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Friday, September 14, 2018

CEG: Who Controls Our Data and Structures

"Do not look upon this world with fear and loathing.
Bravely face whatever the gods offer."
~ Morihei Ueshiba via Deep Yammer


“You were hit by a truck and you were lying there in that gutter — dying — and you had time to sing one song. One song people would remember before you’re dirt. One song that would sum you up. You’re telling me that’s the song you’d sing? That same Jimmy Davis tune we hear on the radio all day… about your peace within, and how it’s real and how you’re gonna shout it? Or, would you sing something different? Something real. Something you felt. ‘Cause I’m telling you right now, that’s the kind of song people want to hear. That’s the kind of song that truly saves people. It ain’t got nothing to do with believing in God, mister Cash. It’s got to do with believing in yourself.”


The Subtle and Not-So-Subtle Force of Ageism

“So often, I see signs that they’re looking for someone younger. Ads ask for ‘digital natives’ and people who ‘live, eat, and dream social media.’”


Why political leaders want to connect informally with everyday people
RESEARCH: The call for politicians to ‘get real’ and ‘go public’ is more than just about winning elections. Officials can design engagement spaces to better suit the needs of citizens and decision-makers.

 


It’s Now Possible To Telepathically Communicate with a Drone Swarm Defense One




 Police say Nigerian national Fisayo Oluwafemi ran a ... scam he was running from inside Sydney's Villawood Detention Centre.

Police arrested people at Villawood, Granville and Chester Hill during raids to crack an email scam.


With cryptocurrency fraud and IRS scams making headlines, I had thought Nigerian email ...


nigerian fraud from www.wired.com
Is there a fix for the internet's oldest hustle—the Nigerian Prince scam?


Top Goldman Banker Raised Ethics Concerns. Then He Was Gone. NYT




Seventeen years after Sept. 11, Al Qaeda may be stronger than ever Los Angeles Times. Is the center ready to handle national security





Presented by Tony Poulakis, Assistant Commissioner (Phoenix and Refund Fraud) Australian Taxation Office April ...
Engadget – We requested our personal information from dozens of companies. Here’s what they gave us — and what they didn’t: “The average American, one study tell us, touches their phone 2,600 times per day. By the end of a given year, that’s nearly a million touches, rising to two million if you’re a power user. Each one of those taps, swipes and pulls is a potential proxy for our most intimate behaviors. Our phones are not only tools that help us organize our day but also sophisticated monitoring devices that we voluntarily feed with interactions we think are private. The questions we ask Google, for instance, can be more honest than the ones we ask our loved ones — a “digital truth serum,” as ex-Googler and author Seth Stephens-Davidowitz writes in Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are. Hoover up these data points and combine them with all of our other devices — smart TVs, fitness trackers, cookies that stalk us across the web — and there exists an ambient, ongoing accumulation of our habits to the tune of about 2.5 quintillion (that’s a million trillion) bytes of data per day. Sometimes that data gets spliced, scattered and consolidated across a web of collaborators, researchers and advertisers. Acxiom, for instance, claims 1,500 data points for each of the 500 million people in its database, including most US adults. Just in the past few months, Facebook was reported to have asked hospitals, including Stanford University School of Medicine, to share and integrate patients’ medical data with its own (the research project has since been put on hold). In April, gay dating app Grindr was revealed to have shared customers’ HIV status with two app-optimization companies. And who suspected completing an online personality test would pave the way for President Donald Trump’s targeted political advertising?…”


In 2014, Ruben Bolling created an updated version of Richard Scarry’s Busytown (as seen in What Do People Do All Day? and Busy, Busy Town) populated with workers with job descriptions like climate change denier, content aggregator, and rage pundit. At Topic, Bolling has updated the activities of Busytown residents for 2018.


“There’s no precedent to look to regarding the top-selling artist of the digital era becoming a total free agent.” - Variety

















The worker who can concentrate,
Lose himself in the hardest task,
Scrapes up time at double the rate,
Creating what? He doesn't ask.
Muscles are meant for heat and toil,
The eyes for precise measurement,
The voice for whispering contempt,
Listening, for the night bell's toll.
It takes a man to scrape a floor.
(God offers no alternative.)
He will go to bed drunk and sore,
Not knowing what it means to live.
The half-finished floorboards await
The restoration of their fate.






