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Ransomware Attacks on Public Institutions

Hackers are always coming up with new approaches, keeping IT staff on their toes

by Karl Stephan In what is just the latest of a lengthening series of ransomware attacks, the sheriff’s office of San Bernardino County, California reportedly paid over $1 million in ransom to an Eastern-Europe-based hacking group.  About half the money was paid by insurance and the county paid the rest from its risk-management fund.  Reporters for the Los Angeles Times were unable to determine exactly who authorized the payments, which enabled the county to restore its email servers, in-car computers, and law enforcement databases.  According to the report, the FBI discourages payments to ransomware hackers, but almost half of the state and local governments attacked worldwide pay anyway.  A survey conducted by the British security firm Sophos was cited in the report, which said that Read More ›

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Physicality Of Data And The Road To Inherently Safer Computing

The software industry today is precisely where the chemical industry was in 1978; hazard control is a mere afterthought

“The Physicality Of Data And The Road To Inherently Safer Computing” was originally published by Forbes, August 24, 2021. David Kruger is Co-Founder and VP of Strategy for Absio Corporation and a co-inventor of Absio’s Software-defined Distributed Key Cryptography (SDKC). Our current concept of cybersecurity is to defend against attacks and remedy failure by erecting more and better defenses. That’s a fundamental mistake in thinking that guarantees failure. Why? Because it’s mathematically impossible for a defensive strategy to fully succeed, as explained in the previous installment of this article series. Another even more fundamental mistake in thinking is that cyberattackers are the cause of our woes. They aren’t. They’re the effect. A hazard is a potential source of harm. Cyberattackers target certain Read More ›

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Can Your Tablet Really Tell People Where You Are?

Yes, and it'll talk louder with the next gen protocols. But there's a way to shut it up

If someone can see your traffic as it is transmitted across the “first hop” physical network and your devices are using the manufacturer-assigned MAC address, they can discover the unique address assigned to your device.

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