America is the world’s innovation engine. The First Industrial Revolution, 1760 to 1830, took place in England. But by the time of the Second Industrial Revolution in the mid-19th century America had already taken over as the premier source of…
Year: 2014
The Secret Meanings of Passwords
As the New York Times relates, it was far too easy to reconstruct passwords after the attacks of September 11, 2001, killed 658 Cantor Fitzgerald employees at the World Trade Center. The financial firm had a policy that all employees…
Tagged with: passwords
Cyberthreat to Vital Infrastructure: This is Not a Movie
In the 2007 film “Live Free or Die Hard” NYPD Detective John McClane (Bruce Willis) is on a mission to stop a group of terrorist-hackers that have crashed the stock market and are targeting America’s infrastructure including the FAA and…
Celebrity Nudes and Mobile Malware – Will Your Phone Be Next?
Recently, hundreds of intimate and revealing photos of female celebrities, including Oscar-winner Jennifer Lawrence, were posted online, apparently after being stolen from their iCloud accounts. Some of those images, many of which were presumably taken with iPhones and other Apple…
Are Hackers Shopping for Your Data on EBay?
Consumers visit eBay to bid on everything from abacuses to zithers. Now it turns out that some site users are getting hijacked by scammers. Some product listings have redirected eBay visitors to sites where criminals harvest their passwords. As a…
Tagged with: eBay
Home Depot Data Breach Could Be the Biggest One – So Far
The data breach at Home Depot is shaping up to be the biggest one to date, dwarfing even the massive leak of 40 million credit card records at Target last year. The New York Times reports that the number of…
Is 2014 “The Year of Encryption”?
The MIT Technology Review suggests that 2014 is “The Year of Encryption.” Yahoo encrypted its email service. Google now encrypts search terms. Microsoft says it will encrypt all the data to and from its networks by the end…
Tagged with: The Year of Data Encryption
Russian Hackers Collect Over One Billion Passwords
The New York Times reports that Russian criminal hackers have collected the largest-known horde of stolen Internet credentials ever, including 1.2 billion username/password combinations and half a billion email addresses. The theft dwarfs the recent theft from Target, which involved…
Security Firm Fakes a Hack Attack on a Hedge Fund, Boasts about Thwarting It
In a June interview with CNBC, cybersecurity firm BAE Systems said that it “detected” and “thwarted” a security breach at a large hedge fund that crippled the fund’s high-speed trading strategy and sent information about its trades to unknown off-site…
Tagged with: BAE Systems
When it comes to Data Security, You Can’t Always Trust Trusted Insiders
AT&T Wireless was recently hit with a security breach that compromised the call records and social security numbers of an undisclosed number of customers. We’ve commented before that companies are reluctant to disclose data breaches because it makes them look…
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