Privacy and Remote Surveillance: Can We Trust Systems to Protect Who Is Watching Us?
Is your security camera safe? With more security devices linked to networks and systems, they are also exposed to different network-based hacks and attacks. Privacy today experiences increasing threats from a rising surveillance apparatus that is justified in national security. Different government agencies—the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Security Agency, and other local and state law agencies—intrude upon private communications of innocent people, collect massive databases of who we call and when, and list suspicious activities based on the most unclear standards. When Surveillance Becomes a Problem In the newest iteration, at least 150,000 security cams installed in factories, hospitals, businesses, and schools were compromised, offering outsiders access to video from psychiatric hospitals, prisons, Tesla factories and so much more. Hackers claim to have breached surveillance agency Verkada that delivered a statement telling they’re studying the scope and scale of the case and that they notified the law enforcement. Apparently, the attack was not sophisticated, using a privileged administrator account to access the system. According to a Verkada spokesperson, every internal administrator account has been disabled throughout the investigation to avoid unauthorized access. Some of the cameras breached utilized facial recognition technology and analytics to determine and distinguish video footage people. Further, the hackers claimed they have had access to the complete video archive of every Verkada customer—which involves audio, archived video, and live feeds. Tillie Kottman, one of the assumed hackers, told Bloomberg that the international hacker collective had planned to present the universality of video surveillance and effortlessness. It could be compromised—particularly when devices are linked as part of the IoT. The Privacy Problems of Security Cameras Unluckily, security cameras cannot track selectively. Anybody stepping into the monitored space will be caught on the camera and watched until they leave. When the recorded footage is saved, that could be used against anybody when the occasion comes. Here’s a random situation showing to what level this could go: The surveillance team could blackmail a cheating husband walking down the block with his lover. A camera could record an innocent stranger passing by down the street when the incident occurred in a nearby location. That person might not have anything to do with the incident, but he could become a suspect as he’s the only person caught on the surveillance at the time. Are Security Cameras an Invasion of People’s Privacy? You will find numerous grey areas about surveillance technology. The general guideline is to use them where it’s useful for security purposes. Do you plan to stalk people or control staff from afar to boost security? Surveillance could spiral out of control. But to avoid surveillance breach here’s the thing you can do: Execute multifactor authentication on accounts, stopping threat factors from logging in Track IOCs, like impossible travel Use the principle of least privilege, limiting the scope of damages in the event of a breach Making sure privileged accounts are only few Companies can also lower the risk by performing careful vendor risk evaluations before buying in.
Pay or Die: The Life-Threatening Cyber Attacks of The Healthcare Industry
For the past years, the healthcare sector has been a major target for cybercriminals. Did you know that healthcare data breaches exploit highly sensitive data, from personally identifiable information like names, addresses, Social Security numbers to sensitive health information like patients’ medical histories, health insurance info, and Medicaid ID numbers? The reasons behind cyber-attacks on healthcare organizations are evident: health insurance companies, pharmacies, urgent care clinics, hospitals, and other healthcare providers keep archives of valuable data. These are juicy details that can be utilized for identity theft than any other industry. Further, the healthcare sector is widely recognized as having weak security. In fact, a recent report discovered that healthcare ranked 9th out of all sectors when it comes to the overall security rating. Cyberattack on Finnish Healthcare Thousands of psychotherapy patients in Finland reported receiving extortion notes from hackers. The alleged hackers had breached Vastaamo, a private healthcare company. They stole important treatment records during such attacks involving recordings of doctor-patient sessions. Extorting clients is an unprecedented way for hackers. Normally, they request ransom from the company from which they have stolen sensitive information. When the healthcare company refused, the hackers sought out the patients themselves. The cyberattack against the company clarifies that the healthcare sector is more prone to cyberattacks than any other industry. What Makes the Healthcare Sector More Vulnerable than Ever? It’s assumed that the first cyberattack incident on Vastaamo’s healthcare facilities occurred in 2018. The information is now being leaked or used for patient’s extortion. You will also find reasons why healthcare information is more significant to cybercriminals than credit cards or Social Security numbers. That’s because the data’s owners are in a more vulnerable position. It is not only their credit score or money which is at risk—it’s their peace of mind, their health. That it is their more intimate privacy, that’s something they could never get back when it leaks out to the public. Hence, the healthcare sector must keep their data safe and take security much seriously. Further, patient data is not the only thing that is a huge risk. Important patients and devices like surgical robots, pacemakers, and ventilators are connected as well. That suggests they are under threat as well. Hospitals today are being sabotaged without even knowing. How to Prevent Cyberattacks on the Healthcare Industry? The initial step to any cybersecurity resilience plan is to keep in mind the holy trinity of cybersecurity: Technology Processes People Healthcare facilities should invest in the proper technology to keep their private data safe. These technologies include spam-filters and antivirus software. That also indicates upgrading to a software that is regularly patched. Healthcare facilities must train their staff to use the internet and email safely and make a powerful security culture among their staff. Ultimately, there must be processes in place which help keep data safe. Rules which apply to everyone and strategies on how to respond should a security breach take place.
