data privacy Archives

Tag: data privacy

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

March 28, 2013 Paul Roberts

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 […]

Mobile Phone Use Patterns: The New Fingerprint

March 26, 2013 Paul Roberts

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 […]

ISP Telenor: Execs Laptops Emptied in Cyber Spy Operation

March 18, 2013 Paul Roberts

The Norwegian telecommunications firm Telenor told authorities in that country that a sophisticated cyber spying operation compromised the computers of leading executives and “emptied” them of sensitive information, including e-mail messages, computer files and passwords, according to a report Sunday by Aftenposten. Several executives of Telenor were the subjects of “extensive, organized industrial espionage,” the report said, quoting Telenor Norway’s director, Rune Dyrlie. The company has reported the incident to Nasjonal sikkerhetsmyndighet – or NSM – Norway’s national security authority as well as Nor-CERT, Norway’s Computer Emergency Readiness Team and the cyber defense unit Cyberforsvaret. “We take it very seriously by several bosses in Telenor stolen sensitive information. It is quite clear that those behind, got downloaded stolen information. There is no doubt that we have lost data,” Dyrlie told Aftenposten. Dyrlie said that the company missed the initial infection, which used “new, customized software.” The first indication of a compromise came after automated monitoring software operated […]

The End Of Privacy: Facebook ‘Likes’ Reveal Sensitive Personal Data

March 12, 2013 Paul Roberts

We all know that, to online marketers, we’re just the sum of our Facebook Wall posts and “Likes” – the ubiquitous, virtual “thumbs up” that we attach to all manner of online ephemera. But all those ironic comments and votes of approval may be revealing a lot more about us than we’re willing to share, according to a new report from researchers at the University of Cambridge and Microsoft Research in the UK. In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), the researchers demonstrated that it is possible to use knowledge of an individual user’s “Likes” on Facebook to “automatically and accurately predict a range of highly sensitive personal attributes including: your age, and gender, you sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views. The list of guessabl`e information goes on to include other less quantifiable characteristics like your personality traits, intelligence, happiness, your preference (or not) […]

EverNote Latest Site Hacked In Coordinated Attack

March 2, 2013 Paul Roberts

The online personal and business productivity service Evernote.com said on Saturday that it is the victim of a hack that exposed encrypted user password information, forcing password resets across a broad swath of the service’s 50 million registered users. The Redwood City, California-based firm revealed in a blog post that its internal security team discovered “suspicious activity on the Evernote network” that “appears to have been a coordinated attempt to access secure areas of the Evernote Service.” The company said it sent password reset messages to its users as a “precaution” but didn’t believe that stored information in users’ accounts or payment information had been exposed. The hack is just the latest of a prominent online firm. In recent weeks, Twitter, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft have all reported compromises of their internal networks. Those intrusions were linked to attacks aimed at developers and relied on exploits of previously unknown “zero day” […]