Tuesday, November 21, 2017

Over 400 of the World’s Most Popular Websites Record Your Every Keystroke


Government Secrecy in the Age of Information Overload:

“Jameel Jaffer, Executive Director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and former Deputy Legal Director for the ACLU, delivered the tenth annual Salant Lecture on Freedom of the Press at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on October 17,  2017, entitled “Government Secrecy in the Age of Information Overload.” Following is a video and transcript of the speech.”



MEdia Dragons of Motherboard Fame – Session replay scripts” can be used to log (and then playback) everything you typed or clicked on a website: “Most people who’ve spent time on the internet have some understanding that many websites log their visits and keep record of what pages they’ve looked at. When you search for a pair of shoes on a retailer’s site for example, it records that you were interested in them. The next day, you see an advertisement for the same pair on Instagram or another social media site. The idea of websites tracking users isn’t new, but research from Princeton University released last week indicates that online tracking is far more invasive than most users understand. In the first installment of a series titled “No Boundaries,” three researchers from Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) explain how third-party scripts that run on many of the world’s most popular websites track your every keystroke and then send that information to a third-party server.Some highly-trafficked sites run software that records every time you click and every word you type. If you go to a website, begin to fill out a form, and then abandon it, every letter you entered in is still recorded, according to the researchers’ findings. If you accidentally paste something into a form that was copied to your clipboard, it’s also recorded…”

Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs: “People join campaigns for different reasons: electing a leader they believe in, advancing an agenda, cleaning up government, or experiencing the rush and adrenaline of campaign life. These are some of the reasons we got involved in politics. We certainly didn’t sign up because we wanted to become cyber experts and we’re guessing you didn’t either… This Cybersecurity Campaign Playbook was written by a bipartisan team of experts in cybersecurity, politics, and law to provide simple, actionable ways of countering the growing cyber threat. Cyber adversaries don’t discriminate. Campaigns at all levels – not just presidential campaigns – have been hacked. You should assume you are a target. While the recommendations in this playbook apply universally, it is primarily intended for campaigns that don’t have the resources to hire professional cybersecurity staff. We offer basic building blocks to a cybersecurity risk mitigation strategy that people without technical training can implement (although we include some things which will require the help of an IT professional). These are baseline recommendations, not a comprehensive reference to achieve the highest level of security possible. We encourage all campaigns to enlist professional input from credentialed IT and cybersecurity professionals whenever possible…”