Wednesday, October 16, 2019


The Privacy Foundation is pleased to announce the Fall 2019 Privacy Seminar: “AI & Privacy: Ethical, Legal, and Technical Issues” Friday Nov 1st 10:00 – 1:00 followed by lunch. For full details and registration information: https://www.law.du.edu/privacy-foundation
Or contact Vince Gonzales vgonzales@law.du.edu 303-871-6313




Always worth studying. Learn from the mistakes of others or learn from your own mistakes.
Texas Chief Information Officer Shares Lessons Learned from Ransomware Attack
… “These 23 organizations were impacted because they failed to follow good cyber hygiene,” said Kimbriel, discussing the incident during the annual National Association of State Chief Information Officers convention in Nashville. “This particular provider had other organizations that were also connected in the same fashion and could have been impacted but because they follow good cyber hygiene they were not.”
In response to the July attack, the Texas National Guard deployed six-man cybersecurity teams who specialized in cybersecurity responses to assist the affected municipalities. 
A similar declaration was not made in Colorado after a 2018 hack on the state’s department of transportation until 10 days after the attack.




How does one miss this in testing? Probably used real data rather than test data (which should incorporate flaws in every field and test every step in the process).
Big Discovery Bank security flaw
Discovery Bank credit cards were affected by a security vulnerability that allowed you to make online purchases without knowing a specific bank card’s CVV.
The card verification value (CVV) is the set of three digits printed on the back of the card which acts as a security measure when making payments online.
MyBroadband received an anonymous tip stating that you could type in any three digits for the CVV when buying something online with a Discovery Bank card and the transaction would be approved. It appeared as though Discovery was not checking the CVV to authenticate transactions at all.




Individually, not much. But remember, hackers steal millions of accounts at a time.
What Your Personal Information is Worth to Cybercriminals
Full packages of data that can be used to steal a US victim's identity sell for $4-$10, the researchers say. These are called 'fullz' and include at least the name, Social Security number, date of birth, and account numbers.
The price seems low but it can get as high as $65 when accompanied by financial information, such as credit scores. The better the credit score, the higher the price. A score of 700, for instance, increased the fullz' value to $40.




Probably impacts many of my students.
Yahoo could pay you $358 for its massive data breach settlement. Here's how to claim it
Was your Yahoo account among the 3 billion struck by multiple data breaches between 2013 and 2016? You might be eligible for a $358 payout or two years of free credit monitoring.
If the settlement is approved by California courts, Yahoo could divvy up more than $117.5 million among users whose names, email addresses and passwords were stolen.
Eligible users can submit claims at Yahoodatabreachsettlement.com to receive at least two years of free credit monitoring services by AllClear ID.
If consumers can verify that they already use a credit monitoring service that they'll keep for at least a year, they can submit a claim for $100 instead. The true amount may be more than that -- up to $358 -- but it will likely be less, depending on how many people submit claims.




Probably similar here.
Australian CEOs are too overoptimistic for cybersecurity, out of touch on privacy
Only 6% of surveyed CEOs think their organisation has suffered a data breach in the last year, but 63% of their CISOs say they have, according to Unisys research. Big disconnect.
The report, Cybersecurity Standoff Australia [PDF], describes CEOs as "overconfident and out of the loop".




A tool for our Ethical Hackers?
OnionShare Lets Anyone Host Anonymous Sites on the Dark Web
A new version of the OnionShare program now allows you to easily create basic anonymous dark web sites on Tor so that they cannot be censored. This is particularly useful for those who wish to publish information anonymously, but do not want to deal with the mechanics of setting up their own dark web server.
"This website is only accessible from the Tor network, so people will need Tor Browser to visit it," states the OnionShare announcement for this new version. "People who visit your website will have no idea who you are – they won’t have access to your IP address, and they won’t know your identity or your location. And, so long as your website visitors are able to access the Tor network, the website can’t be censored."




I am willing to leave retirement to consult on CCPA (really to laugh at your approaching doom).
New Report Suggests Initial Compliance Costs for CCPA Could Reach $55 Billion
For months, there has been speculation about how much the new California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) would wind up costing California businesses as they prepare for the sweeping new privacy legislation, which is set to go into effect on January 1, 2020. According to a new economic impact assessment prepared for the California state attorney general by independent economic research firm Berkeley Economic Advising and Research, initial CCPA compliance could cost companies as much as $55 billion.




Don’t these people watch SciFi movies?
Workers trust AI more than human managers
Workers place more trust in robots and AI than their managers according to the second annual AI at Work study conducted by Oracle and Future Workplace.




When an AI writes (and patents) a better AI will it also write a patent lawyer App?
The Patent Office Is Hunting for an Artificial Intelligence Expert
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office recently launched a recruitment effort to hire its first-ever senior-level artificial intelligence expert to advance the agency’s applications of the emerging technology and provide technical expertise to keep employees on the leading edge.
He’s looking for someone to provide technical insights and expert knowledge across the agency’s numerous AI initiatives. For example, USPTO is implementing the technology in both patent search and trademark image search to speed up its examiners’ ability to spot fraud or whether the contents have already been submitted before. The agency also applies AI to auto-classify patents and connect them to the correct examiners more rapidly.




Could be useful in my next Statistics class.
Crawl data analysis of 2 billion links from 90 million domains offer glimpse into today’s web
SearcEngineLand: Data analysis reveals the distribution of PageRank is highly right-skewed meaning the majority of hosts have very low PageRank – “The web is not only essential for people working in digital marketing, but for everyone. We professionals in this field need to understand the big picture of how the web functions for our daily work. We also know that optimizing our customers’ sites is not just about their sites, but also improving their presence on the web, which it is connected to other sites by links. To get an overall view of information about the web we need data, lots of data. And we need it on a regular basis. There are some organizations that provide open data for this purpose like Httparchive. It collects and permanently stores the web’s digitized content and offers them as public dataset. A second example is Common Crawl, an organization that crawls the web every month. Their web archive has been collecting petabytes of data since 2011. In their own words, “Common Crawl is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to providing a copy of the internet to internet researchers, companies and individuals at no cost for the purpose of research and analysis.” In this article, a quick data analysis of Common Crawl’s recent public data and metrics will be presented to offer a glimpse into what’s happening on the web today…”




Because my students never take notes! (and I think my lectures are worth saving and savoring!)
Google’s new voice recorder app transcribes in real time, even when offline
TechCrunch: “At Google’s hardware event this morning, the company introduced a new voice recorder app for Android devices, which will tap into advances in real-time speech processing, speech recognition and AI to automatically transcribe recordings in real time as the person is speaking. The improvements will allow users to take better advantage of the phone’s voice recording functionality, as it will be able to turn the recordings into text even when there’s no internet connectivity. This presents a new competitor to others in voice transcriptions that are leveraging similar AI advances, like Otter.ai, Reason8, Trint and others, for example. As Google explained, all the recorder functionality happens directly on the device — meaning you can use the phone while in airplane mode and still have accurate recordings.
This means you can transcribe meetings, lectures, interviews, or anything you want to save,” said Sabrina Ellis, VP of Product Management at Google….”




For my geeks.
The Best Way to Search for Free Software Online
lifehacker: “…you want to search for is “open-source” plus the general topic of whatever app or service you’re trying to find. This won’t always net you an app that costs you nothing, but you’re likely to have better luck. You can also search for “alternative to” a conventional app that does something you don’t want to have to pay for (or check out the similarly named website )…”



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