of the potentially
bi-partisan elements could be spun out into separate bills with a
greater chance of progress.
One of these is likely to include the section on
election security.
… Concerns began in late August 2016, when
security researcher Logan Lamb discovered registration details for
6.7 million Georgia voters were being held in a
publicly accessible database. This data included voter
histories and personal information of all Georgia voters, tabulation
and memory card programming databases for past and future elections,
instructions and passwords
for voting equipment administration, and executable
programs controlling essential election resources.
… What made the situation worse was that when
the database was eventually taken down, the
log details were deleted. As a result, it is impossible
to discover whether anyone other than Logan Lamb also accessed the
database.
… Two days before the election it was reported
that the online voter registration database was unsecured and
vulnerable.
Another good “bad example” for my students.
Fewer
Affected in Marriott Hack, but Passports a Red Flag
Fewer
Marriott guest records that previously feared were compromised
in a massive data breach, but the largest hotel chain in the
world confirmed Friday that approximately 5.25 million unencrypted
passport numbers were accessed.
The
compromise of those passport numbers has raised
alarms among security experts because of their value to state
intelligence agencies.
… The
hackers accessed about 20.3 million encrypted passport numbers.
There is no evidence that they were able to use the master encryption
key required to gain access to that data.
Unencrypted
passport numbers are valuable to state intelligence agencies because
they can be used to compile detailed dossiers on people and their
international movements. [Suggesting
that the encryption yields the same number every time, so it can be
used to track my movement. Bob]
… When
Bethesda, Maryland, hotel chain initially disclosed the breach in
November, the company said that hackers compiled stolen data
undetected for four years,
including credit card and passport numbers, birthdates, phone numbers
and hotel arrival and departure dates.
Perspective.
More
Americans are using ride-hailing apps
Americans
who use ride-hailing services has increased dramatically. Today, 36%
of U.S. adults say they have ever used a ride-hailing service such as
Uber or Lyft, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in
fall 2018. By comparison, just 15% of Americans said they had used
these services in late 2015, and one-third had never heard of
ride-hailing before.
As a fan of Science Fiction I can tell you it
makes it easier to understand the potential of new technologies.
Science fiction writers are professional
future-dreamers, imagining worlds far beyond their own. With
technology advancing at astronomical rates, real life feels more and
more like sci-fi every day (for better or worse). So it’s fun to
look back at those writers who, decades and even centuries ago,
imagined what life would be like now—and some of their predictions
were surprisingly accurate.
