In-brief: Close to five billion “fuzzing” tests conducted during 2016 reveal protocols used by industrial control systems, vehicles and Internet of Things devices to be weaker, on average, with many crashing hundreds of times and revealing vulnerabilities that could be used by malicious actors. (Editor’s note: added comment by Chris Clark. Aug 9 2017 – PFR)
In-brief: Russian hackers aren’t the biggest threat to the security and integrity of elections says Bev Harris of Black Box Voting. Instead, it’s a more common enemy: run of the mill political corruption, mostly at the local level. Also: Eric Hodge of CyberScout talks about the challenges of helping states secure their election systems. Problem number one: recalcitrant voting machine makers.
In-brief: is it ever the case that things happen that “nobody saw coming”? Our guest on this week’s podcast would say “no.” He is Richard Clarke, a former National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection and Counter-terrorism for the United States and a veteran of four administrations, from President Ronald Reagan through to President George W. Bush. We talk about modern-day Cassandras: people who are warning about looming catastrophes, mostly in vain.
In-brief: Machine learning is all the rage in the information security industry. But a study by Endgame and University of Virginia suggests that it may be vulnerable to manipulation by sophisticated AI-driven tools.
In-brief: A global federation of labs will test the security of medical devices, according to an announcement on Monday by a consortium of healthcare industry firms, universities and technology firms. (Updated with comments from Dr. Nordenberg. PFR 7/25/2017)
