Target provided some guidance on its fourth quarter earnings on Friday and, not incidentally, dropped another bombshell in the long-running story about the November data breach that exposed credit card information on some 40 million customers. It turns out that the credit card numbers were just the tip of a much larger iceberg. The box store retailer now claims that its investigation of that incident revealed that data on around 70 million customers was exposed, including e-mail addresses, phone numbers, mailing addresses and more. In a statement, Target said that much of the stolen data was “partial in nature,” but that it will reach out to customers whose e-mail addresses were stolen to warn them about potential fraud, including “phishing” e-mails that purport to come from Target. “I know that it is frustrating for our guests to learn that this information was taken and we are truly sorry they are […]
Technologies
Wolfram Floats Common Language For Internet Of Things
Amid all the “connected device” hoopla coming out of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) this week, one of the most interesting announcements came from an unexpected corner: Wolfram Research, a maker of high-end software that is used in scientific research. On Monday, the company’s CEO, Stephen Wolfram, announced The Wolfram Connected Devices Project – an initiative that will comprise both a common catalog of connected devices and a common language to connect them. “Connected devices are central to our long-term strategy of injecting sophisticated computation and knowledge into everything,” Wolfram said. “With the Wolfram Language we now have a way to describe and compute about things in the world. Connected devices are what we need to measure and interface with those things.” Wolfram’s short-term goal is to begin cataloging IoT devices and making those devices ‘searchable’ via its Wolfram Alpha web portal – what the company describes as a ‘computational […]
Siemens Patches Holes In Industrial Control Switch
A security researcher discovered two, serious security holes in a switch by Siemens that could allow an attacker to hijack industrial control system hardware that is heavily used by energy and transportation firms, among others. IOActive, a security consulting firm in Seattle, Washington, said on Thursday that Eireann Leverett, a senior security consultant, discovered two vulnerabilities in Siemens’ SCALANCE X-200 Switches. The vulnerabilities were in a web server component that provided administrators with access to features needed to configure the switches. If exploited, they would have allowed an attacker who had access to the same network as the SCALANCE switch to perform administrative actions on the devices, including updating the switch firmware and hijack active web sessions – all without needing to first log in to the device. SCALANCE is a family of Ethernet switches that connect to industrial control system (ICS) devices including programmable logic controllers (PLCs) and Human […]
Cars Become Gadget-ized, Govt. Warns On Privacy Risk
Your car is a lot more than just a car these days. Forget about the in-car entertainment system with the USB port and the iPhone jack. If you drive a late-model vehicle, it has been tricked out with hundreds of wireless sensors to monitor everything from tire pressure to braking and acceleration. These sensors communicate over a VAN – or Vehicle Area Network – that’s not all that different from the LAN that connects the computers, servers, printers and other peripheral devices in your office. Beyond that, automakers are taking their cue from mobile device makers- and for good reason. Apple booked $10 billion in sales through its AppStore in 2013 alone. That’s not too shabby, when you consider that much of that revenue came in $.99 increments! But, as Jessica Naziri (@jessicanaziri) noted in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times, cars are the new gadgets. After all, the Detroit Auto Show is still […]
CES: The Security Questions Nobody Wants You To Ask
A note that CES – the Consumer Electronics Show – is once again upon us. Prepare yourself for three or four days of tipsy reporting from the mainstream media about all the gee whiz gadgets that will soon be yours…or not. Let’s face it: a lot of what’s shown at CES is proof of concept stuff and some of it is just too downright silly to ever catch on. Remember HAPIFork? The “smart” fork that would warn you when you were shoveling grub into your maw too quickly? Right. Product security and data privacy are almost always lost in the excitement over the new gadgets and the TUSs. (Televisions of Unusual Size? I don’t think they exist!) That’s why, over on the Veracode blog, I put together a quick list of impertinent questions that every security-minded CES attendee should have at their fingertips. The questions cover a wide range of […]
