Data breach at an international student insurer, avoid stalkerware and the latest business email scam. Welcome to Cyber Security Today. It’s Wednesday May 19th. I’m Howard Solomon, contributing reporter on cybersecurity for ITWorldCanada.com. A Canadian-based insurance firm called guard.me has begun notifying policyholders of a data breach. The Markham, Ont., company specializes in covering international students not protected by government insurance. According to the Bleeping Computer news site, policyholders are being told the company spotted suspicious activity on its website on May 12th. Data accessed includes dates of birth and genders. The email and physical mail addresses, as well as phone numbers of some policyholders, were also copied. The data breach notification also says the company is now adding two-factor authentication to protect logins. Does your organization allow employees to use the Internet Explorer browser? Do you as an individual use it? If so, better make sure the browser is patched. Bitdefender says an exploit kit used by a number of cyber attackers now includes ways of getting at two unpatched vulnerabilities in Explorer to deposit malware. Victims get hit just by going to an unsuspecting but infected website. By the way, one of those patches dates back to 2018, the other to 2019. Why they haven’t been installed yet by some people is baffling. Stalkerware is a category of mobile apps that allow someone to monitor other people. Another word for it is spyware. Jealous lovers might secretly install stalkerware on a partner’s smartphone. They might tell the victim it’s an app for their own protection. Some spyware is marketed as a child or employee monitor. They come...
“If 80 percent of our work is data preparation, then ensuring data quality is the important work of a machine learning team.” Andrew Ng The progress in machine learning progress owes a lot to teams downloading models and trying to do better on standard benchmark data sets. The bulk of the time is spent on improving the code, the model or the algorithms. “What I’m finding is that for a lot of problems, it’d be useful to shift our mindset toward not just improving the code but in a more systematic way of improving the data,” said Andrew Ng Last week, Andrew Ng drew the ML community’s attention towards MLOps, a field dealing with building and deploying machine learning models more systematically. Andrew Ng explained how machine learning development could accelerate if more emphasis is on being data-centric than model-centric. Traditional software is powered by code, whereas AI systems are built using both code (models + algorithms) and data. “When a system isn’t performing well, many teams instinctually try to improve the code. But for many practical applications, it’s more effective instead to focus on improving the data,” he said. Progress in machine learning, says Andrew Ng, has been driven by efforts to improve performance on benchmark datasets. The common practice amongst researchers is to hold the data fixed while trying to improve the code. But, when the dataset size is modest (<10,000 examples), Andrew Ng suggests ML teams will make faster progress, given the dataset is good. Improving code vs improving data quality (Source: Deeplearning.AI) It is commonly assumed that 80 percent of machine learning is data cleaning....
The latest on ransomware gangs and their strategies. Welcome to Cyber Security Today. It’s Monday May 17th. I’m Howard Solomon, contributing reporter on cybersecurity for ITWorldCanada.com. Is the Darkside ransomware gang dead or temporarily going quiet? Has ransomware suddenly got a bad name among crooks? This is what many cybersecurity experts are wondering after Darkside said it had lost access to the public part of its blog, payment server and content delivery server. Not only that, Darkside is releasing its decryption keys so anyone hit by its ransomware could get their scrambled data back for free. In addition cryptocurrency funds were also taken by someone from the gang’s payment sever, which is where victims made ransomware payments. This came after U.S. President Joe Biden urged Moscow to take action against the reportedly Russia-based group for its attack on the Colonial Pipeline in the U.S., and Biden promised the U.S. would disrupt the gang. On top of this, one Russian cybercrime forum suddenly banned all discussion threads about ransomware, saying the topic is now toxic. And the REvil gang has been quoted as saying it will keep a closer eye on affiliate crooks who want to use its ransomware platform to make sure they stay away from attacking what it calls the social sector and governments. Are ransomware gangs disbanding, afraid of aggressive law enforcement? Or is this smoke and mirrors? First of all, note that REvil is merely saying it’s going to be more selective in targets. Apparently it thinks that will cool things off. As for Darkside, perhaps some of its money is gone but the gang still...
