Saturday, February 17, 2018

Last week we discussed Backups and Disaster Recovery. Here’s another good ‘bad example.’
Ben Coley reports:
The Davidson County government’s ability to conduct business on computers has been stopped by a software virus known as ransomware, according to County Manager Zeb Hanner.
Hanner said officials learned about the issue around 2 a.m. Friday. He noted that all the files are encrypted and that the hackers are asking for an undisclosed amount of bitcoin, a type of cyber currency gaining popularity. None of the phone systems for county offices are working, as well.
Read more on The Dispatch.




The cost of a failure to ‘design for security?’
Intel facing 32 lawsuits over Meltdown and Spectre CPU security flaws
Intel has revealed today that the company is facing at least 32 lawsuits over the Meltdown and Spectre CPU flaws. “As of February 15, 2018, 30 customer class action lawsuits and two securities class action lawsuits have been filed,” says Intel in an SEC filing today. The customer class action lawsuits are “seeking monetary damages and equitable relief,” while the securities lawsuits “allege that Intel and certain officers violated securities laws by making statements about Intel’s products and internal controls that were revealed to be false or misleading by the disclosure of the security vulnerabilities.”
Intel is also facing action from three shareholders who have each filed shareholder derivative actions that allege certain board members and officers at Intel have failed “to take action in relation to alleged insider trading.” These filings appear to be related to the concerns that have been raised over Intel CEO Brian Krzanich’s stock sales.




No way to tell how many Snapchat users received the phishing email, but probably over a million.
Casey Newton reports:
In late July, Snap’s director of engineering emailed the company’s team in response to an unfolding privacy threat. A government official from Dorset in the United Kingdom had provided Snap with information about a recent attack on the company’s users: a publicly available list, embedded in a phishing website named klkviral.org, that listed 55,851 Snapchat accounts, along with their usernames and passwords.
The attack appeared to be connected to a previous incident that the company believed to have been coordinated from the Dominican Republic, according to emails obtained by The Verge.
Read more on The Verge.
[From the article:
The accounts compromised in July represent a tiny fraction of Snap’s 187 million active users. But the incident illustrates how sites set up to mimic login screens can do an outsized amount of damage — and how companies must increasingly rely on machine-learning techniques to identify them in real time.




A link to the indictment (PDF).
Special counsel Mueller: Russians conducted 'information warfare' against US during election to help Donald Trump win
A federal grand jury has indicted 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities for alleged illegal interference in the 2016 presidential elections, during which they strongly supported the candidacy of Donald Trump, special counsel Robert Mueller's office said Friday.
The indictment says that a Russian organization called the Internet Research Agency sought to wage "information warfare" against the United States and to "sow discord" in the American political system by using fictitious American personas and social media platforms and other Internet-based media.


(Related). The UN is often the last to ‘notice’ trends. Who is the leader here?
Global Powers Must Address 'Episodes of Cyberwar': UN Chief
World leaders must lay the groundwork on how countries respond to cyberattacks that have proven to be a daunting threat, whether by state actors or criminal enterprises, UN secretary general Antonio Guterres said Friday.
"It is clear we are witnessing in a more or less disguised way cyberwars between states, episodes of cyberwar between states," Guterres said during one of the opening speeches at the Munich Security Conference.
"It's high time to have a serious discussion about the international legal framework in which cyberwars take place," he said.
"The fact is we haven't been able to discuss whether or not the Geneva convention applies to cyberwar and whether international humanitarian law applies to cyberwar."




The pendulum swings again!
Rejecting years of settled precedent, a federal court in New York has ruled [PDF] that you could infringe copyright simply by embedding a tweet in a web page. Even worse, the logic of the ruling applies to all in-line linking, not just embedding tweets. If adopted by other courts, this legally and technically misguided decision would threaten millions of ordinary Internet users with infringement liability.
… Courts have long held that copyright liability rests with the entity that hosts the infringing content—not someone who simply links to it. The linker generally has no idea that it’s infringing, and isn’t ultimately in control of what content the server will provide when a browser contacts it. This “server test,” originally from a 2007 Ninth Circuit case called Perfect 10 v. Amazon, provides a clear and easy-to-administer rule. It has been a foundation of the modern Internet.




My students were sure this would not happen for years and years.
Waymo is readying a ride-hailing service that could directly compete with Uber
Waymo is preparing to launch a ride-hailing service akin to Uber’s, but with driverless cars.
The self-driving carmaker spun out of Google was approved on Jan. 24 to operate as a transportation network company (TNC) in Arizona, the state department of transportation told Quartz. Waymo applied for the permit on Jan. 12.




Something for my students to ponder…
Florida Shooter: When Social Media Foretells a Mass Shooting
Disturbing social-media posts apparently made by Nikolas Cruz before a deadly shooting spree have rekindled questions about what responsibilities and capabilities technology companies and law-enforcement authorities have for detecting threats among the billions of words, images and videos online.




Does SIRI (and similar software) know about this?
Why What You Say Reveals More Than You Think
… People’s word choices can reveal such things as their mental health, ability to persuade or even if they’ll default on a loan. A company’s choice of pronouns can affect a customer’s experience and whether it will lead to a purchase. Words used by the media influence how the public thinks about social issues like casino gambling. And the placement of gender — men and women vs. women and men — affect whom the reader believes is on top.




Something for my entrepreneurs.
55 Must-Know SEO Tricks for Business Websites (Infographic)




Something for my geeks.




Something for the Intro to Computers class?
How Computers Work
We use computers every day. But how many of us actually know how they work? Sure we know how to use the software, but I'm thinking about the hardware. How does that aspect of your computer work? Code.org has a new video series that addresses that question and more.
Through watching the videos in How Computers Work you can learn about memory, logic, circuits, binary, and the interaction between hardware and software. Get started by watching Bill Gates introduce the series.


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