The University of Maryland (UMD) said it was the victim of a recent cyberattack, according to their statement released Wednesday. In the letter, UMD President Wallace D. Loh said he was informed of the breach yesterday evening by Brian Voss, the Vice President of Information Technology at the university.
“A specific database of records maintained by our IT Division was breached yesterday. That database contained 309,079 records of faculty, staff, students and affiliated personnel,” Dr. Loh said. “The records included name, Social Security number, date of birth, and University identification number.”
Massive Data Breach at University of Maryland
Governments, corporations, educational institutions, all of them completely incompetent when it comes to basic data security. This is going to be a headache for a lot of people. From Malwarebytes:
Snowden Leaks Spurred Massive Growth at DuckDuckGo
When Gabriel Weinberg launched a search engine in 2008, plenty of people thought he was insane. How could DuckDuckGo, a tiny, Philadelphia-based startup, go up against Google? One way, he wagered, was by respecting user privacy. Six years later, we're living in the post-Snowden era, and the idea doesn't seem so crazy.
In fact, DuckDuckGo is exploding. Looking at a chart of DuckDuckGo's daily search queries, the milestones are obvious. A $3 million investment from Union Square Ventures in 2011. Just prior to that, a San Francisco billboard campaign. Inclusion in Time's 50 Best Websites of 2011. Each of these things moved the traffic needle for DuckDuckGo, but none of them came close to sparking anything like the massive spike in queries the company saw last July. That's when Edward Snowden first revealed the NSA's extensive digital surveillance program to the world. The little blue line on the chart hasn't stopped climbing north since.
Google Exploring Plans to Roll Out Fiber to 34 New Cities
Given the planned Comcast/Time Warner merger, we need as much real competition as we can get. From Google:
Over the last few years, gigabit Internet has moved from idea to reality, with dozens of communities (PDF) working hard to build networks with speeds 100 times faster than what most of us live with today. People are hungrier than ever for faster Internet, and as a result, cities across America are making speed a priority. Hundreds of mayors from across the U.S. have stated (PDF) that abundant high-speed Internet accessPortland, Nashville (PDF) and dozens of others have made high-speed broadband a pillar of their economic development plans. And Julian Castro, the mayor of San Antonio, declared in June that every school should have access to gigabit speeds by 2020.
We've long believed that the Internet’s next chapter will be built on gigabit speeds, so it’s fantastic to see this momentum. And now that we’ve learned a lot from our Google Fiber projects in Kansas City, Austin and Provo, we want to help build more ultra-fast networks. So we’ve invited cities in nine metro areas around the U.S.—34 cities altogether—to work with us to explore what it would take to bring them Google Fiber.
is essential for sparking innovation, driving economic growth and improving education.
Europe Considers Digital Independence
From the Register:
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has lent her support to the idea of building
out new European data networks to help keep Europeans' email and other data out of the hands of US spies.
In the latest edition of her weekly podcast on Saturday, Merkel said she planned to raise the issue among other topics in a meeting with French President François Hollande this week.
"We'll talk, above all, about which European suppliers we have that provide security for the citizens," Merkel said, speaking in German, "that they need not cross the Atlantic with their emails and other things, but we can also build communications networks within Europe."
Kickstarter Compromised: Info Hacked
If you're on Kickstarter, you should probably be busy changing up your passwords. From CNET:
Hackers hit crowd-funding site Kickstarter and made off with user information,
the site said Saturday. Though no credit card information was taken, the site said, attackers made off with usernames, e-mail addresses, mailing addresses, phone numbers, and encrypted passwords.
"Actual passwords were not revealed, however it is possible for a malicious person with enough computing power to guess and crack an encrypted password, particularly a weak or obvious one," the site said in a blog post, adding that "as a precaution, we strongly recommend that you create a new password for your Kickstarter account, and other accounts where you use this password."
Quick, Everyone Panic! Bitcoin Weathers a Stormy Week
There have been some serious shenanigans in the Bitcoin community and economy in recent days. The Mt. Gox exchange continues its downward spiral, while people who (inexplicably) provided control of their Bitcoin to Silk Road 2 got taken for a ride. Here's one of the best rundowns on the Gox flaw that I've found online, from IEEE Spectrum:
Word is that as of this morning, Bitstamp had begun allowing withdrawals once again.Here's what a terrible week looks like in the world of Bitcoin: Two of the most trafficked Bitcoin exchanges, Mt. Gox and Bitstamp, temporarily halt trading and suspend bitcoin withdrawals in the midst of a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS). On exchanges that are still open for business, the value of the currency takes a brutal, sudden hit and then continues to tumble. Bitcoin users notice strange errors in their wallet balances after making routine transactions. Rumor spreads that the Bitcoin protocol is critically flawed. And where rumor is lacking, conspiracy theories abound. All this, and it's barely Thursday.
Nightmare: Comcast to Acquire Time Warner Cable
As if the internet and cable service of these two corporations weren't bad enough already! One can only surmise that the service will we twice as bad if this merger is allowed to go through. Media consolidation continues apace and represents a growing threat to the freedom of information in the United States. I do not imagine that the Democratic and Republican parties, which are effectively nothing more than subsidiaries of these corporations, will do much to prevent the further consolidation and monopolization of media in the United States. From Reuters:
Comcast Corp's proposed $45.2 billion takeover of Time Warner Cable Inc could face close scrutiny from U.S. antitrust regulators because of the deal's potential to reshape the country's pay TV and broadband markets.
The company resulting from the merger of the top two U.S. cable service providers would boast a footprint spanning from New York to Los Angeles, with a near 30 percent share of the pay TV market as well as a strong position in providing broadband Internet services.
The situation is bad enough already . . .
The all-stock deal, announced on Thursday, would put Comcast in 19 of the 20 largest U.S. TV markets, and could give it unprecedented leverage in negotiations with content providers and advertisers.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)