War is an economic event. Can
there be “war” against a single company? An article for my
Computer Security students.
Did
a Chinese Hack Kill Canada’s Greatest Tech Company?
Nortel
was once a world leader in wireless technology. Then came a hack and
the rise of Huawei.
A guide for my
ethical hackers. You don’t do this, do you?
One
out of every 142 passwords is '123456'
… Last
month, Hakçıl, a Turkish student studying at a university in
Cyprus, downloaded and analyzed more than one billion leaked
credentials.
The
main discovery was that the 1,000,000,000+ credentials dataset
included only 168,919,919 unique passwords, of which more than 7
million were the "123456" string.
This
means that one out of every 142 passwords included in the sample
Hakçıl analyzed was the weakest password known today – with the
"123456" string being the most commonly reused password
online for the past five years in a row, and counting.
Not
enough technical detail to understand how they did it. If the
encryption was done on the phones, hacking Encrochat would not give
them access. Something is missing from this story.
How
Police Secretly Took Over a Global Phone Network for Organized Crime
Police
monitored a hundred million encrypted messages sent through
Encrochat, a network used by career criminals to discuss drug deals,
murders, and extortion plots.
… Because
the messages were encrypted on the devices themselves, police
couldn't tap the group's phones or intercept messages as authorities
normally would.
… French
authorities had penetrated the Encrochat network, leveraged that
access to install a technical tool in what appears to be a mass
hacking operation, and had been quietly reading the users'
communications for months. Investigators then shared those messages
with agencies around Europe.
… In
the press release, French authorities wrote "Despite the
findings of the criminal use of Encrochat terminals [phones],"
that they hope "users claiming to be of good faith and wishing
to have their personal data deleted from the legal proceedings can
send their request to the investigation department." They also
invited administrators or managers of Encrochat itself to contact
them if they wanted to discuss the legality of law enforcement
deploying the technical tool to read messages.
A
major escalation of ransomware?
Hacker
ransoms 23k MongoDB databases and threatens to contact GDPR
authorities
A
hacker has uploaded ransom notes on 22,900 MongoDB databases left
exposed online without a password, a number that accounts for roughly
47% of all MongoDB databases accessible online, ZDNet has learned
today.
The
hacker is using an automated script to scan for misconfigured MongoDB
databases, wiping their content, and leaving a ransom note behind
asking for a 0.015 bitcoin (~$140) payment.
The
attacker is giving companies two days to pay, and threatens
to leak their data and then contact the victim's local General Data
Protection Regulation (GDPR) enforcement authority to report their
data leak.
Inevitable,
since NY is now taking the pandemic seriously.
Party
Guests Won’t Talk After 9 Test Positive. Now They Face Subpoenas.
The
New York Times – Rushing
to contain a coronavirus cluster tied to a big party in a New York
City suburb, officials turned to an unusual legal strategy.
“On June 17, a crowd of up to 100 people, most of them in their
early 20s, attended a party at a home in Rockland County, N.Y., just
north of New York City. The event violated a state order in effect
at the time that capped gatherings at 10 people in an effort to slow
the coronavirus’s spread. For local officials, that was just the
start of the problem. The party’s host, who was showing signs of
being sick at the time, later tested positive for the virus. So did
eight guests. County officials, eager to keep the cluster from
growing, dispatched disease tracers to try to learn who else might
have been exposed to the virus at the party. The tracers hit a wall.
“My staff has been told that a person does not wish to, or have
to, speak to my disease investigators,” Dr. Patricia Schnabel
Ruppert, the county’s health commissioner, said on Wednesday. Of
those being contacted about the party, she added: “They hang up.
They deny being at the party even though we have their names from
another party attendee.” Frustrated by the response, county
officials on Wednesday took the unusual step of issuing subpoenas to
eight people who they believe were at the June 17 party. Those who
do not comply and share what they know by Thursday will face fines of
$2,000 a day, officials said…”
"The
first thing we do, let's re-boot all the lawyers"
Robot
lawyers are thriving during the pandemic
Fortune:
“…I spoke with Jason Brennan, the chief executive officer of
U.K.-based legal A.I. company Luminance. He told me the company,
which now has more than 250 customers across the globe, including a
fifth of the world’s largest 100 law firms, has had a 30% increase
in customers since the start of 2020… This is important because it
turns out that a lot of the “grunt work” of Big Law involves
doing exactly what Luminance does: combing through vast troves of
documents, trying to find those clauses that might be problematic.
Maybe they need to be updated due to a regulatory change. Or maybe
they are part of the contracts held by a company that is being
acquired and would open up a big liability issue for the buyer.
Either way, law firms once deployed small armies of paralegals and
junior associates to find them. It used to be that law firms could
simply charge for all this labor and pass the cost on to the client.
But that hasn’t been true for at least a decade. These days,
clients are more likely to demand law firms accept a flat fee for
this sort of work, or pay based on some pre-agreed outcome, not on
man hours. So firms have had to become much more efficient.
Corporate in-house legal departments are also having to do more with
less…”
(Related)
Dying? There’s an App for that! (Probably something to think
about during the pandemic)
Goodbye
World – An Innovative Approach to Estate Planning
… Goodbye
World is an online estate planning tool and mobile application that
helps people who want to create an estate plan by educating them and
simplifying the process. The app gamifies data entry and rewards
clients who complete various sections by unlocking fun bonus
features. Using a series of visual tools, the app presents the
entered data in different ways to ensure accuracy and completeness.
The data provided by clients is used to auto fill estate planning
documents that our attorneys then review.
… Goodbye
World is a technology tool developed for Reid Law LLC.
Another
guide for my students. Emphasis on understanding the business!
How
to build a machine learning model in 7 steps
All
types of organizations are implementing AI projects for numerous
applications in a wide range of industries. These applications
include predictive analytics, pattern recognition systems, autonomous
systems, conversational systems, hyper-personalization activities and
goal-driven systems. Each of these projects has something in common:
They're all predicated on
an understanding of the business problem and that data and
machine learning algorithms must be applied to the problem, resulting
in a machine learning model that addresses the project's needs.
(Related)
Note the need for an ethics specialist.
9
emerging job roles for the future of AI
… We
reached out to IT leaders, AI experts, and industry analysts to get a
sense of the kinds of AI roles they see emerging as AI takes firmer
hold of the enterprise. Some leading-edge companies are already
filling these positions, lending insight into the mix of skills
necessary to succeed in them.
Research tools
Reverse
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