Very early on, during my time as a young support technician nearly twenty years ago, I quickly learned that most people, particularly those who had grown comfortable working with office computers, frequently did not read many of the dialog and alert boxes that popped up on screen, which often-times led to unexpected or even deleterious results. Even if they did read what was presented (or thought they read it), most of the time they could not recall what the dialog box actually said. Despite what you might think, this is actually very human, and not limited to technology use. When performing menial tasks (as many things we do on computers now are), we are prone to learning how to do them as quickly and efficiently as possible, which includes tapping “OK” as quickly as possible to the numerous prompts our devices pose to us throughout the day. You may have already noticed that many online services, apps and websites have taken advantage of this tendency and present patterns of interaction that mimic expected use, but lead to unexpected outcomes, like accidentally downloading and installing antivirus protection that we don’t need, or adding a paid subscription service for an app that was supposed to be free.
I can feel you clicking “Get to the point, Woo…”
While most people have come to expect that websites and online platforms are going to gather demographic information on them and show advertisements that can sometimes seem uncomfortably accurate, they are not as jaded as yours truly to believe that these same “free” services aren’t actively trying to deceive them through misleading and/or confusing interfaces, dialog boxes and obtuse language, but a recently published European study found that this is exactly what they are doing it, and it’s no accident, nor, if you think about it, is it a new practice. McAfee and Adobe have been doing this for years with their Adobe Reader – McAfee Security Center downloads, and I’m pretty sure every single one of my clients has fallen victim to this particularly trap at least once, despite years of warning about the dangers of clicking “OK” before reading the message. Heck, even IT professionals like yours truly have fallen victim to clicking when in a hurry because, we (despite appearances sometimes!) are human too.
At least two US Senators have finally deigned to do something about the alarming increase in deceptive interface practices and have floated new legislation creatively named “Deceptive Experiences to Online User Reduction Act.” The DETOUR Act would give the Federal Trade Commission the legal means to regulate the use of purposefully deceptive or confusing practices to steer users to decisions that may not be in their best interests or subvert expectations, something they have been monitoring in traditional advertising for decades. For now, this legislation is still in committee, but we can take a small measure of hope that this bipartisan bill finds its way to the voting floor soon. Make sure you contact your Congress-critter to let them know that this is important to you.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Since the advent of online discussion forums and the resulting need for forum moderators that can reign in unruly participants, there have been endless (if constitutionally ill-informed) debates in the US about free speech rights and their applicability to the internet. This particular debate has loomed ever larger as social media’s sudden dominance in politics, economics and ethics surprised even the gloomiest doomsayers in the past three years. Last year, the New York 2nd Circuit Court ruled that a public access TV channel had violated the 1st amendment rights of two producers who appeared to have been fired for criticizing their employer. The TV channel, Manhattan Neighborhood Network appealed to the Supreme Court who just earlier this week reversed the decision.
How does this apply to social media?
The details of the case at first don’t seem to apply at all to social media: MNN is a state mandated and funded public access network, an entity that most analysts agreed would appear to be subject to 1st Amendment jurisdiction. Social media platforms, on the other hand, are clearly not state-owned or operated nor is access to them mandated by any state or federal law. Surprisingly, the decision to reverse the 2nd Circuit ruling was led by the “conservatives” on the court, the exact opposite of what was expected by many conservatives pursuing free speech cases against YouTube and other media platforms for their alleged “anti-conservative bias.”
Instead, the majority opinion took a rather narrow view of public forum doctrine, stating that even though the creation and operation of MNN was mandated by the state, it is operated as a private company in a function that is NOT the exclusive domain of the state, much the same as every social media platform in existence. Just because a private entity (even one as big as Google/YouTube) allows everyone to post and participate does not turn it into a protected free speech zone. Justice Kavanaugh states in his conclusion:
“A private entity […] who opens its property for speech by others is not transformed by that fact alone into a state actor.”
