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May 11, 2017
Welcome back to ‘This Week in Getting Hacked’—the world’s greatest cybersecurity-related link dump! Each week, we bring you the best news stories from the cybersecurity field, letting you know who’s getting hacked, who’s hacking, what data is leaking, and about what you should take with caution. So strap in, change your password, and let’s find out who’s getting hacked this week!
On to the links…
There’s a group of people—an underrepresented, marginalized group—that is the current target of cybercriminals and their dastardly attacks, and that group is BILLIONAIRE SUPERYACHT OWNERS.
Hackers have found that it’s super easy to hack a yacht, take control of literally all the tech on it—WiFi, GPS, etc—and then sail it off into the high seas. It’s like modern-day piracy, but instead of scurvy, it’s just malware. WON’T SOMEONE THINK OF THE BILLIONAIRES?!?!
On the opposite end of the financial spectrum, NYC is introducing technology that will track every homeless person living on the island. It’s not like a tagging program or some other inhumane idea, but rather a piece of software called StreetSmart that allows social workers to input data on homeless individuals, and allow those same workers to access a large database of knowledge about individuals with whom they interact with. Here’s a choice quote:
Traditionally, outreach workers have entered information about every encounter into a database, keeping running case files. But those databases never talked to each other. One outreach worker in the Bronx might never know she was talking to the same person who’d checked into a Brooklyn shelter a week prior. More importantly, the worker might never know why that person left. What’s more, systems used by city agencies and non-profits seldom overlapped, complicating efforts to keep track of individuals.
Pretty soon, you might be able to sign into your device using a doodle rather than a password. As a guy that is terrible at drawing, I look forward to all of my data being wiped clean from my device after the 10th time I try to draw a plain ol’ square.
Hey, if IBM has sent you a flash drive, burn it immediately because it contains malware.
What do I do if they sent me this flash drive!?
And finally…
Hackers are spear-phishing using Microsoft Word documents filled to the brim with virsues, Trojans, malware, and all sorts of data-stealing goodies. Their latest target is restaurants and other hospitality services. They start by sending a fake complaint email with the attached doc, then calling the restaurant and asking if someone has opened their complaint yet; when someone does, they hang up the phone immediately and the data stealing begins! The host computer is infected, and the virus spreads to any other networked machines, taking sensitive data as it goes along its merry way. Because nothing says “date night” quite like credit card hackery.
That’s it for this week! Stay safe out there!
