WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

Passwords. We all have lots of them these days. And yet we're told repeatedly to not reuse passwords and to make them strong. For most of us, that's an opposing set of directives. Unless you have some amazing memory, there's no way that we mere mortal

We’re rolling out two new features, Password Checkup and Cross Account Protection, to keep your information safe beyond Google’s sites and apps.

The Magicverse is an Emergent System of Systems bridging the physical with the digital, in a large scale, persistent manner within a community of people.

Last week brought an extraordinary demonstration of the dangers of operating a surveillance state — especially a shabby one, as China’s apparently is. An unsecured database exposed millions of records of Chinese Muslims being tracked via facial recognition — an ugly trifecta of prejudice, bureaucracy and incompetence.

Whether it was here on Hackaday or elsewhere on the Internet, you’ve surely heard more than a few cautionary tales about the “Internet of Things” by now. As it turns out, giving every gadget you own access to your personal information and Internet connection can lead to unintended consequences. Who knew, right? But if you need yet another example of why trusting your home appliances with your secrets is potentially a bad idea, [Limited Results] is here to make sure you spend the next few hours doubting your recent tech purchases.

We live in a data-driven world. Almost every transaction and interaction you have with most organisations involves you sharing personal data, such as your name, address and birth date. You share data online too, every time you visit a website, search for or buy something, use social media or send an email.

Many people, particularly older folks, proudly declare they avoid using the Web to manage various accounts tied to their personal and financial data — including everything from utilities and mobile phones to retirement benefits and online banking services. The reasoning behind this strategy is as simple as it is alluring: What’s not put online can’t be hacked. But increasingly, adherents to this mantra are finding out the hard way that if you don’t plant your flag online, fraudsters and identity thieves may do it for you.

In this brief, we highlight why Canada needs a digital identity system, how other countries have made progress in this area and the lessons we can learn from those experiences to build a system in Canada.

"When you have rising monetization, rising growth and rising data collection, it drives a lot of regulatory scrutiny whether it’s related to data privacy, competition or safety in content."

In the wake of the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandal, what happens to our personal data online is (rightly and sensibly) a bigger talking point than ever. The idea that giving our data away is a valid price for using free websites and online services is no longer taken as a given.

Twitter just asked all 300+ million users to reset their passwords, citing the exposure of user passwords via a bug that stored passwords in plain text — without protecting them with any sort of encryption technology that would mask a Twitter user’s true password. The social media giant says it has fixed the bug and that so far its investigation hasn’t turned up any signs of a breach or that anyone misused the information. But if you have a Twitter account, please change your account password now.

In this paper, we seek to provide an introduction to AI to policymakers and other stakeholders in the wider Internet ecosystem.

Facial recognition is the new hot tech topic in China. Banks, airports, hotels and even public toilets are all trying to verify people’s identities by analyzing their faces. But the police and security state have been the most enthusiastic about embracing this new technology.

What was once possible only via offline cloud computing servers is now built into the cameras themselves. Thus one should expect future security cameras to include not only the video feed but also meta data about objects and people in the scene they are scanning.

• Railway police have begun using facial-recognition eyewear to catch criminals.
• In tests the glasses identified faces within 100 milliseconds.
• Seven people have been arrested for a range of previous crimes, and another 26 were banned from travel.
• China has been ramping up its use of facial-recognition technology as it moves toward a nationwide database that can recognize any citizen within three seconds.

Ransomware has become one of the most prevalent new cybersecurity threats faced by today’s enterprises. Now well beyond the incipient stage of opportunistic attacks, this automated form of blackmail has increased in prevalence and sophistication. The malware now targets organizations of all sizes as the bad guys look for ways to extort money and create trouble for businesses by taking their data hostage. Dark Reading’s 2017 Ransomware Survey queried IT practitioners about their recent experiences with ransomware and related malware over the past 12 months. Some of the findings include:

• 35% of organizations detected ransomware on their systems in the past year.
• 83% of affected organizations responded to infection by deleting the encrypted data and reimagining their systems using backup data.
• Two in five organizations don’t have a ransomware response plan in place.
• Only 27% of organizations believe current anti-malware technology is effective in preventing ransomware.
• Half of IT practitioners believe it will be harder to prevent ransomware from infecting their systems two years from now.

KrebsOnSecurity has long warned readers to plant your own flag at the my Social Security online portal of the U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA) — even if you are not yet drawing benefits from the agency — because identity thieves have been registering accounts in peoples’ names and siphoning retirement and/or disability funds.

Data about exercise routes shared online by soldiers can be used to pinpoint overseas facilities. Sensitive information about the location and staffing of military bases and spy outposts around the world has been revealed by a fitness tracking company.

Exclusive research by us at LDV Capital is the first publicly shared, in-depth analysis which estimates how many cameras will be in the world in 2022. Key Findings include:

• Most of the pictures captured will never be seen by a human eye.
• A paradigm shift will take place in the meaning and use of a camera.
• Over the next five years there will be a proliferation of cameras integrated into products across industries and markets.
• Where there is growth in cameras there will be tremendous business opportunities in the capture, analysis and interpretation of visual data.
• Depth capture will double the number of cameras in handheld cameras.
• By 2022, the number of cameras will be nearly 12X the 2012 figures.
• Your smartphone will have between 4 and 10 cameras by 2022.
• The Internet of Eyes will be larger than the Internet of Things.
• In the next five years, robotics will have 20X more integrated cameras.
• By 2022, all new vehicles will be equipped with more than 25 cameras and this does not include Lidar or Radar.

As noted in yesterday’s breaking story on this breach, the Web site that Equifax advertised as the place where concerned Americans could go to find out whether they were impacted by this breach — equifaxsecurity2017.com — is completely broken at best, and little more than a stalling tactic or sham at worst.

In What’s In a Boarding Pass Barcode? A Lot, KrebsOnSecurity told the story of a reader whose friend posted a picture of a boarding pass on Facebook. The reader was able to use the airline’s Web site combined with data printed on the boarding pass to discover additional information about his friend. That data included details of future travel, the ability to alter or cancel upcoming flights, and a key component need to access the traveler’s frequent flyer account. 

More recently, security researcher Michal Špaček gave a talk at a conference in the Czech Republic in which he explained how a few details gleaned from a picture of a friend’s boarding pass posted online give him the ability to view passport information on his friend via the airline’s Web site, and to change the password for another friend’s United Airlines frequent flyer account.

Anonymity, like security, has many layers. Observers have developed methods of piercing anonymity which involve differing levels of technology.

These are the steps you can take and the tools you'll need to remain anonymous and hidden online. Tor, VPN, burner emails, encryption, bitcoin, etc.

Using password managers like LastPass and 1Password are essential to your online security — cyber security expert Kevin Mitnick explains why.

With the Supreme Court slated to rule next term on whether cellphone location data requires a search warrant, a new poll shows that a majority of U.S. adults support law enforcement accessing certain personal data for someone under investigation, but only if it's authorized by a warrant. Polling was conducted June 8 through June 12 among 2,200 U.S. adults. Morning Consult is the official polling partner of POLITICO, Vox, Fortune, and Bloomberg News.