While the court did not directly call out social media platforms in their decision, even the dissenting opinion, written by Justice Sotomayor, seems to leave little room for creative interpretation, and seems to be speaking directly to the heart of the matter:
“The First Amendment leaves a private store owner (or homeowner), for example, free to remove a customer (or dinner guest) for expressing unwanted views…. In these settings, there is no First Amendment right against viewpoint discrimination.”
Image courtesy of Stuart Miles from FreeDigitalPhotos.net
One of the basic problems with collecting a lot of data is that you need a place to store it, and if it’s sensitive data, you need to store it securely. Unfortunately for everyone, the amount of private data all companies are amassing on their customers is accelerating as everyone (except the customers) realizes just how lucrative this practice is. Or, as is the case for more and more companies who get breached, how costly it may end up being if they can’t keep that data safe, as both party-planning website Evite and United States Customs and Border Protection owned up to this week.
What this means for you
While US CBP has not officially released information on the scope of their leak, sources have confirmed that facial recognition data and license plates for up to 100k individuals crossing the Canadian border were stolen from a CBP subcontractor who was storing and using the data outside of the CBP network on their own systems, which were then breached by an as yet unknown attacker.
In the case of the Evite breach, the website was actually notified several months ago that they had been compromised, but only just now acknowledged that customer data from 2013 was stolen in a breach that appears to have happened in February of this year. No financial information was leaked, but names, emails, IP addresses and passwords were definitely stolen and made available for purchase on the dark web in April.
As is typically the case in these types of breaches, there is not a lot you can do as an individual. Evite, of course, has supposedly notified affected individuals of the breach, and is encouraging all users to reset their passwords as a matter of course. And if you happened to be one of the 100k or so individuals passing through a particular Canadian border crossing which is as yet unnamed, you might never know if your data was part of this particular breach.
In what is likely to be a developing (and increasingly bad) news story, two major medical testing companies have announced that their customers’ information has been exposed by a data breach at a vendor that both firms use for payment collections. The firm, American Medical Collections Agency, informed its two clients separately of a persistent security breach that over the course of 8 months, 11.9 million Quest Diagnostic customer records and 7.7 million LabCorp customer records were exposed and most likely stolen by as yet unidentified threat agents. And seeing as this company also has several other, as yet unidentified clients, it’s likely we will see even more disclosures from those companies once the full extent of the AMCA breach is explored.
But wait…there’s more!
Real estate title insurance giant First American Financial Corp. is currently under investigation by regulators for what appears to be a colossal security failure wherein their website exposed over 800 million documents dating back nearly 16 years that contained customer bank account numbers, Social Security numbers, mortgage, tax and wire transaction records as well as drivers license images. Unfortunately the security researchers who originally discovered and confirmed the glaring privacy breach have no way to determine who else accessed the documents during the nearly 2 years it was exposed, but as you can imagine, this level of confidential information is exactly what identity thieves dream about every night.
What’s to be done about this?
At most, you might be able to participate in a class action lawsuit against First American. As of yet, no litigation has been opened against AMCA, and frankly, most people would have no idea who either of these companies are, as they don’t deal directly with the people who are affected by their breaches. Surely regulators and lawmakers are going to punish these companies significantly, especially in light of egregious lack of diligence as in the case of First American. Surely companies will stop doing business with vendors that aren’t taking security and privacy seriously, right? The fact that companies like Equifax are still in business says otherwise, so the only way we are going to see these companies held properly accountable is to vote in lawmakers who care more about their constituents than their corporate donors.
As you are reading this, major parts of Baltimore, Maryland’s IT infrastructure are still offline, including its email system which was only just redirected to Microsoft’s Office 365 platform so that some form of email delivery could resume. That makes it over 4 weeks without email for city employees and services. For any normal business this would definitely qualify as disastrous, but is it an actual “disaster” by government standards thereby qualifying for the federal aid such a designation bestows? It’s definitely worth considering that if the IT recovery effort doesn’t start picking up steam soon, failures in critical city infrastructure could create life-threatening situations and further breaches of security and privacy in adjacent sectors that rely on the missing city services.
