Please try the URL privacy information feature enabled by clicking the flashlight icon above. This will reveal two icons after each link the body of the digest. The shield takes you to a breakdown of Terms of Service for the site - however only a small number of sites are covered at the moment. The flashlight take you to an analysis of the various trackers etc. that the linked site delivers. Please let the website maintainer know if you find this useful or not. As a RISKS reader, you will probably not be surprised by what is revealed…
The thermometer showed a 103.5-degree fever, and her 10-year-old's asthma was flaring up. Mary Bolender, who lives in Las Vegas, needed to get her daughter to an emergency room, but her 2005 Chrysler van would not start. The cause was not a mechanical problem—it was her lender. Ms. Bolender was three days behind on her monthly car payment. Her lender, C.A.G. Acceptance of Mesa, Ariz., remotely activated a device in her car's dashboard that prevented her car from starting. Before she could get back on the road, she had to pay more than $389, money she did not have that morning in March. http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/09/24/miss-a-payment-good-luck-moving-that-car Remote auto shutdown—what could go wrong with THAT?
[This is getting more than boring. I warned about this 10 years ago. DF] http://thehackernews.com/2014/09/tripadvisors-viator-hit-by-massive-14_24.html TripAdvisor has reportedly been hit by a massive data breach at its Online travel booking and review website Viator, that may have exposed payment card details and account credentials of its customers, affecting an estimated 1.4 million of its customers. The San Francisco-based Viator, acquired by TripAdvisor—the world's largest travel site—for US$200 million back in July, admitted late on Friday that the intruders have hacked into some of its customers' payment card accounts and made unauthorized charges. The data breach was discovered in the bookings made through Viator's websites and mobile offerings that could potentially affect payment card data. http://thehackernews.com/2014/09/tripadvisors-viator-hit-by-massive-14_24.html#sthash.Zw5JjmMy.dpuf
TrustedSec, 25 Sep 2014 https://www.trustedsec.com/september-2014/shellshock-dhcp-rce-proof-concept/ [See also The NYT article. PGN] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/26/technology/security-experts-expect-shellshock-software-bug-to-be-significant.html?rref=technology&module=Ribbon&version=origin®ion=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Technology&pgtype=Blogs&_r=0
Antone Gonsalves, CSO | 25 Sep 2014 The toolkit is capable of infecting computers, routers, and IoT devices to launch large-scale simultaneous DDoS attacks http://www.infoworld.com/article/2687834/security/spike-toolkit-seeks-routers-internet-of-things-for-ddos-botnet.html
Brian Jackson, *IT Business*, 24 Sep 2014 http://www.itbusiness.ca/article/apple-pulls-back-first-update-to-ios-8 Apple Inc. has retracted its first update to iOS 8 since releasing the major update to its platform last week after users reported the update disabled their device's ability to connect with a cell network or use Touch ID.
We forgot our password again at savannah.gnu.org. "Note: The password should be long enough or containing multiple character classes: symbols, digits (0-9), upper and lower case letters (for instance: chill_Urban5Incest). pwqcheck options are 'match=0 max%6 min$,24,11,8,7': The maximum allowed password length: 256 Checks for common substrings are disabled. The minimum length for passwords consisting of characters from one class: 24 The minimum length for passwords consisting of characters from two classes that don't meet requirements for passphrases: 24 The minimum length for passphrases: 11 The minimum length for passwords consisting of characters from three classes: 8 The minimum length for passwords consisting of characters from four classes: 7
[Note: This item comes from friend Bruce Kushnick. DLH] (via Dave Farber) (Excerpted from the new book: The Book of Broken Promises: $400 Billion Broadband Scandal and Free the Net) Fast Lane, Slow Lane—"No Lane"—End Game in Telecommunications http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bruce-kushnick/fast-lane-slow-lane--no-l_b_5865996.html Forget about Net Neutrality's fast lane vs slow lane. We are at the end game in telecommunications and we should all be talking about the "No Lane". Net Neutrality is like one of those Rorschach Tests used in psychological examinations where everyone sees something different in the same picture. With a record 3.7 million comments filed at the FCC in the Open Internet proceeding, as of September 15th, 2014, one thing is clear -- America is angst-ridden about something. The most common theme in the last round of comments filed is now the-easy-to-remember chant—"fast lane vs slow lane", while over the last decade it has referred to the blocking or degrading of service. But the truth is—the angst is not only from 'Net Neutrality'. According to an ACSI survey, in 2014, Comcast and Time Warner are leading the list as the "most hated companies in America", while "ISPs", (actually the phone and cable companies, including AT&T and Centurylink) were also at the bottom of customer satisfaction. While Net Neutrality focuses on important issues, it doesn't address or cure anything to do with stopping the "No Lane"-- the end game if AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner continue on their path. These companies are the incumbent wireline and cable companies that control most of the wires in the US and that also means that they control all wireless services. Control