Wednesday, November 13, 2019


Imagine (insert country name here) backed companies as the lowest cost manufacturer of voting machines.
Report: Election Vendors Are 'Prime Targets,' Need Oversight
The private companies that make voting equipment and build and maintain voter registration databases lack any meaningful federal oversight despite the crucial role they play in U.S. elections, leaving the nation's electoral process vulnerable to attack, according to a new report.
The Brennan Center for Justice on Tuesday issued the report, which calls on Congress to establish a framework for federal certification of election vendors.


(Related) Would the response be different depending on which party is in power?
Labour cyber-attack: Hostile nation state could be behind hack, ex-GCHQ boss says
A former GCHQ boss has said nation state hackers may have been behind the "large-scale cyber attack" on the Labour Party.
The party's digital platforms were hit by a "sophisticated and large-scale" cyber attack on Tuesday morning, a Labour spokesperson admitted, although it failed because of the party's "robust security systems" and they were confident that no data breach occurred. [Confident enough to risk the next election? Bob]




I don’t think my students really believe me when I tell them this is how it works. It’s a Catch 22. A breach is evidence of non-compliance.
PCI DSS Compliance Between Audits is Declining: Verizon
Companies subject to PCI DSS security requirements are audited once per year, yet many of these companies continue to be breached. It is not that PCI DSS fails, but that companies fail to maintain compliance from one audit to the next. According to Verizon's 2016-2018 dataset, at the time of a breach, no organization was compliant across all 12 PCI DSS requirements.
This is the primary thrust of the Verizon 2019 Payment Security Report -- the eighth annual report (PDF ) on the state of PCI DSS compliance: compliance sustainability from one annual audit to the next. "Most companies are able to achieve compliance fairly easily," Rodolphe Simonetti, managing director of Verizon's global security consulting, told SecurityWeek, "but what is important is maintaining compliance throughout the year. This is the only way to mitigate risk and manage security properly."
"We can definitively state," says the Verizon report, "we have never reviewed an environment or investigated a PCI data breach involving an affected entity that was truly PCI DSS compliant—even if it had a signed Attestation of Compliance (AOC)." While it cannot confirm industry claims that no PCI DSS compliant company has ever been breached, it does say categorically that no covered breached company within its purview was actually compliant at the time of the breach.




DHS Policy can not amend the constitution. So will each port of entry now need a judge 24X7 to issue warrants?
Federal Court Rules Suspicionless Searches of Travelers’ Phones and Laptops Unconstitutional
EFF – Government Must Have Reasonable Suspicion of Digital Contraband Before Searching People’s Electronic Devices at the U.S. Border – “In a major victory for privacy rights at the border, a federal court in Boston ruled today that suspicionless searches of travelers’ electronic devices by federal agents at airports and other U.S. ports of entry are unconstitutional. The ruling came in a lawsuit, Alasaad v. McAleenan, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and ACLU of Massachusetts, on behalf of 11 travelers whose smartphones and laptops were searched without individualized suspicion at U.S. ports of entry.”


(Related)
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) sued the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) today to obtain information that will shine a light on the agency’s use of Rapid DNA technology on migrant families at the border to verify biological parent-child relationships.
In a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) complaint filed today in federal court in San Francisco, EFF asked a judge to require DHS to disclose information about the agency’s deployment of Rapid DNA systems, including the number of individuals whose DNA has been collected, the accuracy of DNA matches, and the exact gene processing used to identify parent-child relationships. The lawsuit also seeks training materials, consent forms and privacy statements given to families, and locations of DHS’s Rapid DNA pilot programs.
According to media reports, DHS, and its component Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), began a pilot program in May to conduct Rapid DNA testing on adults and children presenting themselves at the U.S. border. The purpose of the testing was to find individuals who were not related through a biological parent-child relationship and prosecute them for fraud. The pilot program then grew, with testing at seven locations at the U.S.-Mexico border. In June, DHS indicated that Rapid DNA testing is now part of the agency’s policy.




It’s the tools you don’t control that cause concern.
Facebook is secretly using your iPhone’s camera as you scroll your feed
… The problem becomes evident due to a bug that shows the camera feed in a tiny sliver on the left side of your screen, when you open a photo in the app and swipe down. TNW has since been able to independently reproduce the issue.
Maddux adds he found the same issue on five iPhone devices running iOS 13.2.2, but was unable to reproduce it on iOS 12. “I will note that iPhones running iOS 12 don’t show the camera (not to say that it’s not being used),” he said.
Update November 13, 7:20AM UTC: Facebook has confirmed the issue, calling it a bug (who would’ve guessed, right?).




The pendulum swings further to the consumers favor?
EU adopts New Deal for Consumers
On November 8, 2019, the European Union adopted the “Directive Modernizing Consumer Law. This directive is part of the so-called “New Deal for Consumer” (see here ), a package of legislative reforms designed to revise existing EU consumer laws. The main objective of these reforms is to adapt EU consumer protection legislation to the realities of the digital era, as well as to foster transparency and ensure effective enforcement of consumer protection laws.
The directive amends the following existing EU consumer laws:



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