Boldly Going Where Hackers Have Already Been
Captain’s Log. Stardate 94293.37 Travelling back to the early 21st century to examine the state of Earth’s technological interconnectivity and security has revealed some troubling insights into our forerunners. These problems have multiplied like tribbles over the last few years, and one in particular stands out. One Earth year ago, in what would be 2015,… Read More
How Not to Maintain Consumer Trust
Ok, so this was pretty big news over the weekend, this WhatsApp “betrayal” of its users’ previously assured privacy by changing its privacy policy to share certain information with Facebook. When Facebook purchased the company in 2014, both Mark Zuckerberg and WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum insisted on independence between the two platforms. That would no… Read More
Media Under Siege?
SPOILERS for Mr. Robot Season two of Mr. Robot has so far escalated the first season’s conflict into a looming cyber war between the US and China, in which the latter’s Minister of State Security, Whiterose, through the “Dark Army” at her disposal, intends to take advantage of the chaos unleashed by the ECorp hack… Read More
One Malware to Rule Them All
A newly discovered malware strain, dubbed Project Sauron after Tolkien’s villain in The Lord of the Rings, has been secretly infecting and spying on the world’s top computers for five years. It’s a fitting moniker, as the dark lord of Middle-Earth was always in his own right associated with espionage. From the beginning he was… Read More
DNC hack shows severe US vulnerability to cyber attacks
The big news this weekend was, of course, the hack of the Democratic National Committee emails. 20,000 emails exposed ordinarily wouldn’t even make the Top 5 list of data breaches for a given month, but this story has deservedly been catapulted to number one. Few breaches have had the political significance of the DNC’s dirty… Read More
Mr. Robot returns, as unsettlingly relevant as ever
Everyone’s favorite narratively unstable, obliquely framed, psychological hacker drama, Mr. Robot, returned to TV this week with its second season premiere. Buckle in, because if you weren’t already paranoid enough about cyber security, you’ll never trust another device or email again. As before, any articles written here on Mr. Robot won’t really contain too much… Read More
When Sharing Becomes TMI
Last week was apparently host to Social Media Day. I had assumed that every day was Social Media Day, but June 30 specifically marks the anniversary of the celebration initiated by Mashable seven years ago. Recognition of the transformative and communicative power of the tool that has helped define the 21st century so far is worthwhile,… Read More
Digging Up Dirt on the Competition
“In Virginia, recently,” jokes Conan O’Brien in a recent monologue, “a computer crash wiped out a decade’s worth of U.S. military data. However, this morning the Chinese government called and said, ‘No problem, we backed it up.’” Humor usually has a grain of truth to it; although in cases like these, it’s more like a… Read More
The Weakest Link
It’s often noted that employees, left untrained or unsupervised, can become the weakest link for an organization when it comes to its data security practices. Few incidents offer such a high profile example of this as last year’s breach at Morgan Stanley, in which a former broker in the firm’s wealth management group, Galen Marsh,… Read More
Millennials at high risk for a data breach
Reading the results of a survey conducted by Webroot, it’s pretty remarkable to learn that despite their peerless levels of tech savvy, millennials score lower on security than an older generation like the Baby Boomers. The data speaks to familiar experience, however, when I think about it. Multiple times have I seen friends and family… Read More