Even long-time Central West Enders in St. Louis might not recognize Berlin Avenue, but the street has a storied past in our neighborhood. It is now called Pershing Avenue, and the corner of Pershing and Euclid now has a commemorative plaque that hints at its history. In a post for Nicki’s blog, I take a walk back in time to show what happened on this little corner of our city.
Here are the ones from the first part of the week.
A friend told me this tale of woe that someone he knows had all their Mac Things compromised to the point where they were no longer working. Before I describe the situation, if you use iCloud, do these three things now:
Now, why go through all this? If you don’t know about SIM swapping, take a moment to click on that piece that I wrote a few years ago and learn more about it. Basically, once a criminal knows your cell phone number, they can impersonate you and get your phone number reassigned to their own phone and the fun begins.
What if you don’t use iCloud but use Google’s Account? You should follow a similar path, particularly if you have an Android phone.
Now, why the business of deleting your identity docs? This is because once someone has control over your iCloud, they look through your photo stream and find these things, and then use that as the authentication process to recover your other accounts. And if you employ the “fake birthday” dodge (as I do and described here) you will have additional pain and suffering if you have to show your ID and the person you are talking to can’t match it to your fake birthday that you set up when you first created your FaceTwitTok account.
Happy holidays folks. Don’t respond to texts from out of the blue. Don’t click on anything in email, even from someone you correspond with. And don’t reuse your passwords and eat your veggies while you are at it too.
Simon and Garfunkel once sang:
Here are this week’s stories in SiliconANGLE. My most interesting story is about one man’s effort to improve the power grid in Ukraine, thanks to a very clever collection of Cisco networking gear that provides backups when the GPS systems are jammed by the Russians.
The American Red Cross responds quickly when disaster strikes. News programs are filled with striking scenes of disaster relief — shelters housing hundreds of survivors, the distribution of thousands of meals and disaster assessment volunteers at work across the affected area. But these efforts would be impossible without the support of the Operations Department working behind the scenes.
For one story, I interview Randy Whitehead and Dan Stokes and their various roles as volunteers. Both have transported a Red Cross emergency response vehicle from one location to another. That effort doesn’t capture news headlines, but it is essential to the mission.
For a second story, I spoke to the people behind an effort to help lawyers better understand international humanitarian law, something very much in the news these days. Lori Arnold-Ellis, the Executive Director of the Greater Arkansas chapter, and Wes Manus, an attorney and Red Cross board member, have expanded and extended a course first assembled by the International Red Cross called Even War Has Rules and are teaching it in our region to lawyers and non-lawyers alike. I took one of the courses and learned a lot too!
That is one of the reasons why I keep coming back to volunteer at the Red Cross: there are so many places to help out and you meet the most interesting people. It is terrific to get to talk to them and hear their stories.
Here are four stories that I wrote this week.
Happy holidays! Here are my stories for the week:
Say your company has just been attacked by a ransomware gang, and they are demanding payment or they will do various criminal acts. So whom do you call first?
Ideally, you should make all of these calls in quick succession. But a situation involving a finserv firm’s ransom attack earlier this month has brought about a new wrinkle in what is now called the multipoint extortion games. This term refers to ransomware gangs using more than just encrypting your data as a way to motivate a company to pay up. Now they file a complaint with the SEC.
Say what? You mean that the folks who caused the breach are now letting the feds know? How is this possible? Read this story by Ionut Ilascu in Bleeping Computer for the deets. They have the victim on the record that they were breached, and information from the ransomware group seems to match up with a complaint that was filed with the SEC at about the same time period. So how annoyed were the ransomware gang that they decided on this course of action? The victim says they have contained the attack. The one trouble? Apparently the breach notification law doesn’t come into effect until next month that requires the mandatory disclosure. Someone needs to provide legal assistance to the bad guys and at least let them know their rights. (JK)
But seriously, if you have a corporate culture that prevents breach disclosure to your customers — at a minimum — now is the time to fix that and become more transparent, before you lose your customers along with the data that the ransomware folks supposedly grabbed.
This week on SiliconANGLE, I covered major security announcements adding AI features to the product lines of Microsoft, Palo Alto Networks, and Wiz. All are claiming — incorrectly — to be the first to do so.
I had an unusually productive week here at SA. This is the rundown.
First and foremost is my analysis of kubernetes and container security, which describes the landscape, the challenges, the opportunities for security vendors to fill the numerous gaps, and what else is going on here. There is a lot going on in this particular corner of the infosec universe, and I think you will find this piece interesting and helpful.
There were some shorter pieces that I also wrote: