data privacy Archives

Tag: data privacy

Video: Weaponizing Your Coffee Pot

October 7, 2013 Paul Roberts

The third annual DerbyCon wrapped up last week. Alas, I wasn’t able to make it down to Louisville, Kentucky and don a pork-pie hat with the smart people there. Still, there were some great presentations, and most of them are available online. One worth checking out if you’re into the Internet of Things hacking -thing is Daniel Buentello’s (@danielbuentell0) presentation of “Weaponizing Your Coffee Pot.” This is a repeat performance for Daniel, who also presented it at the ToorCon Conference in Seattle back in July. The first half of this talk is a high level overview of IoT and the security implications thereof. Mostly this is stuff you’ve read on this blog before. In the second half, Daniel goes down into the weeds on hacking a couple of classic IoT devices: Belkin’s WeMo IP enabled power outlet and Nest’s iconic thermostat. Without getting into all the details (its worth watching […]

Beyond ‘Likes’: CrowdOptic Uses Google Glass To Map Your Focus

October 4, 2013 Paul Roberts

Sometimes a technology becomes so ubiquitous and obviously useful that we (humans) cease to think critically about its shortcomings. As an illustration of this, imagine yourself teleported back in time to the island of Manhattan in 1900. You’d find a bustling metropolis, for sure. You might look around and notice that the people dressed differently, or that the skyline was different from what we’re used to. But I bet one of the things you’d notice first was the stench emanating from the piles of horse manure and puddles of urine. As this (great) post at The Daily Kos points out, there were 200,000 horses working in New York City by 1900. Those horses were dropping 4 million pounds of manure and 40,000 gallons of urine on city streets every day. “The ubiquitous street sweepers could only pile the stuff up in vacant lots, occasionally to the height of sixty feet. To […]

Bombshell: Adobe Says Massive Hack Netted Source Code, Customer Info

October 3, 2013 Paul Roberts

In what sounds like a worst-case scenario, Adobe Corp. admitted on Thursday that a massive breach of its corporate network resulted in the theft of information on close to three million customers and source code for two widely-used products: Adobe Acrobat, Acrobat Publisher, Cold Fusion and “other” as-yet undisclosed products. The news came in a string of announcements late Thursday on Adobe’s corporate blog as well as the news site Krebsonsecurity.com. The revelation came after Brian Krebs, the reporter behind that site, and Alex Holden, the Chief Security Officer of Hold Security, discovered what is described as “a massive 40 GB source code trove stashed on a server used by the same cyber criminals believed to have hacked into major data aggregators earlier this year, including LexisNexis, Dun & Bradstreet and Kroll.” After being informed of the find, Adobe investigated and acknowledged the theft. In a blog post by Chief […]

Losing The Future: Schneier On How The Internet Could Kill Democracy

October 2, 2013 Paul Roberts

With his deep background in both cryptography and Internet security, Bruce Schneier is of the most thoughtful commentators on all matters cyber. So revered is he, that he even inspired a list of humorous Chuck Norris-style “Bruce Schneier” facts . In recent months, Bruce has been an invaluable sounding board amid the drip-drip-drip of details of ubiquitous government surveillance stemming from Edward Snowden’s leak of classified intelligence on NSA spying and cyber operations. In this video, from a recent speech Bruce did at the TEDxCambridge event up here in the Boston area, he goes a bit deeper: drawing out the current trend lines like hacktivism, Facebook- and Twitter-fueled popular revolutions, civil war and mass surveillance, and trying to discern what the future might look like. /div> Bruce’s theory: although nimble groups of activists, dissidents and hackers have been more adept at using the Internet and innovative technologies and platforms built on […]

FTC Bows Out Of IOT Conference Amid Shutdown

October 1, 2013 Paul Roberts

Attendees at a high-level summit to discuss the fast-emerging Internet of Things in Washington D.C. were informed that a scheduled talk by Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chairwoman Edith Ramirez would not take place because of a U.S. Government shutdown that began at Midnight. Ramirez was scheduled to address the 2013 M2M & Internet of Things Global Summit on Tuesday morning on “The FTC’s Interest in the Internet of Things,” but conference attendees told The Security Ledger that Ramirez was forced to cancel her talk because of a government shutdown. “Attendees were told she could not give it due to the shutdown,” said Torrey Barrett, a marketing professional attending the event, reported via Twitter. Ramirez was scheduled to speak at 9:00 AM on Tuesday as one of a series of keynote speakers, just after Michael Nelson (@MikeNelson), Microsoft’s Principal Technology Policy Strategist and just ahead of Chris Vein, a former deputy […]