of the wires also gives them control over all services, including competitor services, but more importantly it gives them the ability to control who gets upgraded and who doesn't, or what prices customers' pay, or worse, who will be 'shut off' and end up in a 'Digital Dead Zone'. How bad is the broadband 'landscape'? A recent speech by FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler brings the "No Lane", filed with the "have nots", into focus. "At the low end of throughput, 4 Mbps and 10 Mbps, the majority of Americans have a choice of only two providers. That is what economists call a "duopoly", a market place that is typically characterized by less than vibrant competition." "At 25 Mbps, there is simply no competitive choice for most Americans. Stop and let that sink in...Three-quarters of American homes have no competitive choice for the essential infrastructure for 21st century economics and democracy. Included in that is almost 20 percent who have no service at all!" "Things only get worse as you move to 50 Mbps where 82 percent of consumers lack a choice." Ironically, (as we mentioned in our previous article), America's customers have been charged about $400 billion dollars to have the entire US upgraded to fiber optic services by 2010, or there abouts, with speeds of at least 45 Mbps in both directions—and that was the speed of broadband in 1992; by 2014, we should have been a 'gigabit nation'. Wheeler, unfortunately, appears to be in denial about the other pressing issues—And it is going to get worse. The "No Lane": Shutting off the Copper—and Force-Migrating to Wireless. At an investor meeting, a CITI Investment Research analyst asked Fran Shammo, Verizon's CFO, about "the homes where you don't have FiOS. I think it's... maybe roughly 8 million homes...". Fran Shammo responded: 'VoiceLink' and 'harvesting' are the plan. "Outside of the FiOS footprint obviously, really we are taking two measures there. One is the Wireless portfolio and replacing some of that that old voice legacy copper voice with our LTE voice product that Wireless has been selling across the nation for almost two years now called Home Phone Connect. Within Wireline, they have a very similar product called VoiceLink which in essence is the same thing. "So we will try to replace that copper legacy with those technologies. But look, I mean, outside, this is kind of where you say it's you have to nurture it and harvest what you have and we know that we are not going to be able to compete with speed in that environment and we will continue to do the best we can." Harvesting customers is essentially getting as much profits out of a customer as possible by raising rates until the customer screams uncle and leaves, or stays but is being gouged. But the primary goal is to shut off the copper, so make as much as possible until then. Meanwhile, VoiceLink caused a revolt on Fire Island, New York. After the Sandy Storm, Verizon's plan was to not fix the copper utility networks in various parts of New York and New Jersey and force customers onto a 2G-styled wireless service called VoiceLink. Fire Island residents attacked this plan and in 2014 they were wired with fiber optics; Mantoloking New Jersey wasn't as fortunate or vocal and is still forced onto VoiceLink. Unfortunately, AT&T has an identical plan, but they call it the "IP Transition". This chart, supplied by AT&T to the FCC, is the current and after picture about its plans for the Carbon Hill Alabama Internet Protocol (IP) transition trials, which is supposed to migrate customers from the current networks to Internet-based networks. In this rather jaw-dropping chart we see that AT&T will shut off 60% of working wired services to be replaced with their own wireless service, while 4% can't get anything upgraded so far. And their wireless product includes a VoiceLink-like service. (I note that as of the filing, VoiceLink couldn't do data applications or Internet service.) How exactly does shutting off the working phone lines (and not upgrading the customers), or worse, replacing the line with an inferior and expensive wireless service constitute a "transition" to IP protocols exactly? Net Neutrality's Broadband Utility Push and the Disconnect. To read the Rest: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bruce-kushnick/fast-lane-slow-lane--no-l_b_5865996.html Bruce Kushnick, Executive Director,New Networks Institute
California Amends Data Breach Notification Law and Prohibitions on Use of Social Security Numbers On September 30, 2014, Governor Jerry Brown signed into law several amendments of California's data breach notification law and California's prohibition on certain uses of social security numbers. These amendments take effect on January 1, 2015. Implementation of Security Procedures and Practices to Protect Personal Information The recent breaches of security at national chain retailers such as Target and Home Depot have prompted calls for laws that better protect digitized personal information. Current California law requires organizations that own or license personal information about Californians to implement and maintain "reasonable security procedures and practices" to protect that personal information from unauthorized access, destruction, use, modification and disclosure. In the event of a known or suspected breach, the law also requires those organizations to notify California residents whose information may have been compromised of the breach. California's Civil Code provides that California residents who have suffered harm attributable to a breach of these requirements may sue the companies that failed to comply and may recover damages. One of the