Tag Archive for: Observer

Ex-hackers roundtable discusses 1990s hacking, security industry // The Observer


Notre Dame faculty Walter Scheirer and Luis Felipe Murillo began teaching a course last spring called “The Archaeology of Hacking: Everything You Wanted to Know About Hacking but Were Afraid to Ask.” On Thursday, the two faculty members held a hacker roundtable where 1990s hacking and its evolution were discussed by three ex-hackers and a professor of anthropology.

The panel was mediated by Gabriella Coleman, a Harvard professor of anthropology focusing on hacking and computing. Panelists included Rocky Witt, a senior security engineer in the cryptocurrency industry; Mike Schiffman, lead of network security engineering at Google and Stephen Watt, a software engineer at DomainTools. Witt, Schiffman and Watt were all former hackers.

Each panelist introduced themselves and told the story of how they became interested in hacking.

Witt said his family received their first computer in the mid-1990s. 

“I was very bored in school, very bored in my small town and I turned to mischief to keep myself entertained,” he said.

Witt’s first attempt to gain unauthorized access into systems was copying login strings.

Schiffman said his first experience with a computer was with a Commodore VIC 20, which was owned by his father.

Schiffman’s friend introduced him to the hacking world, where he used an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) to “consume information.”

Watt received his first computer around 1991, when he was about eight years old. 

“I got online because I grew up in Florida — weather was too hot,” Watt said. “Shortly thereafter, I started dialing up some local bulletin boards with my modem. From there, I started getting into pirating software.”

When Coleman asked about the “multifaceted” social scene among hackers in the 1990s, Witt mentioned the vast use of IRCs in “looking for sources of information or people who can teach you something.”

“Back in the day, it was probably a lot more likely that [security vulnerabilities with ‘zero days’ left to protect] would actually leak. You’d have … a closed network of people sharing information between trusted friends and somebody might just publish it,” Watt said.

Watt said an interested hacker would usually…

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Promotional offers from SLT-Mobitel | Sunday Observer


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Top 5 security hacks for iOS 14 and Android 11 – Tech Observer


If you have updated your Apple phone or your Android to the latest version – iOS 14 or Android 11 respectively – you may have noticed that they come with enhanced privacy controls. These new versions allow you to more easily check, and change, the personal information and phone features that individual apps can access. 

So how about taking this opportunity to give your personal and work phones a mobile privacy health check? Even if you are running earlier OS versions – or do not have a smartphone at all – it’s still worth taking a few minutes to check the privacy settings in your digital life and ensure that they are where you want them to be.

Before you start

If you have loads of apps installed, don’t worry: you can check some of the most important permissions for all of them in one go. Alternatively, focus on the apps you use most. (If you do forget to check up on old apps, Android 11 will reset all “sensitive” permissions automatically if an app is not used for a few months.) 

Watch out for apps that are asking for access to features or information that they very clearly don’t need – a calculator that’s insisting on using your camera and knowing your location, for instance.

If you have any apps like this, then you should be asking yourself, “Do I want this app on my phone at all?” It could be an overtly malicious app or overly-aggressive adware that’s out to collect as much information as possible for monetization through a data broker. If in doubt, don’t bother trying to tune up its privacy settings – get rid of it.

Top five things to check on iOS 14 and Android 11 to pep up privacy

For iOS 14 you can manage all your privacy settings through Settings > Privacy. On Android 11, the location of the Privacy section varies from device to device, so you may need to look around for the settings pages. However, the Android Permission manager page lets you see all app permissions in one place.

1) Location services

This is one of the most important permissions to check and both iOS and Android offer a centralized one-click block option that covers all apps. They have also made it easier to find out which apps already have permission to know…

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Atrium alerts patients of ransomware data breach at one of the hospital’s vendors – Charlotte Observer

Atrium alerts patients of ransomware data breach at one of the hospital’s vendors  Charlotte Observer
“data breach” – read more