The Real Disaster: A failure in management and budget
While sources have reported that the ransomware attack was likely caused by a city employee falling for a phishing attack, the real failure was the city government’s utter mismanagement of their IT infrastructure, which at the time of the attack, was powered by systems built decades ago that have been chronically under-supported by a budget of less than half of the national average, and run by a series of CIOs that appeared to be, at best, in way over their heads or at worst, possibly criminal.
Unfortunately, rather than taking a hard look at their management failures, city leaders instead are trying to lay some of the blame at the feet of the federal government, more specifically the NSA who is purportedly the original source of the EternalBlue exploit (leaked in 2017) that was part of the ransomware code used to shut down Baltimore’s IT. Call me cynical, but if it hadn’t been some bit of code powered by NSA-developed exploits, it was only a matter of time before Baltimore’s poorly funded and managed IT systems fell victim to some other form of attack.
In case you aren’t picking up what this story is laying down, here are the lessons any city or business should take away from Baltimore’s “disaster”:
- Make sure you are maintaining a proper IT budget. Baltimore was spending half of what they should have been spending for a city of their size.
- Make sure your employees are properly trained on workplace technology security. They don’t need to be security experts, but they should know how to spot a phishing email.
- Make sure your critical systems are backed up and a proper DR plan is in place. A lot of Baltimore’s headaches would have been cleared up much sooner with proper backups.
- DIY IT is no longer an option for any serious business. Modern, secure IT services require professionally-maintained and monitored systems for which most businesses lack funding or expertise or both. There are companies that specialize in delivering turnkey IT services at a fraction of the cost of comparable on-premise systems.
How long could your organization continue to operate without its core servers? Could you last two weeks? The the city of Baltimore, MD has been without its email and payment processing services since May 7th after refusing to pay the nearly $100K bitcoin ransom demanded by the hackers that “kidnapped” their systems. In case you are one of the few people left on earth who are unfamiliar with the scourge known as “ransomware”, it’s basically a form of extortion where hackers gain access to an organizations computers and lock everyone out by encrypting the files which can then only be unlocked and made usable again by paying for a digital key.
Should you pay the ransom?
This is, pun intended, the (sometimes) million dollar question that is difficult to answer and is often situation dependent. From a security and law-enforcement point of view, authorities typically recommend not paying the ransom, but from a purely financial and technical vantage, the answer isn’t necessarily “no.” Case in point: when the city of Atlanta refused to pay a $50K ransom to unlock its hacked computers, it ended up costing them $17M to fix. With Baltimore’s payment processing unavailable, the city was unavailable take payments for parking tickets, utility bills, and process real estate sales, which likely results in huge operating shortfalls, on top of having to pay security and technology consultants a great deal of money to restore systems and data that were permanently destroyed by the ransomware attack.
Unfortunately there isn’t a security system or platform that is impervious to malware attacks, primarily because the large majority of successful hacks are the result of human error versus technical failure. And one of the biggest errors that can be avoided is making the mistake of not properly backing up your critical data and systems, which, as you might have guessed is probably the best defense against these types of attacks. Ransomware attacks can seem crippling, but with the proper backups and contingency planning, most organizations can recover quickly without having to consider the prospect of paying a ransom.
Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
New week, new punching bag: this time, Intel returns to the spotlight with yet another flaw in its CPUs, up to and including the most recent 9th generation processors as well as going back as far as ones produced in 2008. This week has been absolutely bananas for technology issues so I’m going to keep the literary gymnastics to a minimum. Truth be told, I’m still trying to wrap my head around the technical details of this latest exploit, but here’s a simplified explanation of what I understand so far.
What this means for you: apply updates and stay patched!
