Business

Iran Taps Chafer APT Group amid Civil Aviation Crisis

Iran’s Chafer hacking group is targeting aviation repair and maintenance firms in an apparent effort to obtain information needed to shore up the safety of that country’s fleet of domestic aircraft, according to research by the firm Symantec.

China Using Big Brother-Like System to Track, Monitor Minorities

China has developed a Big Brother-like system of surveillance and big-data technology to monitor and incriminate ethnic minorities by using their personal information to deem them government threats.

Updated: A New Lobbying Group is fighting Right to Repair Laws

Consumer advocates and proponents of right to repair laws in 17 states have a new enemy to worry about. The Security Innovation Center, with backing of powerful tech industry groups, is arguing that letting consumers fix their own devices will empower hackers.*

Episode 84: Free Alexa! Cory Doctorow on jailbreaking Voice Assistants and hacking diversity with Rapid7’s Corey Thomas

In this week’s Security Ledger Podcast (#84): The 1990s era Digital Millennium Copyright Act made it a crime to subvert copy protections in software and hardware.  We speak with Cory Doctorow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation about his group’s efforts to win an exemption from that law for voice assistants like the Amazon Echo and Google Home. Also: February is Black History Month in the United States. We interview Corey Thomas, the Chief Executive Officer of the firm Rapid 7 about what it means to be a black man in the information security industry and about his path to the field.

EFF Seeks Right to Jailbreak Alexa, Voice Assistants

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is asking the Library of Congress to give owners of voice assistant devices like Amazon’s Echo, Google Home and other voice assistants the right to “jailbreak” the devices: freeing them from content control features designed to prevent users from running unauthorized code on those platforms.