Monday, July 27, 2020


Do we not care?
Election Officials Are Vulnerable to Email Attacks, Report Shows
Many of the thousands of county and local election officials who will be administering November’s presidential election are running email systems that could leave them vulnerable to online attacks, a new report has found.
Cybersecurity vendor Area 1 Security Inc. tracked more than 12,000 local officials and determined that over 1,600 used free or nonstandard email software that often lacks the configuration and management protection found with large cloud-service providers. More than half of the officials used email systems with limited protection from phishing attacks, Area 1 said. The findings underscore problems with the country’s diverse, locally administered election system that attracted the attention of state-sponsored hackers four years ago.




Not just a security risk. Could this invalidate some IP claims? Document bias?
Source code from dozens of companies leaked online
Source code from exposed repositories of dozens of companies across various fields of activity (tech, finance, retail, food, eCommerce, manufacturing) is publicly available as a result of misconfigurations in their infrastructure.
A public repository of leaked code includes big names like Microsoft, Adobe, Lenovo, AMD, Qualcomm, Motorola, Hisilicon (owned by Huawei), Mediatek, GE Appliances, Nintendo, Roblox, Disney, Johnson Controls; and the list keeps growing.
Kottmann told BleepingComputer that they find hardcoded credentials in the easily-accessible code repositories, which they try to remove as best as they can, to prevent direct harm and avoid contributing in any way to a larger breach.
Kottmann believes there are thousands of companies that expose proprietary code by failing to properly secure SonarQube installations.




Backdoor issues.
Atlassian says encryption-busting law has damaged Australia’s tech reputation
Asha Barbaschow reports:
Atlassian believes Australia’s encryption-busting legislation continues to have a negative impact on the country’s technology sector, both from the perspective of partnering with an Australian company and attracting tech talent down under.
The Act’s passage has significantly degraded the global reputation of the Australian tech sector, as local companies and multinationals alike question whether actions compel them to the Act will degrade industry’s ability to secure customer data and place their employees at individual peril,” Atlassian head of IP, policy, and government affairs Patrick Zhang said.
Read more on ZDNet.




...and Mark Zuckerberg giggles all the way to the bank.
Twitter and Facebook become targets in Trump and Biden ads
Social media has become the target of a dueling attack ad campaign being waged online by the sitting president and his election rival. They’re shooting the messenger while giving it lots of money.
President Donald Trump has bought hundreds of messages on Facebook to accuse its competitor, Twitter, of trying to stifle his voice and influence the November election.
Democratic challenger Joe Biden has spent thousands of dollars advertising on Facebook with a message of his own: In dozens of ads on the platform, he’s asked supporters to sign a petition calling on Facebook to remove inaccurate statements, specifically those from Trump.




Probably not the right formula.
Why Hundreds of Mathematicians Are Boycotting Predictive Policing
Popular Mechanics – “Several prominent academic mathematicians want to sever ties with police departments across the U.S., according to a letter submitted to Notices of the American Mathematical Society on June 15. The letter arrived weeks after widespread protests against police brutality, and has inspired over 1,500 other researchers to join the boycott. These mathematicians are urging fellow researchers to stop all work related to predictive policing software, which broadly includes any data analytics tools that use historical data to help forecast future crime, potential offenders, and victims. The technology is supposed to use probability to help police departments tailor their neighborhood coverage so it puts officers in the right place at the right time…”



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