Gizmodo: “Openly recognizing their companies’ past failures in rare displays of modesty, Facebook and Twitter executives touted new efforts to combat state-sponsored propaganda across their platforms before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday, acknowledging that the task is often “overwhelming” and proving a massive drain on their resources.  Despite frequent and contradictory remarks by President Donald Trump, America’s top national security officials have continued to warn of ongoing foreign influence operations aimed at the 2018 and 2020 U.S. elections.

GPO grapples with ‘Keeping America Informed’ in the digital information age


 
fedscoop: “The Government Publishing Office (GPO) is tasked with “Keeping America Informed,” which practically means that the agency, through various channels, provides free public access to all the official publications of the federal government. In the days before the internet, this mandate was a lot easier to keep track of. In a recently released report, the Library of Congress’ Federal Research Division (FRD) explores how federal agencies tend to publish information these days (spoiler alert: online) and how the GPO can do a better job keeping tabs on official government documents in the information age.




Nextgov

September 7, 2018

The risks to the IT systems that underpin the nation’s critical infrastructure “are increasing,” upping the odds of a successful cyberattack, according to a report from the Government Accountability Office. The report identifies four major cybersecurity challenges and 10 critical actions the federal government needs to take to secure the nation’s energy grids, transportation systems, dams or financial institutions, but it takes a dim view of the government’s past actions shoring these systems up.




The New York Times

September 6, 2018

House Republicans withdrew on Thursday from negotiations with Democrats over a pact that would have effectively barred both parties from using hacked or stolen material on the campaign trail this fall. Leaders of the National Republican Congressional Committee, the campaign arm of House Republicans, and their counterparts at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee had labored for much of the summer over rules that would have governed the way the congressionally run committees and their candidates treated material like the thousands of pages of damaging Democratic documents stolen and leaked by Russian hackers in 2016.




CyberScoop

September 5, 2018

The House of Representatives on Wednesday passed a bipartisan bill aimed at deterring foreign governments from conducting hacking operations against U.S. critical infrastructure. The Cyber Deterrence and Response Act put forth by Rep. Ted Yoho, R-Fla., calls on the president to identify individuals and organizations engaged in state-sponsored hacking that significantly threatens U.S. interests, and then to impose one or more of a slew of sanctions on them. That “naming and shaming” approach is an effort to ward off future cyberattacks from China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea — four countries that U.S. officials routinely label as top adversaries in cyberspace.


Inside Cybersecurity
September 5, 2018
Streamlining congressional oversight of cybersecurity policy, creating a high-level “cyber director” role at the White House and -- of course -- closer scrutiny of Trump administration cyber efforts will top the priority list if Democrats take the House in November, according to one key Democratic lawmaker.

CyberScoop
September 5, 2018
he House passed two bills Tuesday that aim to bolster the Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity efforts as they relate to securing the agency’s own vendor supply chain as well as securing other federal agencies’ networks. Both bills now head to the Senate. 

AP
September 4, 2018
Just two months before the midterm elections, bipartisan legislation to try to prevent foreign hacking into U.S. election systems is stalled in Congress as the White House and some Republicans worry it could exert too much federal control over the states.


ADMINISTRATION

Bloomberg
September 7, 2018
The Trump administration is considering imposing sanctions on Chinese entities caught stealing U.S. intellectual property via cyber attacks, three people familiar with the matter said. The plan being discussed would use an Obama administration executive order that allows the U.S. to impose sanctions on individuals or entities engaging in “malicious cyber-enabled activities.”

Nextgov
Within Vicki Hildebrand’s first three months as chief information officer of the Transportation Department in 2017 and 2018, various component agencies were hit with three separate ransomware attacks. .

CyberScoop
September 7, 2018
The U.S. has announced the extradition of accused Russian hacker Andrei Tyurin from the nation of Georgia for his alleged role in a hacking campaign against American financial institutions, according to the Department of Justice.

FCW
September 6, 2018
Electrical grid providers and the federal government should develop collaborative response templates to handle cyber and physical attacks on power supply infrastructure, according to a new study by a member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council and grid expert.

The Washington Post
September 5, 2018
Cyberweapons and sophisticated hacking pose a greater threat to the United States than the risk of physical attacks, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said Wednesday while urging state election officials to add more safeguards to their voting systems

CyberScoop
September 5, 2018
Hackers sponsored by foreign governments have chipped away at the United States’ global economic advantage through a steady campaign of intellectual property theft, according to a top National Security Agency official.

