Wednesday, August 07, 2019


Slick! Uses far less gas than wardriving.
With warshipping, hackers ship their exploits directly to their target’s mail room
This newly named technique — dubbed “warshipping” — is not a new concept. Just think of the traditional Trojan horse rolling into the city of Troy, or when hackers drove up to TJX stores and stole customer data by breaking into the store’s Wi-Fi network. But security researchers at IBM’s X-Force Red say it’s a novel and effective way for an attacker to gain an initial foothold on a target’s network.
It uses disposable, low cost and low power computers to remotely perform close-proximity attacks, regardless of the cyber criminal’s location,” wrote Charles Henderson, who heads up the IBM offensive operations unit.
… “Once we see that a warship has arrived at the target destination’s front door, mailroom or loading dock, we are able to remotely control the system and run tools to either passively, or actively, attack the target’s wireless access,” wrote Henderson.




We love our employees even as we surveil the heck out of them!
How Technology Transformed Insider Fraud – and How New Technology Is Fighting Back
In criminal cases, investigators home in on suspects by ascertaining who had the means, motive, and opportunity to perpetrate the crime. By that tripartite standard, it shouldn’t be surprising that occupational fraud – fraud carried out by company employees, executives, and other insiders – outranks virtually all other forms of fraud faced by modern organizations.
Technology may be one of the great enablers of insider fraud – but paradoxically, it’s also indispensable to combating it.
Here’s a look at how insider fraud has evolved, and how technology has guided its evolution.




You only need to worry when there is a microphone involved. Or a camera. Or an Internet connection.
Revealed: Microsoft Contractors Are Listening to Some Skype Calls
Contractors working for Microsoft are listening to personal conversations of Skype users conducted through the app's translation service, according to a cache of internal documents, screenshots, and audio recordings obtained by Motherboard. Although Skype's website says that the company may analyze audio of phone calls that a user wants to translate in order to improve the chat platform's services, it does not say some of this analysis will be done by humans. [Are we assuming AI now? Bob]




Because it does exactly what you ask it to do?
6 reasons why AI projects fail
Eighteen months ago, Mr. Cooper launched an intelligent recommendation system for its customer service agents to suggest solutions to customer problems. The company, formerly known as Nationstar, is the largest non-bank mortgage provider in the U.S., with 3.8 million customers, so the project was viewed as a high-profile cost-saver for the company. It took nine months to figure out that the agents weren't using it, says CIO Sridhar Sharma. And it took another six months to figure out why.
The recommendations the system was offering weren't relevant, Sharma found, but the problem wasn't in the machine learning algorithms. Instead, the company had relied on training data based on technical descriptions of customer problems rather than how customers would describe them in their own words.




Free is good!
Millions of Books Are Secretly in the Public Domain. You Can Download Them Free
Vice – A quirk of copyright law means that millions of books are now free for anyone to read, thanks to some work from the New York Public Library: “Prior to 1964, books had a 28-year copyright term. Extending it required authors or publishers to send in a separate form, and lots of people didn’t end up doing that. Thanks to the efforts of the New York Public Library, many of those public domain books are now free online. Through the 1970s, the Library of Congress published the Catalog of Copyright Entries, all the registration and renewals of America’s books. The Internet Archive has digital copies of these. but computers couldn’t read all the information and figuring out which books were public domain, and thus could be uploaded legally, was tedious. The actual, extremely convoluted specifics of why these books are in the public domain are detailed in a post by the New York Public Library, which recently paid to parse the information in the Catalog of Copyright Entries. In a massive undertaking, the NYPL converted the registration and copyright information into an XML format. Now, the old copyrights are searchable and we know when, and if, they were renewed. Around 80 percent of all the books published from 1923 to 1964 are in the public domain, and lots of people had no idea until now…”



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