- “‘Chaos Is the Point’: Russian Hackers and Trolls Grow Stealthier in 2020” – The New York Times. Not surprisingly U.S. and western officials expect a cyber onslaught during the 2020 election. However, they also expect new players on the field and new methods to disrupt and influence the election. But of greatest concern, many states, localities, and private sector entities throughout the election system are woefully unprepared. Some claim many systems are not poised to address the tactics used by the Russians in 2016 let alone some of the new attacks being seen.
- “The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It” – The New York Times. By scraping sites like Facebook and using an artificial intelligence algorithm, a company has pioneered a technology that is currently being used to allow law enforcement agencies to identify people from photographs by matching them from publicly available pictures on the internet. The privacy implications from this breakthrough are still being grappled with.
- “Many companies are not taking the California Consumer Privacy Act seriously—the attorney general needs to act” – Consumer Reports. A number of companies are openly planning to defy the consumer provisions in the California Consumer Privacy Act. Given public statements by the California Attorney General’s office about only being able to bring a handful of cases a year, if companies are actually intending to not comply with the privacy statute.
- “Iran can use cyberattacks against the U.S. That’s not nearly as bad as it sounds.” And “Get ready for serious cyberattacks from Iran, experts say” – Washington Post. One expert downplays the risks posed by Iranian retaliatory cyberattacks given their capability and the limited impact of most cyberattacks while other experts predict imminent and possibly dire attacks from Iran.
- “‘Online and vulnerable’: Experts find nearly three dozen U.S. voting systems connected to internet” – NBC News. Despite the federal government and vendors claiming that no voting or lection systems are connected to the internet, and advocacy organization finds more than 35 systems have wireless systems protected only by firewalls that can be breached fairly easily.
- “Hackers Are Breaking Directly Into Telecom Companies to Take Over Customer Phone Numbers” – Motherboard. Entrepreneurial hackers have moved beyond SIM swapping and are instead targeting telecom employees to hack directly into their systems to achieve the same goal of compromising phones.
Further Reading (January 27)
Published
Michael Kans 