new amendments extends the first requirement (that of implementing and maintaining reasonable security procedures and practices) to organizations that maintain personal information, even if they don't own it or license it from others. Thus, businesses that host or otherwise retain data for others, such as cloud and co-location service providers, and retail businesses that collect information from their customers but do not own or license it, must now implement and maintain reasonable security procedures and practices if that data contains any personal information. For purposes of California's data breach law, "personal information" means a person's first name or initial and last name in combination with any one or more of the following data elements: (i) social security number, (ii) driver's license number, (iii) California identification card number, (iv) an account, credit or debit card number in combination with any required security code, access code or password or (v) any individually identifiable information regarding the person's medical history, medical treatment or diagnosis by a health care professional. However, personal information that is encrypted does not trigger the law's compliance requirements. The new amendment does not specify the scope of what it means to "maintain" personal information. Consequently, "maintain" can be interpreted quite broadly; and businesses that collect personal information about California residents would be prudent to comply with the law's requirements, at least until future cases provide clarification. The law also does not specify what security procedures and practices will be considered sufficient, other than to say that those measures must be "appropriate to the nature of the [personal] information." Thus, the law leaves it up to each business to implement what it deems to be reasonable security measures under the circumstances. Whether those measures are sufficient or insufficient will be determined in retrospect by a court when the business is sued for failure to comply with the law. Offers of Identity Theft Prevention and Mitigation Services Another recent amendment requires businesses experiencing a breach of their security systems to offer all affected persons not less than twelve months of free identity theft prevention and mitigation services along with all information necessary to take advantage of the offer. This applies only to those who own or license the personal information that has been compromised, not to those who merely maintain that information. This amendment does not specify what identity theft and mitigation services to offer or any minimum benefits that must be included with those services. Amendment of Prohibitions on Certain Uses of Social Security Numbers California law currently prohibits businesses from (i) publicly posting or displaying social security numbers, (ii) printing social security numbers on cards required to access products or services, (iii) requiring individuals to transmit their social security numbers over the Internet in an unsecured or unencrypted fashion, (iv) requiring the use of social security numbers to access Internet web sites without also requiring a password or unique personal identification number or other authentication device to access that web site, and (v) printing social security numbers on any materials that are mailed, unless state or federal law requires it. The new California amendments also make it illegal to sell, offer to sell, or advertise for sale any individual's social security number. However, the release of a social security number for a purpose allowed by federal or state law, or as part of a larger transaction where the release is necessary in order to accomplish a legitimate business purpose, does not violate the new law. Tips and Recommendations. (1) Most businesses, regardless of where located, that maintain computerized databases that include personal information will have to comply with California's breach notification law because those databases are likely to include personal information about California residents. (2) If possible, Companies that own, license or maintain computerized data that include personal information should encrypt either the names of the individuals contained in their databases or the data elements or both. The requirements in California's breach notification law to provide reasonable security for personal information and to notify those affected by a breach in that security do not apply if the personal information is encrypted. (3) Offering theft prevention and mitigation services following a breach is now mandatory for companies that actually own or license personal information, and the offer must comply with the new requirements mentioned above. Companies that maintain personal information (but do not own or license it) who experience a breach should consider this type of offer as a form of best practices to mitigate harm, even though this part of the law does not apply to them. (4) Keep in mind that each state enacts its own laws in the data privacy area and those laws vary significantly from one another. At least three other states, Florida, Kentucky and Iowa, recently amended their personal information breach notification laws, and California has enacted several previous amendments since its law first became effective in 2003. This is an area of the law that changes frequently, and California is often in the forefront of those changes. Companies must keep up to date on protection and breach notification requirements that affect how they conduct their business in all states. The changes described in this client update are contained in Assembly Bill 1710.
