Weekend Reads: 071918

In this post, we present ARTEMIS (Automatic and Real-Time dEtection and MItigation System), a defence system that can be used by operators to protect their own network from BGP prefix hijacking events. Using real experiments, we’ve shown that ARTEMIS can detect prefix hijacking events within seconds and neutralize them within a minute; orders of magnitude faster than with current practices. —Vasileios Kotronis @APNIC

You could sum up the security advantages of serverless this way: What containers did for ensuring the operating system and hardware layer could be maintained and secured separately, serverless offers the same at the application and web server layer. And yet — serverless is no silver bullet from a security perspective. Serverless environments still need to be designed and managed with security in mind at every moment. —Vince Power @The New Stack

Another lesson is that privacy defenses don’t need to be perfect. Many researchers and engineers think about privacy in all-or-nothing terms: a single mistake can be devastating, and if a defense won’t be perfect, we shouldn’t deploy it at all. That might make sense for some applications such as the Tor browser, but for everyday users of mainstream browsers, the threat model is death by a thousand cuts, and privacy defenses succeed by interfering with the operation of the surveillance economy. —Arvind Narayanan @Freedom to Tinker

Many people, particularly older folks, proudly declare they avoid using the Web to manage various accounts tied to their personal and financial data — including everything from utilities and mobile phones to retirement benefits and online banking services. The reasoning behind this strategy is as simple as it is alluring: What’s not put online can’t be hacked. But increasingly, adherents to this mantra are finding out the hard way that if you don’t plant your flag online, fraudsters and identity thieves may do it for you. @Krebs on Security

A company you’ve likely never heard of allegedly exposed some of the most personal data of “pretty much every U.S. citizen,” a security researcher said on Wednesday. Exactis, a major data company based in Palm Coast, Fla., allegedly leaked the data of 340 million individuals, according to the security researcher Vinny Troia, who discovered what he described as a breach earlier this month. The records exposed comprise nearly two terabytes of data, according to a report from Wired published Wednesday. —Kari Paul @Market Watch

Open-plan offices have taken off because of a desire to increase interaction and collaboration among workers. But an innovative new study has found that employees in open-plan offices spend 73% less time in face-to-face interactions. Email and messaging use shot up by over 67%. —Libby Sander @Intellectual Takeout

Silicon Valley moguls seem to believe they can fix most anything, and they appear befuddled when their attempts to do so aren’t met with unbridled enthusiasm. The tech billionaire Elon Musk was among the millions of people captivated by the plight of the 12 boys and their soccer coach recently trapped in a cave in Thailand. But Mr. Musk didn’t just follow the story on the news and social media; he has vast resources, so he also tried to help. —Zeynep Tufekci @The New York Times