Friday, August 18, 2017

It seems that Security is never considered when using a new technology.  Is there some assumption that someone else will take care of all that “Security Stuff?”  Also, what makes anyone believe that a password is sufficient security? 
A leading US supplier of voting machines confirmed on Thursday that it exposed the personal information of more than 1.8 million Illinois residents.
State authorities and the Federal Bureau of Investigation were alerted this week to a major data leak exposing the names, addresses, dates of birth, partial Social Security numbers, and party affiliations of over a million Chicago residents.  Some driver’s license and state ID numbers were also exposed.
Jon Hendren, who works for the cyber resilience firm UpGuard, discovered the breach on an Amazon Web Services (AWS) device that was not secured by a password.  The voter data was then downloaded by cyber risk analyst Chris Vickery who determined Election Systems & Software (ES&S) controlled the data. ES&S provides voting machines and services in at least 42 states.


Perfect for my Software Assurance class.
Well, this sounds like an epic FAIL on the City of Yonker’s part, doesn’t it?
City of Yonkers – Information Technology (Westchester County)
The IT department’s acceptable computer use policy was not signed or acknowledged by all employees and city officials have also not classified personal, private and sensitive information based on its level of sensitivity and the potential impact should that data be disclosed, altered or destroyed without authorization.  In addition, city officials have not ensured that employees received adequate cyber security training and have not adopted a breach notification policy or a disaster recovery plan.
You can access the full report here (.pdf).


Gosh, you don’t think the government would lie do you?  (Me too!) 
Dems want independent probe into FCC cyberattack
Democratic lawmakers are calling for an independent investigation into how the Federal Communications Commission responded to a reported cyberattack in May that crippled the agency’s comment filing system.
Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) and Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.) sent a letter to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) on Thursday that cast doubt on the FCC’s version of the incident.
“While the FCC and the FBI have responded to Congressional inquiries into these [distributed denial of service] attacks, they have not released any records or documentation that would allow for confirmation that an attack occurred, that it was effectively dealt with, and that the FCC has begun to institute measures to thwart future attacks and ensure the security of its systems,” the letter reads.
“As a result, questions remain about the attack itself and more generally about the state of cybersecurity at the FCC — questions that warrant an independent review.”


Perspective.  A partial list of victims.
NotPetya Attack Costs Big Companies Millions


Obvious security? 
Facebook Awards $100,000 Prize for Spear-Phishing Detection Method
   To test their method, the researchers analyzed more than 370 million emails received by a large enterprise’s employees between March 2013 and January 2017.
The first part of the detection method relies on the analysis of two key components: domain reputation features and sender reputation features.  The domain reputation feature involves analyzing the link included in an email to see if it poses a risk.  A URL is considered risky if it has not been visited by many employees from within an organization, or if it has never been visited until very recently.
The sender reputation feature aims to identify spoofing of the sender’s name in the From header, a previously unseen attacker using a name and email address closely resembling a known or authoritative entity, exploitation of compromised user accounts, and suspicious email content (i.e. messages that reference accounts and credentials, or ones that invoke a sense of urgency).


If it’s good enough for Russia…
Natalia Gulyaeva, Maria Sedykh, and Bret Cohen write:
On 31 July, the Russian data protection authority, Roskomnadzor, issued guidance for data operators on the drafting of privacy policies to comply with Russian data protection law.  Russia’s 2006 privacy law – Federal Law No. 152-FZ of 27 July 2006 “On Personal Data” (Personal Data Law) – requires, among other things, that Russian data operators must adopt a privacy policy that describes how they process personal data.  This notice requirement is similar to the approach in Europe.  Furthermore, data operators shall publish such a policy online when personal data is collected online or otherwise provide unrestricted access to the policy when personal data is collected offline.  The guidance – although non-binding and recommendatory in nature – emphasizes the regulator’s compliance expectations and should therefore be taken into account by organizations acting as data operators in Russia.


How to write Terms of Service?  More important: How to read them! 
2nd Circuit’s Uber arbitration ruling huge win for app industry
On Thursday, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Uber user Spencer Meyer assented to the company’s mandatory arbitration requirement when he clicked a button to complete his registration for the Uber smartphone app.  The 2nd Circuit’s decision, written by Judge Denny Chin for a panel that also included Judges Reena Raggi and Susan Carney, rejected Meyer's argument that he wasn’t on fair notice of the arbitration provision because the Uber registration process presented the app’s terms of service only via hyperlink.  
That's great news for companies with smartphone apps – and not just because the court held that app purchasers can be bound by a “sign-in wrap” that folds assent to terms of service into registration for the app.  The 2nd Circuit also confirmed the obvious: Now that Internet-connected devices have become nearly ubiquitous, smartphone users ought to know that registering for an app has legal consequences.


A project for my students.
Algorithmic Transparency for the Smart City
by on
Brauneis, Robert and Goodman, Ellen P., Algorithmic Transparency for the Smart City (August 2, 2017).  Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3012499
“Emerging across many disciplines are questions about algorithmic ethics – about the values embedded in artificial intelligence and big data analytics that increasingly replace human decision making.  Many are concerned that an algorithmic society is too opaque to be accountable for its behavior.  An individual can be denied parole or denied credit, fired or not hired for reasons she will never know and cannot be articulated.  In the public sector, the opacity of algorithmic decision making is particularly problematic both because governmental decisions may be especially weighty, and because democratically-elected governments bear special duties of accountability.  Investigative journalists have recently exposed the dangerous impenetrability of algorithmic processes used in the criminal justice field – dangerous because the predictions they make can be both erroneous and unfair, with none the wiser.  We set out to test the limits of transparency around governmental deployment of big data analytics, focusing our investigation on local and state government use of predictive algorithms.  It is here, in local government, that algorithmically-determined decisions can be most directly impactful.  And it is here that stretched agencies are most likely to hand over the analytics to private vendors, which may make design and policy choices out of the sight of the client agencies, the public, or both.  To see just how impenetrable the resulting “black box” algorithms are, we filed 42 open records requests in 23 states seeking essential information about six predictive algorithm programs.  We selected the most widely-used and well-reviewed programs, including those developed by for-profit companies, nonprofits, and academic/private sector partnerships.  The goal was to see if, using the open records process, we could discover what policy judgments these algorithms embody, and could evaluate their utility and fairness.  To do this work, we identified what meaningful “algorithmic transparency” entails.  We found that in almost every case, it wasn’t provided.  Over-broad assertions of trade secrecy were a problem.  But contrary to conventional wisdom, they were not the biggest obstacle.  It will not usually be necessary to release the code used to execute predictive models in order to dramatically increase transparency.  We conclude that publicly-deployed algorithms will be sufficiently transparent only if (1) governments generate appropriate records about their objectives for algorithmic processes and subsequent implementation and validation; (2) government contractors reveal to the public agency sufficient information about how they developed the algorithm; and (3) public agencies and courts treat trade secrecy claims as the limited exception to public disclosure that the law requires.  Although it would require a multi-stakeholder process to develop best practices for record generation and disclosure, we present what we believe are eight principal types of information that such records should ideally contain.”


Keeping my students busy.


For my Geeks.


A reminder.


Last chance to get eclipse glasses?
Community College of Denver Solar Eclipse Party
Community College of Denver will be setting up two telescopes to safely view the 93% partial solar eclipse on August 21st.  One telescope is a Coronado Solarmax 60mm with an H-alpha solar filter, the other is a 6" Celestron scope with a broadband solar filter.  Safe viewing glasses provided.

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