Mind Matters Natural and Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis

Taghacking

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Virus detected hologram concept

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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Desperate woman trying to log into her computer forgot password

Forgot Your Password? Maybe You Can Forget It for Good! But Wait…

Tech companies are trying to develop workarounds for passwords via biometrics — facial recognition, fingerprints, and behavior patterns

A tech writer — maybe not the sort of person you’d expect — confesses that he is terrible with passwords. But he is hardly alone: In 2019, a survey conducted by Google and The Harris Poll found that 24% of Americans use “password,” “123456,” or some other ridiculously easy combination as the key to their online world. More than a third of people in the U.S. and Canada keep their passwords in notebooks or on Excel, according to a 2019 study from HYPR, the self-anointed “passwordless company.” And the same report detailed how 72% of people reuse their passwords in their professional and personal lives, while 49% just add or change a particular digit or character in their passwords when Read More ›

Chinese hacker. Laptop with binary computer code and china flag on the screen. Internet and network security.

U.S. and Allies Formally Accuse China of Exchange Server Hack

This isn’t the first time the Chinese-backed hacker group has infiltrated organizations

On Monday, July 19, three cybersecurity announcements were made: In response to the massive Microsoft Exchange Server hack, the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Norway, Japan, the E.U., and NATO formally accused the Chinese government of engaging in harmful cyberactivity. The U.S. Department of Justice published its indictment of four Chinese hackers associated with the Chinese government, known as APT40. The FBI, CSIS, and the NSA published a cybersecurity advisory cataloging the fifty tactics, techniques, and procedures used by Chinese state-sponsored hackers. Then, on Tuesday, the CSIA and the FBI published a report on state-sponsored international hacking groups that included accusations that the Chinese state-backed hackers infiltrated thirteen oil and natural gas pipeline operators between 2011 and 2013. In Read More ›

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Social media concept.

Fallout From Facebook’s Huge Privacy Hack: A Serious Unfriending

The Big Hack in April, in which even Mark Zuckerberg’s data got scraped, was hardly the first one Facebook faced

We’ll let engineering prof Karl Stephan start the story, comparing Facebook to God: For purposes of discussion, we will compare Facebook to the traditional Judeo-Christian God of the Old and New Testaments. And we will restrict the comparison primarily to two matters: communication and trust (or faith). Users of Facebook communicate with that entity by entering personal information into Facebook’s system. That act of communication is accompanied by a certain level of trust, or faith. Facebook promises to safeguard one’s information and not to reveal it to anyone else without your permission… Karl D. Stephan, “In Facebook we trust” at MercatorNet Safeguard the information? As recent news reports revealed, a month ago today, a hacker released roughly 533 million users’ Read More ›

Computer Hacks of Governments, Hospitals, Firms Increase

Even the ones we depend on are vulnerable. They’re not always anxious to talk about it

It’s not just companies, it’s countries that get hacked these days. Here are some examples from the United States: ➤ The big story was the Solar Winds case last month. One version is that an intern thought that SolarWinds123 was a safe password: At this point though, it’s still uncertain whether the password leak played a role in the SolarWinds hack, CNN noted, which is believed to be the largest foreign intrusion campaign in U.S. history. This month, White House national security adviser Anne Neuberger stated that approximately 100 different companies and nine federal agencies, including the one that oversees the country’s nuclear weapons, had been compromised by foreign hackers. Jody Serrano, “SolarWinds Officials Throw Intern Under the Bus for Read More ›

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explosion of a filament light bulb

AI Smash Hits 2020 Part I

An ultimate test of a successful technology is whether it has been reduced to practice. Has it made a financial impact on the market? Has it been adopted by the very picky US military? Has it changed lives? We’re going to count down the AI Smash Hits: the top ten AI success stories for 2020. Join Dr. Robert J. Marks as he Read More ›

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Binary code with China flag, data protection concept

Charges Reveal Extent of China-Sponsored Hacking in the West

Targets have included COVID-19 labs, dissidents, and religious groups
What’s new about the most recent indictment is the acknowledgment that China is working with known cybercriminals. Read More ›
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Check mark on shield, Security, safe, privacy or other Security concept background, Data Protection Concept, Technology Background

Hackers Seize Popular Twitter Accounts for Giant Bitcoin Scam

Scammers have gained access to a number of high-profile Twitter accounts, including those of Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Kanye West, and Elon Musk

Today, hackers gained control of a number of Twitter accounts, and used them to scam people out of their Bitcoin money. As we have reported before, the security within Bitcoin actually seems to facilitate scams. In the current ripoff, scammers have gained access to a number of high-profile Twitter accounts, including those of Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Kanye West, and Elon Musk. Their usual line is that they are seeking matching donations to a good cause. So if the user sends Bitcoin to a certain wallet address, the high-profile Twitter account will send a matching donation. However, the wallet address (and the promised match) are both frauds, and the money goes straight into the scammers’ pockets. It is unclear how Read More ›

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cybercrime, hacking and technology concept - male hacker with headphones and coding on laptop computer screen wiretapping or using computer virus program for cyber attack in dark room

The New Cyber Cold War with China

Cybersecurity strategist Peter Singer told Wired that there has never been a better time than the COVID-19 pandemic to be a government hacker

The United States has formally accused China of both funding and operating cells of hackers who infiltrate research labs working on responses to COVID-19.

Read More ›
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Hacks damage Facebook, kill Google+

The internet changes everything. For example, it makes the Big Guys more vulnerable, not less vulnerable, than bit players
Facebook gets blamed for everything from what Russia does to what American voters do. But the people who seem to think Mark Zuckerberg and company have superpowers for changing the world are mistaken. Facebook was not able to fend off a damaging hack. Read More ›
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AI Is Not (Yet) an Intelligent Cause

So-called “white hat” hackers who test the security of AI have found it surprisingly easy to fool.
Hutson describes one test last year where a computer scientist at UC Berkeley subtly altered a stop sign with stickers. It fooled an autonomous vehicle’s image recognition system into “thinking” it was a 45 mph speed limit sign. Humans could immediately recognize the stop sign, but the car did not. Autonomous car makers wonder, could hackers turn them into terror weapons? Read More ›