ICS security experts take the occasion of US Government warnings that Russian cyber operators are working against the US power grid to reiterate their own warnings. Electrical generation and distribution systems remain dangerously vulnerable to attacks that could in the worst case induce catastrophic failure. Cylance has determined that one of the ways attackers are getting access to utilities' networks is through compromised Cisco routers.
Emerging consensus appears to be that AMD vulnerabilities CTS Labs reported are real, but not particularly serious.
London-based Cambridge Analytica is reported to have at least discussed using sparrows, honey traps, to compromise political targets. It also obtained data on some fifty-million Facebook users. Cambridge Analytica categorically denies accusations of blackmail and improper use of data. The data first collected were obtained consensually, in the course of a university psychologist's research, then passed to Cambridge Analytica enriched with data from connections of those who consented and data harvested from other sources.
The incident has been very bad for Facebook, which insists there was no data breach. Observers say, right: it's worse. The data collection wasn't, notes Motherboard, a bug, but a feature. Facebook's privacy policies apparently permitted the kind of data harvesting conducted, but only within certain (easily transgressed, according to reports) limits. Facebook has retained Stroz Friedberg to help mop up the damage.
We are shocked, shocked, to hear that President Putin's reelection may have been aided by ballot-stuffing. On the other hand, wouldn't ballot-stuffing in Russia's presidential election be an act of supererogation?