In-brief: Manufacturers are using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to prevent farmers and heavy equipment owners from repairing their own machinery. But efforts in a number of states are pushing a “right to repair” citing the DMCA’s cost to small business owners and the stifling effect on start ups and potentially new industries.
The folks over at SCADA Strangelove turned me on to this article from the International Railway Journal that presents the findings of an analysis of the security of industrial control and SCADA systems used to manage railway networks. The conclusion: railways are rife with “faults and vulnerabilities (that will) allow cyber criminals to not only degrade key reliability parameters and bypass safety mechanisms (and) carry out attacks which directly affect rail traffic safety.” The study was conducted by Valentin Gapanovic, the senior vice president of Russian Railways, Efim Rozenberg, the first deputy director general at the Moscow based research firm NIIAS JSC and Kaspersky Lab Deputy Chief Technology Officer Sergey Gordeychik. At issue is not just the systems that are used to manage railway networks, including the movements of trains and critical switching systems that configure tracks. Rather: it is the culture of safety and security in the rail sector which, the study concludes, is still silo’d between physical […]
In-brief: The Department of Health and Human Services issued guidance that declared most ransomware infections to be reportable under the Federal HIPAA patient privacy law.
(credit: Duo Security)
The next time you’re in the market for a new Windows computer, consider this: if it comes from one of the top five manufacturers, it’s vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks that allow hackers to install malware.
That’s the take-away from a report published Tuesday by researchers from two-factor authentication service Duo Security. It found third-party updating tools installed by default threatened customers of Dell, HP, Lenovo, Acer, and Asus. The updaters frequently expose their programming …read more
In-brief: Intel announced on Thursday that it was acquiring Itseez Inc., a San Francisco-based start-up that develops algorithms and software for computer vision. The company said it sees applications in autonomous vehicles, security and manufacturing.
