Quantum Attack on Soliloquy

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Webcam hacking is getting more and more widespread

A hacker can actually turn on your webcam remotely to take live footage of you and your home. One more incident.

The warning follows the creation of a website that allows voyeurs to watch live footage from insecure cameras located around the world. The website, which is based in Russia, accesses the cams using the default login credentials, which are freely available online for thousands of devices. 

Risks associated with even non-online shopping

Here.

Point-of-sale malware is making brick-and-mortar shopping more dangerous. Online, attackers are beginning to value user accounts with payment information attached more than credit card details themselves.

Bots Vs. Humans

Google’s new thinking in differentiating humans from the bots. Article.

Google’s revised reCAPTCHA test promises to help website users solve security puzzles faster — unless they are using a browser’s private mode or some other privacy measure.

The dire condition of Indian mobile phone networks

BBC article here.

Here’s what those mobile phone users deal with every day:

• Can’t connect: Connecting when “roaming” can be a struggle. If your flight has just landed, several hundred devices power on and try to connect to an overloaded network. On a train, users find it difficult to hold a conversation even when passing through areas with moderate cellular coverage. It’s the same on inter-state highways.

• Network busy: You have a full signal, but can’t call – common in busy areas such as Delhi’s airport, Gurgaon’s Cyber City (an office area near Delhi), and elsewhere in India’s large metros. Many users keep retrying on auto-redial, which adds to the problem.

• Call drops: When you, or the person you’re calling, are on the move, it’s common for the call to drop. Often, both of you will try re-dialing, and fail to connect. If one of you moved into an overloaded network area, you may not be able to reconnect easily.

• No internet: Mobile data is patchy in India. 3G isn’t everywhere, but even where you get a strong 3G signal, you might find no data activity. This is a problem for a country with 240 million mobile internet subscribers – that’s 92% of its total internet subscriber base.

• Poor signal: A weak mobile signal is common in urban India’s high-rise office and residential areas. The upscale condominium complex in Gurgaon where this writer lives has virtually no mobile service.

Is the HTTPS protocol fundamentally flawed?

HTTPS, in short, is an absolutely critical but fundamentally flawed
cybersecurity technology.

The article claims.

Iranian hackers routinely attack airlines, airports, says cio.com

If this article is to be believed, the world is already in the state of a full fledged cyber war, or is on the verge of it. You do not need rocket launchers or nuclear weapons to win a war against your enemy country; you can bring a country to its knees by using cyber weapons.  The full report — published by the IT security firm Cylance — on the skills of Iranian hackers to bring down network services in a far away country is here.

The Operation Cleaver report documents how Iran is the first highly motivated Western world adversary poised to execute serious attacks against global infrastructure, not just targeting the United States, but the critical infrastructure of over a dozen different countries,” said Stuart McClure, Cylance’s CEO and President, in a blog post. “They aren’t looking for credit cards or microchip designs, they are fortifying their hold on dozens of networks that if crippled would affect the lives of billions of people.

The Indian connection: The report also mentions that this Iranian hacking operation — codenamed operation cleaver — has compromised the network data associated with the Indian education sector.

Is 30 November the ICSD?

I did not know that 30 November is the International Computer Security Day. Nevertheless,  some ICSD tips on how to browse the Internet securely. Read.

Sony hack

Files containing confidential data of thousands of employees — such as salary, dates of birth, employee IDs and social security numbers — have been stolen from Sony servers, before being put on torrent networks. Article.

Several files being traded on torrent networks seen by this author include an global Sony employee list, a Microsoft Excel file that includes the name, location, employee ID, network username, base salary and date of birth for more than 6,800 individuals.