Two independent groups of researchers as well as Intel themselves have been quietly working on identifying a new, serious exploit in how Intel CPUs operate. Unlike typical security flaws that can be patched with software, vulnerabilities like this one, dubbed RIDL, Fallout, or MDS (depending on who you talk to) are a result of how the CPU was designed to operate. This new flaw, along side the two previously announced Spectre (2017) and Fallout (2018) vulnerabilities, fall into a class of exploits that are based on a core design of Intel architecture originally built to help computers run faster. Put as simply, predictive processing guesses what the CPU is going to be asked to do next and have the necessary code or data already loaded into nearby caches. Previous exploits looked at the predictions, and the latest basically looks at the guesses that turned out to be wrong or unused. Each discarded guess only contains a few bytes of data, but given a focused attack repeated thousands or millions of times, the leaked data can eventually be amassed into a significant security breach.
Interestingly enough, Intel has known about this particular flaw for an undisclosed amount of time, and has already been working with major industry players like Microsoft, Google, Apple and the usual Windows PC manufacturers to patch or mitigate the vulnerability, which may or may not already be applied to your equipment. At this point, unless you really like reading technical bulletins like this one, I’d recommend paying close attention to update notifications from your computer’s manufacturer as well as applying security patches to your various devices, regardless of their business or personal focus. As with the previous two vulnerabilities, Intel and manufacturers are being cagey about pointing out exactly which updates might be addressing this particular issue, or even if they’ve already been fixed (as many manufacturers will assert), and Intel itself is downplaying the severity of the flaw, despite differing opinions from the independent research groups. Intel discounts the severity based upon the relative sophistication required to exploit the flaw, but researchers rightly point out that though the flaw may be hard to exploit, the data it exposes is highly sensitive and previously thought completely secure.
Even if you haven’t read the seminal novel 1984 in many decades, you will surely recall the omnipresent “Big Brother” and the even more haunting reminder/warning that “Big Brother is watching you.” Rather than actually representing a single person (or even celestial being) readers quickly come to realize Big Brother is the result of countless numbers of citizens informing on their family, friends and neighbors in service of the Party “groupthink“. Fast forward to the present, where, believe it or not, Big Brother is watching and listening, but maybe not quite in the way Orwell had originally imagined.
“Alexa! Play doubleplusgood prolefeed!“
Most of you have come to accept that devices like Amazon’s smart speakers, Echo and it’s petite sibling, Dot, are always listening, ostensibly to be able to snap to action the second you shout, “Alexa!” But what you might not realize (or remember) is that Amazon is recording and keeping a copy of everything the device hears after you speak the trigger word. Depending on how cynical I’ve made you about technology over the years, this may or may not come as a surprise to you, and if you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, I even wrote about this nearly three years ago. Despite very clearly dancing on knife-edge of child-protection laws in 2016, regulation has not halted or even slowed the proliferation of millions of eavesdropping, smart-devices.
If you are curious about what your own Alexa-powered smart speaker has recorded in your private home or office, have a look at http://www.amazon.com/alexaprivacy. Fortunately for our house, most of these recordings consist of teenagers ironically asking Alexa to play Despacito, our family belting out the lyrics to various Queen anthems, and desperate searches for recipes based on the contents of pantries ravaged by previously mentioned teenagers. More importantly, despite living with someone who is a staunch advocate of privacy and who has made no effort to hide that fact, our family has obviously agreed to give up some of that privacy for the (sometimes meager) convenience and amusement the device offers. We also have a Ring doorbell on our porch and have also opted into sharing some of that video footage (at our discretion) with our neighbors, again potentially sacrificing some privacy in trade for a technologically amplified neighborhood watch.
