Tag Archive for: GREAT

Schools don’t have great cybersecurity, and hackers have caught on : NPR


School cyberattacks are on the rise.
School cyberattacks are on the rise.

Scott Elder has a pretty typical morning routine. He wakes up at 7 a.m., drinks coffee and feeds the dogs, Bella (a rat terrier) and Spencer (a Chihuahua). But on Jan. 12, 2022, Elder’s routine was interrupted by a concerning phone call.

Elder is the superintendent of Albuquerque Public Schools in New Mexico, and the call came from his district’s IT department, saying they had found some sort of computer virus.

He recalls thinking, “Oh, we’ve got a bug in the system and they found it so they’ll just kill it and we’ll be done, right?”

The bug was in the student records system. So Elder’s IT staff shut that network down. But that meant teachers wouldn’t have access to basic information about the almost 70,000 students enrolled in New Mexico’s largest school district. Educators couldn’t take attendance, wouldn’t know children’s bus routes and were locked out of grading systems.

Meanwhile, IT staff was desperately trying to figure out whether the computer virus had spread to their health records, security system and payroll.

Over the course of the morning, Elder began to understand the enormity of the situation.

“I would say that I went from mildly disturbed at 7 a.m., to very concerned by 9 a.m., to sick to my stomach by noon because I was beginning to realize that this was not a one-day event, that we had a real problem.”

Then came the ransom demand for more than a million dollars.

School systems of every size have been hit by cyberattacks, from urban districts like Los Angeles and Atlanta, to rural districts in Pennsylvania and Illinois. And the problem has been growing.

While it’s hard to know exactly how many K-12 school systems have been targeted by hackers, an analysis by the cyber security firm Emsisoft estimates that 45 school districts were attacked in 2022. In 2023, Emsisoft found that number more than doubled, to 108.

“The education sector has been and continues to be very heavily…

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Six great options for password managers


Using unique and strong passwords for every website is a must for internet security. Too few people know how to do this, and that’s where password managers come in and can make online life easier.

There’s no doubt about it, actually doing the work to stay safe on the web is hard — and getting harder. In order to be truly secure online, each and every login you use needs its own strong, unique password.

We’re starting to see the spread of “passkeys” that make this process easier, since it doesn’t rely on passwords. Until this is universal, however, users should consider a password manager to help them create, manage, and fill in strong passwords.

The password managers we’ve picked here are excellent, free or low-cost, and user-friendly. Furthermore, we’ve checked each company’s privacy policies to ensure that they can’t read any of your stored passwords, thanks to end-to-end encryption.

All six of our managers offer features like two-factor authentication, secure password sharing, and importing existing passwords. They all help you create strong passwords, auto-store them, and report on any passwords that are weak or compromised.

We’ve checked to see if any of the companies reported a compromise or server breach, such as “what happened to LastPass. Thanks to their “zero-knowledge” policies, none of the password managers we list here have been compromised.

Keychain

Being built-in to Apple’s Mac and mobile devices, this is the obvious first choice. Whenever you first sign in or create an account on a website in Safari, Keychain — called “Passwords” in system settings — will pop up and offer to store this new login.

You should always, always say “yes” to this. That login is then stored and encrypted on your device, and then stored on iCloud and synced across your Apple devices.

At one time, what is now called iCloud Passwords only worked with the Safari browser on Mac. As of macOS Sonoma, it now also supports Edge, Chrome, Opera, and other Chromium-based browsers — sorry, Firefox.

You can even use Keychain on PCs by downloading “iCloud for Windows” application, and signing in to your Apple ID. It can then import and sync any logins you have stored in the default…

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Blackhat (2015) – Film Review, Good cyber thriller, great extras,


blackhat film review bluray

Director: Michael Mann
Cast: Chris Hemsworth, Viola Davis, Tang Wei
Certificate: 15

By Roger Crow

Cyber thrillers can fall flat if they slip into the realms of cliché, but thankfully Blackhat, now released on super hi-def 4K UHD, gets the cardinal sin out the way early: assorted close-up tracking shots of data transfer through chips and microscopic tech landscapes.

Chris Hemsworth is terrific as Nicholas Hathaway, the ace hacker released from prison to help the US government find the villain responsible for a nuclear power plant meltdown in Hong Kong.

Chicago’s Mercantile Trade Exchange is also hacked, causing soy futures to soar. Okay, less urgent but relevant to the plot, which was reminiscent of 007 epic A View To A Kill.

With the aid of Nicholas’s old mate, Captain Chen Dawai, a military officer in China’s cyber warfare unit, and his sister Lien, they set off with Hathaway to find their man.

blackhat film review coverHathaway is the world’s least likely hacker seeing as he looks like a Norse god, but it scarcely matters; viewers will be just itching for the moment he beats up a bunch of assailants in a restaurant.

“Not perfect”

The first act is nothing special as director Michael Mann sets out his stall and lets his tale unfold.

Viola Davis is okay as FBI Agent Carol Barrett, the figure of authority keeping an eye on Hathaway and slowly developing respect for him. (There’s a back story about 9/11 shoehorned in to give her a little depth, but she does rather well in a generic role).

Tang Wei, who plays our hero’s love interest, is good not great. I’d have preferred Maggie Q or Gong Li in the role, but she looks nice, while the action scenes are okay.

A shootout at a dockside dragged on a bit, but thankfully not as long as the one in Mann’s Heat.

For me, Michael Mann peaked with 1992’s The Last of the Mohicans, but this is possibly his best work since then.

It’s not perfect. There was some confusion over a character’s death in the second act, possibly intentional, and an incendiary scene was framed like many exploding car shots: long shot, characters on the left,…

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Digital Bounty: The great crimeware awakening


This guest editorial was written by Roger A. Grimes, a technology evangelist at KnowBe4.

Criminals are awakening and taking advantage of their new digital bounty. Ransomware is just beginning to show us how bad it is soon going to be. We thought it was bad now. We really didn’t have a clue.

Estimated reading time: 13 minutes

How I wish for the days of yesteryear. I’m old enough to remember the dawn of computer hackers and malware. I wasn’t around in the ’50s and ’60s and not old enough in the ’70s to experience the very early and first digital criminals and their malicious creations firsthand. But I was around to see the first personal computer virus, Elk Cloner.

It was created by 15-year-old Richard Skrenta in 1982. It infected the boot sectors of Apple II computers and floppy disks. Skrenta meant it as a practical joke to mess with his friends, but as is often the case with auto-roving malware, it spread worldwide, causing all sorts of havoc.

I was fully involved in reading about and fantasizing about fighting computer crime during the discovery of Pakistani Brain, the world’s first IBM PC-compatible infecting virus, which came out in 1986. By the time the Jerusalem, Cascade, Stoned, and Lehigh viruses came out in 1987, I was disassembling them into their assembly language coding constituencies for a volunteer group called the PC Antivirus Research Foundation (created by Paul Ferguson) and using a precursor of the Internet called FIDONet to send my digital research findings to the computer antivirus discussion group and John McAfee.

For a long time, a decade-plus, most digital computer malware was written to be harmless jokes. They printed funny messages, played music, and made typed letters on your screen collect at the bottom of the screen area. The worst-behaving malware programs, like the Melissa virus (1999) and the Iloveyou worm (2000), flooded corporate email networks and paging systems.

Sure, there were the occasional malicious malware programs like the AIDS Cop virus (which was the first ransomware program) and the 1992 Michelangelo virus (which formatted hard drive partitions). Still, most were near benign and created more to prove that some young man somewhere…

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