The fiber-optic cables carrying data across the internet are vulnerable to hacking. Two US initiatives aim to fix that by creating super-secure quantum transmissions.
Category: cybercrime/malcode – Page 209
Biohackers Are Implanting Everything From Magnets to Sex Toys
Biohacking raises a host of ethical issues, particularly about data protection and cybersecurity as virtually every tech gadget risks being hacked or manipulated. And implants can even become cyberweapons, with the potential to send malicious links to others. “You can switch off and put away an infected smartphone, but you can’t do that with an implant,” says Friedemann Ebelt, an activist with Digitalcourage, a German data privacy and internet rights group.
Patrick Kramer sticks a needle into a customer’s hand and injects a microchip the size of a grain of rice under the skin. “You’re now a cyborg,” he says after plastering a Band-Aid on the small wound between Guilherme Geronimo’s thumb and index finger. The 34-year-old Brazilian plans to use the chip, similar to those implanted in millions of cats, dogs, and livestock, to unlock doors and store a digital business card.
Kramer is chief executive officer of Digiwell, a Hamburg startup in what aficionados call body hacking—digital technology inserted into people. Kramer says he’s implanted about 2,000 such chips in the past 18 months, and he has three in his own hands: to open his office door, store medical data, and share his contact information. Digiwell is one of a handful of companies offering similar services, and biohacking advocates estimate there are about 100,000 cyborgs worldwide. “The question isn’t ‘Do you have a microchip?’ ” Kramer says. “It’s more like, ‘How many?’ We’ve entered the mainstream.”
Research house Gartner Inc. identified do-it-yourself biohacking as one of five technology trends—others include artificial intelligence and blockchain—with the potential to disrupt businesses. The human augmentation market, which includes implants as well as bionic limbs and fledgling computer-brain connections, will grow more than tenfold, to $2.3 billion, by 2025, as industries as diverse as health care, defense, sports, and manufacturing adopt such technologies, researcher OG Analysis predicts. “We’re only at the beginning of this trend,” says Oliver Bendel, a professor at the University of Applied Sciences & Arts Northwestern Switzerland who specializes in machine ethics.
Yuval Harari & Russell Brand in conversation | Penguin Talks
Hacking humanity — russell brand & noah yuval harari
Penguin Talks is a new series of free creative events which gives young people the opportunity to hear…
Did China hack US motherboards?; Industrial-base report, previewed; New tool to fight fake news; ‘Light footprints’ mean shaky intel; And a bit more
China put tiny spy chips on many U.S. servers. That’s the word from Bloomberg Businessweek, whose cover story published Thursday asserts that Beijing persuaded Chinese hardware manufacturers to install a surveillance chip, half the size of a grain of rice, on the motherboards of hundreds of thousands of data servers sold around the world by a U.S. company called Supermicro, including to Amazon and Apple.
D-Wave takes quantum computers mainstream with ‘Leap’
Quantum computing technology is slated to revolutionize our ability to manipulate and analyze data, fundamentally changing the way that countless industries from cybersecurity and telecommunications to pharmaceutical development and transportation logistics will operate in the future. Even the US Senate is getting in on the action.
The White House Is Getting America Ready For Its Quantum Leap
While the rest of the country has been transfixed by the Brett Kavanagh confirmation drama, the White House was quietly but steadily taking major steps to secure America’s high-tech future.
The first was the release of the National Cybersecurity Strategy last week, which I discussed in a previous column. This week came the National Strategic Overview for Quantum Information Science (QIS), released by a subcommittee of the Committee on Science for the National Science and Technology Council. This document is a big win for Jacob Taylor, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s point man on all things quantum, and a major win for America.
California just became the first state with an Internet of Things cybersecurity law
California Governor Jerry Brown has signed a cybersecurity law covering “smart” devices, making California the first state with such a law. The bill, SB-327, was introduced last year and passed the state senate in late August.
Starting on January 1st, 2020, any manufacturer of a device that connects “directly or indirectly” to the internet must equip it with “reasonable” security features, designed to prevent unauthorized access, modification, or information disclosure. If it can be accessed outside a local area network with a password, it needs to either come with a unique password for each device, or force users to set their own password the first time they connect. That means no more generic default credentials for a hacker to guess.
The bill has been praised as a good first step by some and criticized by others for its vagueness. Cybersecurity expert Robert Graham has been one of its harshest critics. He’s argued that it gets security issues backwards by focusing on adding “good” features instead of removing bad ones that open devices up to attacks. He praised the password requirement, but said it doesn’t cover the whole range of authentication systems that “may or may not be called passwords,” which could still let manufacturers leave the kind of security holes that allowed the devastating Mirai botnet to spread in 2016.
How to know if you’re affected by Facebook’s massive data breach
Answer: Quite possibly because Facebook’s already forced you to log out and back into your account today.
The news: Facebook said hackers exploited a software flaw to access the records of almost 50 million customers. The firm said it had fixed the vulnerability and reported the breach to law enforcement.
The hack: The company said that the hackers had exploited a coding glitch that affected the service’s “View As” feature, which lets people see what their own profile looks like when someone else takes a look at it online. This allowed them to get hold of digital “tokens,” which are software keys that let people access their account without having to log back in every time.