How AI And Machine Learning Will Improve Marketing In The Future
Advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning are revolutionizing all industry and business factors; however, most marketers have just scratched the surface of the possible use of this groundbreaking technology. There are more than 300 million possible consumers in the United States alone. Multiply this number of branded products in a specific category, bearing in mind all diverse configurations and variants on hand for procurement. Then, consider how those procurement choices are impacted by past brand interactions, weather, kind of device, time of day, language, personal preference, sentiment, and a whole lot more. There’s no way an individual could have an entry to these variables, include them into actionable insights as well as roll-out activities in real-time. Due to this, marketers depend on the analysis of big data to link the dots. For real-time, efficient, and targeted activities, marketers depend on machine learning and artificial intelligence. AI and its use in ML can assist a team of marketing in controlling micro-target consumers, expenses, perform precise demand forecasting, measurable return on investment, obtain actionable insights, and eliminate waste in offline and online spending. While people are likely to utilize the terms AI and ML interchangeably, there are different disparities between them. Artificial intelligence refers to the creation of machines that are interested, which learn from the environment, and able to close-human problem solving. ML or machine learning is the use of artificial intelligence, which offers a system that can assess information and boost itself without being openly taught to do so. Machine learning and artificial intelligence can assist in getting rid of marketing waste by enabling micro-targeting of consumers open to conversion and following on buying and helping them know the best offer and form for utmost efficiency. Marketers can obtain real-time responsiveness. A technology that runs typically automatically can make structure dynamic content and make a retargeting decision on the spot in reaction to the customer’s behaviors. Lessened Expenses: Automated jobs set and forget, reduced investments in workers’ time and resources, which marketers could apply to tactical purposes. The whole team can be more efficient and productive. Companies can get rid of waste which happens naturally as the outcome of mass advertising, by personalizing every offer to the least amount to an impact purchasing decision. Make Marketing Efforts Easier: With this latest technology, companies can use client behavioral information to precisely determine who are likely to be clients. This goes beyond conventional information analytics as machine learning algorithms can integrate outcomes of marketing hard works and utilize them to enhance strategic choices in future efforts. Marketing departments can make the campaign easier, utilizing micro-targeting outcomes from machine learning plans to concentrate on customers, which can be affected without wasting resources and effort on less likely candidates. Obstructions to personalization take account of omnichannel integration, poor quality of data, complex execution, and inability to measure return on investment. Machine learning can assist in eliminating these obstructions to success through automatically gathering. These could be analyzing superior customer information, offering actionable insights as well as automatically doing personalized interaction with active content.
