At a glance.
- Customer data breach at US trailer manufacturer.
- Breach affects major US labor union.
- Online proctors or honeytraps that amount to entrapment?
Trailer manufacturer suffers customer data breach.
American truck trailer maker Utility Trailer Manufacturing Company (UTM) disclosed it suffered a cyberattack last April when an intruder gained unauthorized access to the company’s network, compromising customer names, addresses, and Social Security numbers. JD Supra notes that Console & Associates, P.C is conducting an investigation to determine the potential harm to the victims, who could choose to file a class-action lawsuit. An initial investigation by UTM determined that approximately 28,700 customers were impacted, and notification letters were sent to the victims last week.
Intruder accesses US workers’ union data.
Console & Associates, P.C. will be busy, as they are also interviewing victims of a recent data breach impacting Service Employees International Union, Local 32BJ, a service workers’ union with members scattered across the US’s eastern seaboard. JD Supra explains that an unauthorized party gained access to several computers on the union’s network, and a subsequent investigation revealed that the attacker accessed files containing employee and member data between October 21 and November 1 of last year. The compromised data includes the names, addresses and Social Security numbers of up to 230,487 individuals.
Proctoring platforms set traps for cheaters.
A college student has exposed what appears to be a cheating entrapment operation using online test proctoring websites. University of Central Florida computer science major Kurt Wilson discovered honeypot sites baiting online test-takers with answers to typical college exam questions. When a target attempts to access the answer, they receive nothing, but the site collects the victim’s IP address, which can then be used to label the student a cheater. Gizmodo reports that popular remote proctoring service Honorlock allegedly had twelve of these cheating snare sites, including gradepack[.]com and quizlookup[.]com, linked to its platform.
St. John’s University associate professor and educational ethics expert Ceceilia Parnther says the ploy amounts to digital entrapment. “Students see that there’s an environment where it’s automatically assumed that they are not to be trusted,” she said. And that assumption is not ill-founded, as a recent report from the Center for Democracy and Technology revealed 81% of teachers said their school employed some type of surveillance software. Honeypots aside, most test proctoring platforms use some combination of spyware, lockdown browsers, and webcam access to snoop on students’ activities and detect “risky” behaviors, but the effectiveness of these tools is questionable, as the tech can be easily confused by the test-taker’s environment or even their complexion.