Search Results for "Privacy"

What’s In Your Bucket? Data For The Taking In Amazon S3 Containers

Security is one of the main obstacles to greater cloud adoption. When it gets right down to it: companies that own sensitive data are reluctant to release control of it to a third party without ample reassurance that it won’t be lost or stolen. Given that’s the case, the results from an analysis of Amazon’s cloud-based Simple Storage Service (S3) by the security firm Rapid7 won’t ease privacy and security fears surrounding cloud-based storage and applications. In that study, Rapid7 researchers surveyed 12,328 Amazon S3 “buckets” – virtual containers for stored data. The results: 1,951 of those buckets were publicly accessible – around 1 of every 6. Within those 2,000-odd public buckets were 126 billion (with a “B”) files. That’s right – 126 billion. The sheer amount of data was too large for Rapid7 to audit each file individually, so the company sampled 40,000 publicly visible files and found that […]

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Mobile Phone Use Patterns: The New Fingerprint

Mobile phone use may be a more accurate identifier of individuals than even their own fingerprints, according to research published on the web site of the scientific journal Nature. Scientists at MIT and the Université catholique de Louvain in Belgium analyzed 15 months of mobility data for 1.5 million individuals who the same mobile carrier. Their analysis, “Unique in the Crowd: the privacy bounds of human mobility” showed that data from just four, randomly chosen “spatio-temporal points” (for example, mobile device pings to carrier antennas) was enough to uniquely identify 95% of the individuals, based on their pattern of movement. Even with just two randomly chosen points, the researchers say they could uniquely characterize around half of the 1.5 million mobile phone users. The research has profound implications for privacy, suggesting that the use of mobile devices makes it impossible to remain anonymous – even without the use of tracking […]

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Botnet Of Embedded Devices Used To Map Internet

Botnets are mostly linked with spam e-mail campaigns, denial of service attacks and data theft. But global networks of compromised hosts can be used for a variety of ends – not all of them malicious. That was the idea behind “Internet Census 2012,” a stealth project by an unnamed and unknown researcher/hacker to map the entire IPV4 Internet address space using a massive network of compromised devices. The results, published in the form of a research paper, underscore the problem of  unsecured embedded devices, including set top boxes, home routers and critical infrastructure, with the hacker able to locate and compromise these systems, creating a botnet of more than 420,000 nodes. According to a copy of the report, the project grew out of an experiment to locate unprotected devices online using nmap, the open source scanning tool. By compromising each vulnerable host and then enlisting it to scan for other […]

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As a highly ranked, 10 year old publication, Security Ledger serves a sophisticated audience of IT professionals and security subject experts and is widely recognized as an influential, cybersecurity publication. If your organization has something to say about information technology, cyber security, privacy or data protection, The Security Ledger is interested in hearing from you and providing a stage for thought leadership and discussion. Click on the link below to learn more! Why Security Ledger? | Download our Media Kit | Contact Us Regarding Sponsoring | Earned Media Why Security Ledger? Through visibility on securityledger.com, you can reach an audience of readers who care about cyber security issues that affect both enterprises and consumers in key verticals such as retail, health care, government, critical infrastructure and finance. For more than ten years, leading firms in the information security space have worked with Security Ledger to help get their message out to […]

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FTC Forum Will Tackle Mobile Device Threats

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is continuing to focus its energies on protecting the growing number of consumers using smart phones and other mobile devices. Next up: a public forum to discuss threats to mobile devices. The FTC announced the one-day public forum on Friday and said it hopes to use the event to address problems like “malware, viruses and similar threats facing users of smartphones and other mobile technologies.” The event will take place on June 4th at the FTC’s offices on New Jersey Avenue NW in Washington, D.C. The public forum is just the latest effort by the nation’s leading watchdog to reign in a free-wheeling mobile application marketplace, and put stronger consumer and privacy protections in place. Earlier this month, the agency released a Staff Report that called on mobile OS, mobile device and mobile application firms to provide clearer guidelines to consumers about how their information […]

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