"Yada yada. A disparaging response, indicating that something previously said was predictable, repetitive or tedious... This phrase is a modern-day equivalent of 'blah, blah, blah'... incessant talk - yatter, jabber, chatter." http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/yada-yada.html The NSA has so buried itself in yottabytes ("YB") of boring Big Data in aptly named Bluffdale ("Bluffbytes" ?), Utah, that it can't make any sense of it, as the following article indicates. (There are an incredible number of excellent links in the original article; too many to include here.) How American Intelligence Works in the 21st Century, *HuffPost, 30 Sep 2014 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-engelhardt/how-american-intelligence-works_b_5906246.html Failure Is Success Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com What are the odds? You put about $68 billion annually into a maze of 17 major intelligence outfits. You build them glorious headquarters. You create a global surveillance state for the ages. You listen in on your citizenry and gather their communications in staggering quantities. Your employees even morph into avatars and enter video-game landscapes, lest any Americans betray a penchant for evil deeds while in entertainment mode. You collect information on visits to porn sites just in case, one day, blackmail might be useful. You pass around naked photos of them just for... well, the salacious hell of it. Your employees even use aspects of the system you've created to stalk former lovers and, within your arcane world, that act of "spycraft" gains its own name: LOVEINT. You listen in on foreign leaders and politicians across the planet. You bring on board hundreds of thousands of crony corporate employees, creating the sinews of an intelligence-corporate complex of the first order. You break into the `backdoors' of the data centers of major Internet outfits to collect user accounts. You create new outfits within outfits, including an ever-expanding secret military and intelligence crew embedded inside the military itself (and not counted among those 17 agencies). Your leaders lie to Congress and the American people without, as far as we can tell, a flicker of self-doubt. Your acts are subject to secret courts, which only hear your versions of events and regularly rubberstamp them—and whose judgments and substantial body of lawmaking are far too secret for Americans to know about. You have put extraordinary effort into ensuring that information about your world and the millions of documents you produce doesn't make it into our world. You even have the legal ability to gag American organizations and citizens who might speak out on subjects that would displease you (and they can't say that their mouths have been shut). You undoubtedly spy on Congress. You hack into congressional computer systems. And if whistleblowers inside your world try to tell the American public anything unauthorized about what you're doing, you prosecute them under the Espionage Act, as if they were spies for a foreign power (which, in a sense, they are, since you treat the American people as if they were a foreign population). You do everything to wreck their lives and—should one escape your grasp -- you hunt him implacably to the ends of the Earth. As for your top officials, when their moment is past, the revolving door is theirs to spin through into a lucrative mirror life in the intelligence-corporate complex. What They Didn't Know [...] Producing Subprime Intelligence as a Way of Life [...]
Craig Timberg, *The Washington Post, 30 Sep 2014 http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/09/30/holder-urges-tech-companies-to-leave-device-backdoors-open-for-police/ Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said on Tuesday that new forms of encryption capable of locking law enforcement officials out of popular electronic devices imperil investigations of kidnappers and sexual predators, putting children at increased risk. [...]
FYI—Apparently, IMSI/SSID/BluetoothID catchers aren't good enough (or profitable enough for mobile operators). Here comes "LTE Direct Discovery", which puts a tracking beacon in every pocket! "[LTE Direct] has a range of up to 500 meters, far more than either Wi-Fi or Bluetooth." So basically, you can now reliably capture the ID's of every cellphone that you pass on the freeway. "LTE Direct" aka "Proximate Discovery" aka "Ambient Awareness". BTW, I'm curious about how the NSA/FBI backdoor for "LTE Discovery" information works. Here are Qualcomm's marketing materials: https://www.qualcomm.com/media/documents/files/lte-direct-whitepaper.pdf Size: 101 KB (102,427 bytes) https://www.qualcomm.com/system/files/document/files/Research_LTE-D_White_Paper.pdf Size: 479 KB (489,511 bytes) https://www.qualcomm.com/media/documents/files/creating-a-digital-6th-sense-with-lte-direct.pdf Size: 2.3 MB (2,411,428 bytes) https://www.qualcomm.com/media/documents/files/business-opportunities-beyond-ultrabroadband-proximity-services-and-lte-direct.pdf Size: 1.4 MB (1,446,036 bytes) https://www.qualcomm.com/media/documents/files/lte-proximity-services.pdf Size: 2.4 MB (2,491,591 bytes) https://www.qualcomm.com/media/documents/files/lte-proximity-services.pdf Size: 2.4 MB (2,491,591 bytes) https://www.qualcomm.com/media/documents/files/enabling-proximity-services-via-lte-device-broadcast.pdf Size: 3.1 MB (3,177,036 bytes) - - - - Tom Simonite, 29 Sep 2014 Future Smartphones Won't Need Cell Towers to Connect http://www.technologyreview.com/news/530996/future-smartphones-wont-need-cell-towers-to-connect/ Qualcomm, Facebook, and other tech companies are experimenting with technology that lets smartphones use their LTE radio to connect directly to other devices up to 500 meters away. [long item PGN-truncated]
There's a timely article by Geoff Huston in the September 2014 issue of *The Internet Protocol Journal* that may be worthy of your attentions. It's strongly recommended reading for those of you not familiar with Internet security problems. http://www.protocoljournal.org
The FDA recently announced a two-day workshop to gather public comments on medical device security. Here's the announcement, plus a commentary. http://www.fda.gov/MedicalDevices/NewsEvents/WorkshopsConferences/ucm412979.htm http://blog.secure-medicine.org/2014/09/fda-to-hold-workshop-on-medical-device.html This workshop is follow up to the 2013 draft FDA guidance on medical device security http://www.fda.gov/MedicalDevices/Safety/AlertsandNotices/ucm356423.htm http://www.fda.gov/downloads/MedicalDevices/DeviceRegulationandGuidance/GuidanceDocuments/UCM356190.pdf
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