The End of Privacy: The Most Damaging Privacy Leaks of the 21st Century
Data is transforming to one of the most important assets in the digital realm. The tech giants monopolizing data are considered the most powerful organizations on the planet. Nonetheless, they are often becoming vulnerable to a data breach epidemic despite the overflowing value of data monitored by such entities. A data breach is an information security breach where personal data is exposed publicly without approval. When giant firms such as Yahoo and Facebook have gotten comprehensive attention for the outcome of a data breach, small companies are no escape. Take note that data breaches can impact businesses of all sizes in many different ways. They are challenging to determine, expensive to address, and can cause massive reputational damage that some enterprises never recover. Nevertheless, the only thing organizations can do in such scenarios is to mitigate the consequences of a breach to execute a detailed risk management practice for a recognition, restraint, and communication in the aftermath of a data breach. Below is the list of the well-known and biggest data breaches in the 21st century. FriendFinder Networks Data Breach Occurred in October 2016 and affected 400 million accounts This company suffered one of the major and most damaging data breaches in history in 2016. FriendFinder Network Inc. jeopardized 400 million accounts, with most of them coming from AdultFriendFinder.com. Did you know that every database involved in the breach is composed of usernames, email addresses, and passwords kept in plain text? Marriott International Data Breach Occurred in September 2018 and affected 500 million guest records. On September 8, 2018, a security tool flagged a suspicious effort to access a guest reservation database for Marriott’s Starwood brands. It was found out that the Starwood network was compromised in 2014 when the international corporation started an investigation. The data breach happened when it was still a separate company before merging with Marriott. In 2016, Marriott acquired Starwood but failed to incorporate the firm with its reservation system. Starwood was still utilizing its preceding IT infrastructure, which resulted to an attack. The record of five hundred million guests was washed out from the Starwood systems by the hacker. The cybercriminals utilized Trojan Horse software to access the accounts Facebook Data Breach Occurred in September 2019 and affected 400 million users This is one of the recent data breaches of today. The giant social media platform, Facebook, reported a series of security breaches in the past. Nevertheless, the data breaches that happened in 2019 were big. The company disclosed that millions of Instagram passwords had been kept online in plain text. After that, other problems, such as technical flaws allowing kids to chat with strangers online, undiscovered to their parents. News emerged of a data leak in September 2019 that uncovered the phone numbers of at least 400 million Facebook users. That database comprises records throughout numerous geographic locations, consistent with 133 million Facebook users in America, 50 million in Vietnam, and 18 million in the United Kingdom. The database in question was discovered to be unsecured by password or any form of encryption. Anyone searching the web could find and access that data. First Americans Financial Corporation Data Breach Occurred in May 2019 and affected 885 million users American journalist Brian Krebs reported the big data breach of financial records from the company in 2019. The breach leak digitalized documents which go back to 2013. A few of the most important data stolen during the incident were drivers’ license images, wire transaction receipts, social security numbers, mortgage and tax records, bank statements, and bank account numbers. What’s more, the breach was started from an authentication mistake. No verification was needed to access the files that make them accessible to anyone with a browser. Any individual with the link can access data, and with a change of one digit, it was simple to find other documents with the same URLs. The company encountered a common web designer error referred to as Direct Object Reference (IDOR). A web page with sensitive data is made so a certain party will only view it. Nonetheless, the table turned as there’s no other way to determine the person seeing it. Anybody who types the link could easily and directly access the web browser. Cybercriminals and hackers used Advanced Persistent Bots (APBs) to gather and index the remaining documents. This data breach proved that companies could not massively depend on unique links to protect data. As an alternative, documents must be safeguarded with passwords and multi-factor authentication. Yahoo Data Breach Occurred in October 2017 and affected three billion accounts Yahoo suffered the biggest and most detrimental breach in history in 2013. However, it took another 3-4 years to find the accident. The Chief Intelligence Officer of InfoArmor, Andrew Komarov, discovered the data breach when he’s assisting the firm in responding to another data attack in 2016. He unraveled hints of the 2013 breach while trying to take down the stolen information. He observed a dark web seller providing close to $300,000 for a list of over a billion Yahoo accounts in August 2015. Yahoo experienced a hot in its income when it went public along with the massive data breach. The organization alerted its users to reset all their passwords and restart their security questions. News of the breach declined Yahoo’s value by $350 million, not to mention the stock price drop by three percent. The security breach led the company to long-term effects. What’s more, the company ran into different civil and regulatory complainants, as it failed to disclose the breach timely. It is expected that most of their post-breach injuries could have been prevented had it been assessed and revealed the breach sooner. There you have it! These are the top five of the biggest and most damaging data breaches in the 21st century. What are your thoughts about this post? Share your insights with us by leaving your comments below!