Fifth Domain
September 4, 2018
The Department of Homeland Security named Robert Kolasky as head of the new National Risk Management Center, part of a larger emphasis from the Trump administration on working with the private sector to halt cyberattacks.


INDUSTRY

Gov Info Security
September 7, 2018
British Airways is warning customers that it suffered a hack attack that compromised up to 380,000 customers' payment cards as well as personal data over a 15-day period.

The Washington Post
September 7, 2018
Sonatype, a Maryland-based cybersecurity company, announced Friday that it has raised $80 million from investors.

Cyberscoop
September 6, 2018
o ahead and hack that car in peace. In a move greeted happily by cybersecurity researchers around the world, the electric-automobile company Tesla announced that hacking the company’s software as part of “good-faith security research” will not void your warranty.

Gov Info Security
September 6, 2018
Unknown attackers are intercepting every piece of data handled by more than 7,500 routers made by MikroTik, while also using another 239,000 compromised routers to serve as proxies, according to new research from 360's Network Security Research Lab.

The Hill
September 5, 2018
Private companies are stepping up to offer cybersecurity programs for midterm campaigns as Congress stalls on passing election security legislation.

Infosecurity Magazine
September 5, 2018
Celebrating the success of this year’s live hacking event, HackerOne (H1) recently announced that more than $500,000 was paid in bounties during the third annual h1-702 at DEF CON 26 in Las Vegas last month.

The Wall Street Journal
September 4, 2018
Hackers are constantly probing for “the one flaw overlooked” in Houston’s computer networks, the official responsible for safeguarding the fourth-largest U.S. city’s system said. “Compromise is inevitable,” said Christopher Mitchell, chief information security official, at a Houston City Council hearing last month.

Inside Cybersecurity
September 4, 2018
It's been a year since the massive Equifax data breach was revealed, but Congress and federal agencies appear stuck in neutral when it comes to crafting a policy response that would address cybersecurity requirements for consumer credit agencies, including breach-notice and related issues.


INTERNATIONAL

The Washington Post
September 6, 2018
The Justice Department announced charges Thursday against an alleged hacker for the North Korean government in connection with a series of major cyberattacks including the 2014 assault on Sony Pictures Entertainment, marking the first time the United States has brought such charges against a Pyongyang operative.

Reuters
September 4, 2018
A growing number of countries can hack into private computer networks and install malicious software to sabotage another country’s infrastructure, Germany’s domestic spy chief said. China, Russia and other countries continued to try to break into German companies’ computers to steal valuable industrial information, Hans-Georg Maassen, head of the BfV domestic intelligence agency, told a security conference.

FCW
September 3, 2018
Over the past year, U.S. policymakers have paid increasing attention to threats facing the technology supply chain from foreign intelligence agencies. New evidence of a Chinese hacking group's links to Beijing could give law enforcement investigators and members of the new ammunition to crack down on economic espionage and threats to the technology supply chain.
AP
September 6, 2018
An expert panel of the National Academy of Sciences called for fundamental reforms to ensure the integrity of the U.S. election system, which is handicapped by antiquated technology and under stress from foreign destabilization efforts.
 
via 



Couple’s disturbing Airbnb discovery
A COUPLE was horrified to find a hidden spy camera in a clock which was pointed at the bed in their Airbnb apartment.
Dougie Hamilton, from Glasgow, Scotland was on holiday in Toronto, Canada, with his girlfriend when he made the chilling discovery.
The 34-year-old informed Airbnb right away, and bosses have said they will launch an investigation.

Dougie Hamilton was stunned by what he found. Picture: FacebookSource:Facebook

Airbnb is investigating. Picture: FacebookSource:Supplied
Mr Hamilton told the Daily Record: “We were only in the place for 20 minutes when I noticed the clock. We’d had a busy day around the city and finally were able to get to the Airbnb and relax.
“I just happened to be facing this clock and was staring at it for about 10 minutes. There was just something in my head that made me feel a bit uneasy.
“It was connected to a wire like a phone charger which wasn’t quite right. The weirdest thing was, I’d seen a video on Facebook about cameras and how they could be hidden and they had a clock with one in it, too.”— Read more
Tax Cases of note
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