Each person and family must decide how much privacy they are willing to sacrifice in exchange for security, and keep a very watchful eye for the point at which the sacrifice escalates from privacy to the abrogation of personal freedoms. Though we aren’t explicitly told how Orwell’s Oceania transformed into the nightmarish surveillance state, it’s easy to see how they got there. The seductive lure of convenience and personal gratification is a sure-fire way to gradually erode personal privacy and security without raising an eyebrow, just as sure and slow as a stream carving a grand canyon.
GPS tracking devices on fleet vehicles have enabled transportation and shipping companies to to streamline operations and improve efficiency for decades. As vehicles have become increasingly computerized, these devices also acted as a gateway for even more data gathering, commonly known as telemetry, which naturally led to them being connected to the internet for realtime data gathering and, of course, remote control capabilities, including the ability to stop engines, apply brakes and even control the steering. And, as is the tendency for all things internet-connected, these GPS systems are vulnerable to hacking, especially if the companies writing the software do dumb things like setting the default password to “123456”.
Who would do such a thing?
You can bet that if you set your default password to something as simple as that, and even publish that fact in the app documentation, someone is going to notice and take advantage, which is exactly what a hacker did when he used this knowledge and bit of code to brute force his way into thousands of user accounts for two widely-used Android apps. Not only was he able to gather confidential user data from the mobile device on which the apps were installed, but he was also able to gain collective access to thousands of vehicles that were managed by the app itself. Both apps also included functionality that, if installed and enabled by the vehicle operator, allowed the engine to be stopped remotely, even if it was in motion (up to 12 MPH supposedly). According to the hacker himself, he had the potential to cause a great deal of chaos, financial damage and potential physical harm if he were to actually follow through on killing engines on thousands (he claims hundreds of thousands) of vehicles, he stopped short of doing so, as his intent was not to hurt individuals but to raise awareness with companies using the flawed platforms. Both apps are developed by firms located in a country that has a reputation for producing products, software and firmware with serious security flaws and alleged backdoors. It’s unclear whether this particular hacker’s efforts will result in any overall improvements in the industry, but since contacting the app firms, at least one of the companies has reached out to its customers to urge them to change their passwords.
It’s a lovely day when I get to incorporate a pun into the weekly newsletter, but not so lovely for Samsung who has faced a series of setbacks on a variety of issues with their smartphones. The latest problem has actually prompted the Korean manufacturer to recall all the review units of the Galaxy Fold, and to delay the release (originally scheduled for April 26) of the new device by at least a month. The problem? The nearly $2000 smart phone has failed within days of its unboxing for at least 4 high-profile reviewers. In this case, the failure is of the highest magnitude: the vaunted, super-wide display that is literally designed to be folded in half is dying because of this feature. Normally I’m not inclined to report on technology issues for a product that is clearly aimed at a very specific, narrow market, but I think the Fold and the others that are definitely following are indicative of an important technology trend.
Can Samsung iron out this particular wrinkle?
It would seem the primary problem behind the initial release of Samsung’s folding flagship phone is one that will be particularly difficult to solve. In order for the screen to actually fold, Samsung engineers had to circumvent features that smartphone manufacturers have been working towards ever since the “glass slab” design was popularized by the iPhone: the inclusion of a durable, shatter-resistant screen and a sealed case to protect it from moisture. The Fold’s design actually goes in the opposite direction to achieve its titular function; the screen is plastic and not sealed, allowing dirt to get behind the most vulnerable part of the phone (the “crease”). Continual improvements in the slab phone design across just about all models and price points have emboldened us to carry and use these relatively expensive devices in a casual way that the Fold, in its current iteration, absolutely cannot survive. One of the primary reasons Samsung and other manufacturers are pursuing foldable screens is because consumers like tablet-sized screens and you can bet if we could fold them up to put into a pocket, we would quickly abandon the larger, less portable counterparts immediately. I have no doubt this is a problem that will be solved, and possibly in short order, but unless you have $2000 burning a hole in your pocket, I don’t recommend buying the first generation folding smartphones until they can survive more than a few days of careful usage.