Black Friday just got a bit more black. Target Corp., one of the U.S.’s leading retail outfits, confirmed in a statement Thursday morning that reports of a massive breach of the company’s payment infrastructure, resulting in the exposure of data on an estimated 40 million credit and debit card accounts. The statement, released on Target’s website, follows media reports on Wednesday citing reports from leading credit card issuers. In it, the company confirmed “it is aware of unauthorized access to payment card data that may have impacted certain guests making credit and debit card purchases in its U.S. stores.” According to statements by Target, the credit card data was stolen between Nov. 27 and Dec. 15, 2013 and includes customer name, credit or debit card number, and the card’s expiration date and the CVV, or three-digit security code. Shoppers at the company’s U.S. stores were affected, but the breach did not affect Target’s Canadian […]
Retail
Open Source IoT Platform Would Boost Security
Interoperability (or the lack of it) stands out as one of the major obstacles to the expansion of the Internet of Things. As we’ve discussed on this blog, the lack of a common platform for Internet-enabled devices to communicate on has resulted in a balkanized IoT landscape. Nest’s smart thermometer and smoke detector communicate and share information famously, but if you want to link them with some smart appliance from GE or LG, you’re out of luck. But that may soon be changing. On Tuesday, The Linux Foundation announced a new, cross industry consortium of major IT infrastructure makers, software vendors and electronics firms. The AllSeen Alliance is tasked with developing a common, open source platform that allows hardware and software firms to unite their creations, regardless of their brand – and provide basic security features, to boot. The Alliance counts electronics giants like Panasonic, Qualcomm, LG and Sharp as […]
BitCoin’s Popularity Is Undermining Promises of Anonymity
The virtual currency Bitcoin has soared in value against the U.S. dollar in recent months, topping out a staggering $913 USD to 1 Bitcoin (or BTC) as of late Tuesday. The currency had many ups and downs since it was launched in January 2009. But its main attraction, all along, has been anonymity. Unlike any other online payment system, Bitcoin transactions – like cash transactions – cannot be traced back to specific individuals. Also like cash, they cannot be reversed. Both those factors give Bitcoin users the confidence that their online purchasing activity – whether computer hardware or contraband will remain private. But a group of researchers at two U.S. universities have released a paper that suggests reports of Bitcoin’s anonymity may (to paraphrase Twain) “be greatly exaggerated.” Specifically: the researchers found that, by culling a variety of open source data using public data from the Bitcoin Peer to Peer network and from […]
Verizon: New Cloud Encryption Service Will Secure IoT Devices
Identity is one of the biggest challenges facing companies that are deploying products for the “Internet of Things,” as well as traditional enterprises that find IoT technologies of all types knocking at the door. The question, in short, is “how do I know that this device is legitimate, and ties back to an identity that I trust with access to my network resources and data? Of course, identity management has always been an aching problem in the enterprise space. The problem with the IoT is scale – given the sheer size of the IoT (30 billion connected devices by 2020), you can add a few “zeros” onto the number of devices that could, potentially, be seeking access to your network at any time. [Related read: Identity Management’s Next Frontier: The Interstate] It makes sense that, in a distributed environment like that, the cloud may be the best place to address […]
At FTC Forum, Experts Wonder: Is Privacy Passé?
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) used a one-day workshop to highlight security and privacy issues prompted by so-called “Internet of Things.” But attendees at the event may have walked away with a more ambiguous message, as prominent technologists and industry representatives questioned whether conventional notions of privacy had much relevance in a world populated by billions of Internet-connected devices. “I don’t feel like privacy is dead,” keynote speaker Vint Cerf, a Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, told an audience at the FTC workshop. “I do feel like privacy will be increasingly difficult for us to achieve,” Cerf warned. And Cerf wasn’t alone in wondering whether that might not be such a bad thing – or even that unusual. “Is privacy an anomaly?” Cerf wondered aloud, recalling his experience living in a small, German town where the “postmaster knew what everyone was doing.” Our modern concept of being ‘alone […]
