In-brief: a report by the firm IOActive warns that industrial and home robots may be vulnerable to remote, software based attacks.
Hardware
Updated: The CloudPets Incident is Everything That’s Wrong with Consumer Internet of Things
In-brief: the apparent leak of data on owners of CloudPets connected stuffed animals underscores lax security and privacy practices that are common among connected products firms. (Updated with comment from Troy Hunt. PFR 2/28/2017.)
Silent Epidemic: Data Theft has become a Public Health Crisis | Digital Guardian
In-brief: One in four Americans was the victim of data theft, but policy makers can’t find the spirit to act. What if I said that there was a disease that affected one in four adults in the U.S.? This disease caused pain and hardship and the costs of curing it were considerable – ranging to thousands of dollars per patient? And, again: one in four people contacted this disease – 25% of the adult population?Most epidemiologists would consider a disease that widely spread to be an “epidemic.” After all, the CDC considers an influenza outbreak to be an “epidemic” when around 7% of morbidity (deaths) in a given observation period are due to the flu. Here in the U.S., however, there’s a long-standing affliction bearing down on a quarter of the population, but nary a mention of the words “epidemic.” In fact, officials who monitor this disease are loath to […]
New Website Is Clearing House for Medical Device Vulnerabilities
In-brief: A website run by the National Health ISAC will serve as a clearing house for information on security vulnerabilities in medical devices, the first of its kind in the US.
File-less Malware Attacks Target Bank, Business Networks
In-brief: Security experts are warning that so-called “file-less” attacks on commercial networks operated by banks and other firms are spreading and harvesting sensitive information, like administrator user names and passwords.
