Without adtech, the EU’s GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) would never have happened. But the GDPR did happen, and as a result websites all over the world are suddenly posting notices about their changed privacy policies, use of cookies, and opt-in choices for “relevant” or “interest-based” (translation: tracking-based) advertising. Email lists are doing the same kinds of things. @Doc Searl’s Weblog
A newly-uncovered form of DDoS attack takes advantage of a well-known, yet still exploitable, security vulnerability in the Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) networking protocol to allow attackers to bypass common methods for detecting their actions. —Danny Palmer @ZDNet
Today, that’s coming in the form of imperceptible musical signals that can be used to take control of smart devices like Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri to unlock doors, send money, or any of the other things that we give these wicked machines the authority to do. That’s according to a New York Times report, which says researchers in China and the United States have proven that they’re able to “send hidden commands” to smart devices that are “undetectable to the human ear” simply by playing music. —Sam Barsanti @AVI News
In a paper we recently presented at the Passive and Active Measurement Conference 2018 [PDF 652 KB], we analyzed the certificate ecosystem using CT logs. To perform this analysis we downloaded 600 million certificates from 30 CT logs. This vast certificate set gives us insight into the ecosystem itself and allows us to analyze various certificate characteristics. —Oliver Gasser @APNIC
With cybercrime skyrocketing over the past two decades, companies that do business online — whether retailers, banks, or insurance companies — have devoted increasing resources to improving security and combatting Internet fraud. But sophisticated fraudsters do not limit themselves to the online channel, and many organizations have been slow to adopt effective measures to mitigate the risk of fraud carried out through other channels, such as customer contact centers. In many ways, the phone channel has become the weak link. —Patrick Cox @Dark Reading
Just a few years after Bitcoin emerged, startups began racing to build ASICs for mining the currency. Nearly all of those companies have gone belly-up, however—except Bitmain. The company is estimated to control more than 70 percent of the market for Bitcoin-mining hardware. It also uses its hardware to mine bitcoins for itself. A lot of bitcoins: according to Blockchain.info, Bitmain-affiliated mining pools make up more than 40 percent of the computing power available for Bitcoin mining —Mike Orcutt @Technology Review
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