Category: Current Events

Posted in Current Events, Informational, Research

“Hack the Hackers…”

Posted on by Steph

Cybersecurity in the News

It’s been in the news that after two large cyberattacks against 2 Australian companies the government is:

  • Contemplating a law to prevent paying ransomware payments
  • Creating a team to ‘hack the hackers’
Computer screen filled with orange, red, white, and green ‘code’

The problem with the former solution is that it will hurts businesses more than hackers. The time to outlaw payments for ransomware has long passed in my opinion. It doesn’t appear to offer a solution really or it doesn’t answer the real problem which is that there a lack of push or support for shoring defenses that would lower the success of these attacks.

The second outcome I have less of an opinion on. Though I will say that active countermeasures (similar to this idea) has been a idea in cyber for years.

Dark Reading has more to say on the latter than I.

I just think this geopolitically is something to watch. I’m also curious to see how cybercriminals might respond to both proposed actions.

More Reading:

Posted in Current Events, Informational, Research, Topic

Privacy in the Digital Age:

Posted on by Steph

Roe v. Wade

Again, had a post planned and instead news caused a different post.

Even before the Supreme Court officially struck down the Roe v. Wade decision and sent reproductive health issues back to the states there were stirrings questioning how incoming changes might effect health apps and data collection.

Living in today’s world people might not worry about how much of their information is readily collected or available. Perhaps, they’ve resigned themselves to the fact that they can’t stop their data being collected. There has been very little headway made in crafting some type of national privacy law, so it makes one feel like this is just inevitable, online privacy is your own concern.

For months before today reading through Twitter brought calls for women to remove period tracking apps and be more cognizant of how their data might be collected and in the future possibly subpoenaed as proof of some ‘reproductive crime’..

“Democrat lawmakers along with privacy advocates are now growing worried prosecutors in these anti-abortion states will use subpoenas to demand tech companies help them identify which users have visited an abortion provider.” -Michael Kan, PCMag.

I would definitely consider myself a privacy advocate. I think the majority of infosec people are concerned about privacy to some degree. It’s concerning that it really took something so dramatic to bring this conversation about data collection back to the foreground.

It can be proposed that perhaps we all just became too complacent in many ways…

How all this unfolds and develops is something to keep a definite eye on.