Fight hate on private messaging apps, how Zix is used for scams, a warning on QR codes and more. Welcome to Cyber Security Today. It’s Wednesday, May 12th. I’m Howard Solomon, contributing reporter on cybersecurity for ITWorldCanada.com. The government of Canada should do more to stop disinformation on private internet messaging platforms like WhatsApp, Telegram, WeChat, Facebook Messenger and Snapchat. That’s the recommendation of the cybersecurity policy exchange at Toronto’s Ryerson University. There’s a lot of discussion about disinformation on public social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. But in a report issued Tuesday the exchange says private messaging apps are also being abused by fake news, hate speech, sexual comments and materials that incite violence. In a survey of 2,500 Canadians, a quarter of respondents said they get messages with hate speech at least once a month. Rates are higher among people of colour. Almost half said they get private messages at least once a month that they suspect are false. Some platforms label suspect messages and limit the number of targets that suspect messages can go to. But the report says the federal government should do more, including improving digital literacy so people can spot falsehoods, and demanding transparency from private messaging platforms on how many accounts host and distribute bad material. There’s a link to the full report here. Recently I told you a ransomware gang had threatened to release confidential files of the Washington, D.C. police department unless it was paid. According to news reports the gang says it has started putting that data online. If true the files could damage police operations. Meanwhile the...
President Moon Jae-in vowed additional government support for the data industry Friday, stressing the need to develop big data into the country’s new growth engine. “The government will fully support the data industry as part of efforts to revitalize our economy. We will establish a new expressway of data in the era of data as we built the Gyeongbu Expressway in the era of industrialization,” the president said. His remarks came in a meeting with some 120 officials and representatives from the data industry, held in Pangyo, just south of Seoul. The meeting was also aimed at discussing the removal of excessive government regulations that the president said may impede the development of the new industry. “Now, the Republic of Korea must become a nation that best handles the Internet, a country that best processes data,” Moon told the meeting, noting the country ranked 56th out of 63 countries reviewed for their digital competitiveness in a recent study by a Swiss college. President Moon Jae-in speaks in a meeting with government officials and business representatives on deregulation in Pangyo, just south of Seoul, on Aug. 31. (Yonhap) At the meeting, the government announced plans to invest 1 trillion won ($899 million) in the data industry next year. Moon called for stepped up efforts to more quickly develop the new industrial sector. “The future of our innovation-led growth (strategy) lies in data. Removal of regulations related to the data industry must be quickly completed for the development of new industry and new technologies,” he said. “I again stress that speed and timing are important.” Still, the president also stressed the...
Get US and UK politics insight with our free daily email briefing straight to your inbox When you subscribe we will use the information you provide to send you these newsletters. Your information will be used in accordance with ourPrivacy Notice. Thank you for subscribingWe have more newslettersShow meSee ourprivacy notice Britain faces a cyber “reckoning” with the East, one of Britain’s top spooks signalled today. GCHQ director Jeremy Fleming, boss of the Government’s eavesdropping station, told experts that action was needed if western democracies were to retain powers to decide the future of crucial tech systems. Speaking at the CyberUK 2021 virtual conference, he said: “Without action, it is increasingly apparent that the key technologies on which we rely for prosperity and security won’t be shaped and controlled by the West. “We can see significant technological leadership is moving East. “It’s causing a conflict of interests, of values, where prosperity and security are at stake. “It follows that cyber security is an increasingly strategic issue that needs a whole of nation approach if we are to continue to reap the benefits of technology. “These are really big themes and they have big stakes. “There is no doubt we are facing a moment of reckoning; I am optimistic about our response – after all, the UK has considerable soft and hard power. We are already a leading cyber power. “We have a history of technological innovation – from the early proto computers to the World Wide Web, British ingenuity continues to shape the world. “But it is clear that to face up to this moment of reckoning we need...
web development company singapore,singapore mobile application developer,web application singapore,app development singapore,web design singapore,singapore mobile app developer,mobile app development singapore,singapore website design,developer in singapore,mobile application developer singapore,mobile app developer singapore,design firms in singapore,mobile apps singapore,website designer singapore,singapore app developer,developers in singapore,web designer singapore,mobile developer singapore,website developer singapore,app developer singapore,mobile apps development singapore,web design services singapore,web design company singapore,graphic designer in singapore,website development singapore,singapore web design services,mobile game developer singapore,singapore web development,website design singapore,singapore web design,android developer singapore,web development singapore,design agency singapore,ios app development singapore,ios developer singapore,ruby on rails developer singapore,mobile application development singapore
