Mobile Threats Archives

Tag: Mobile Threats

New York City Phone Booths Add Beacons, Stoke Controversy

October 6, 2014 Paul Roberts

The web site Buzzfeed has a scoop today about a stealthy deployment of beacon technology in Manhattan that has some privacy experts concerned. According to the exclusive report, by Buzzfeed’s Joseph Bernstein and Jeremy Singer-Vine, Titan a media company that sells ad space in more than 5,000 phone kiosk panels in New York City’s five boroughs, has installed about 500 beacons on its ad panels. The company went forward with the deployment with the blessing of New York City’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT), but without any public input, Buzzfeed reported. Beacons are wireless devices that interact with mobile phones and other portable electronics. They’re used to provide location-specific data and interactions, such as advertisements linked to nearby businesses or to track the movements of an individual within a defined space (such as a show floor). In the case of the phone booth beacons, Titan and Sbordone, the company that provides the display […]

Europol Warns of Internet of Things Risk

October 6, 2014 Paul Roberts

In a newly released report, Europol’s European Cybercrime Center (EC3) warns that the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) threatens to strengthen the hand of organized cyber criminal groups and make life much more difficult for police and governments that wish to pursue them. EC3’s latest Internet Organized Crime Threat Assessment (iOCTA) says the “Internet of Everything” will greatly complicate the work of law enforcement creating “new opportunities for everything from cyber criminals to state actors to child abusers. The growing numbers of connected devices will greatly expand the “attack surface” available for cyber criminal activity, the EC3 warns. Cyber criminals may co-opt connected devices for use in common criminal activity (like denial of service attacks and spam campaigns). However, advancements like connected (“smart”) vehicles and infrastructure create openings for large scale and disruptive attacks. The report, which was published late last months, is a high level position paper and pulls data mostly […]

You’re Invited: A Conversation on Password Security and Targeted Attacks

September 23, 2014 Paul Roberts

A note to Security Ledger readers that I’ll be facilitating a really interesting conversation this afternoon on password (in)security and how weak user authentication can undermine even the best laid security plans. The SANS Webinar, Security for the People: End User Authentication Security on the Internet” kicks off at 3:00 PM Eastern today (12:00 PM Pacific). You can register to join us using this link. My guest is DUO Security researcher Mark Stanislav, a frequent Security Ledger contributor and one of the smartest guys out there when it comes to passwords, authentication and securing the Internet of Things. There’s plenty to talk about: weak authentication schemes are the root cause of any number of prominent breaches – from the recent attacks the Apple iCloud accounts of A-list celebrities, to the breach at retailer Target (reportedly the result of a phishing attack on an HVAC contractor that Target used.) Mark and I […]

Will Big Data Transform Fraud Detection? | SmartData Collective

September 22, 2014 Paul Roberts

The folks over at Smart Data Collective have an interesting story today on Big Data and its (expected) impact on a variety of industries and business practices. Fraud (and fraud detection), it turns out, may be one area that is transformed by better data analytics. According to the article, by Monte Zweben, fraud analytics are posed to be transformed not just by “Big Data,” but by better and faster analytics. The article looks at a variety of industries, including consumer marketing and logistics that stand to benefit from the growth in data and data analytics. Fraud detection is one of them. Zweben cites statistics on the growth of fraud as a global problem. Kroll’s most recent Global Fraud Report found the number of companies falling victim to fraud has increased to 70 per cent. Credit card companies were among the first to embrace “Big Dat” analytics to spot irregularities in patterns of charges […]

With Cars Connected to the Internet, What about Privacy? | Computerworld

September 19, 2014 Paul Roberts

Lucas Mearian has a long and quite thorough article over at Computerworld weighing the possible security and privacy risks posed by connected vehicles. Among other things, Mearian weighs the recent past and likely future of connected vehicles, noting that, “once mobile devices are connected to car infotainment systems and cars are connected to the Internet, vehicles will become a rich source of data for manufacturers, marketers, insurance providers and the government.” They’ll also be a target for hackers. The problem is that, unlike mobile phones, cars have useful lives that are measured in decades, not years – or even months. That makes it difficult for manufacturers, who want to make their vehicles state of the art, but also must deal with the reality of much longer development cycles and complex interactions between non-critical and critical on board systems. [Read more Security Ledger coverage of connected vehicles here.] A couple issues worth noting: […]