weekly cypher

FBI again refutes Trump’s claim that China hacked Hillary Clinton’s email

The Weekly Cypher is specially curated to keep you up-to-date on the latest in cybersecurity, biometrics, and related news and innovations. Here are a few of the headlines you might have missed this week.

FBI again refutes Trump’s claim that China hacked Hillary Clinton’s email | Washington Post

The FBI says there is no evidence to support President Trump’s unfounded claim that Hillary Clinton’s emails were hacked by China. Early Wednesday Trump tweeted, “Hillary Clinton’s Emails, many of which are Classified Information, got hacked by China. Next move better be by the FBI & DOJ or, after all of their other missteps (Comey, McCabe, Strzok, Page, Ohr, FISA, Dirty Dossier etc.), their credibility will be forever gone!” The president offered no evidence to support this assertion. The FBI first said Clinton’s email servers weren’t hacked in 2016. Asked about the president’s assertions, the FBI provided a statement Wednesday afternoon that simply said: “The FBI has not found any evidence the servers were compromised.” [Read More]

T-Mobile Alerts 2.3 Million Customers of Data Breach | Threat Post

Wireless carrier T-Mobile warned 2.3 million subscribers via text this week about the possibility their personal account information has beed exposed. This was in addition to a customer advisory on the T-Mobile website alerting all its 77 million customers of the breach. About 3 percent of those were affected, the company said. According to the advisory, T-Mobile “discovered and shut down… unauthorized access to certain information” on August 20. Exposed information included customers’ “name, billing zip code, phone number, email address, account number and account type (prepaid or postpaid).” The company said no credit card data, social security numbers or passwords were part of the breach. [Read More]

Tech Companies Move To Protect Election Systems As Trump Administration Flounders| Fast Company

Major tech companies – including Microsoft, Google, and Cloudflare – are offering free and discounted cybersecurity to local election officials. For example, Jigsaw, a tech incubator working on digital vulnerabilities, owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, is running the “Protect Your Election” project. The project is designed to make a suite of tech tools to defend against attacks like DDoS and email phishing as accessible as possible for campaigns, political groups, independent news outlets, human rights groups working on elections, election workers, and activists. Synack, a security service founded by ex-NSA operators, is offering $500,000 worth of free penetration testing assessments for elections. Each test runs $25,000 to $35,000, says Justine Desmond, Synack’s product-marketing manager for government. This comes at a time that government officials working to counter election interference from Russia are operating with no strategy from the top, including from President Donald Trump’s fractured National Security Council, leaving each agency to fend for itself without White House support or direction. [Read More]

Air Canada resets 1.7 million accounts after app breach | Naked Security

Air Canada was forced to issue a password reset for all 1.7 million users of its Android, iOS and BlackBerry mobile app following a breach of up to 20,000 accounts last week. According to the alert, the company detected “unusual login behavior,” between August 22 and 24, after which it blocked further access. For the people believed to be directly affected by the breach, two types of data were put at risk:

Hackers had access to users’ name, email address, telephone number, and Air Canada Aeroplan account number. They may also have been able to get users’ passport number, NEXUS number (a system allowing rapid crossing of some borders), Known Traveler number, gender, birth date, nationality, passport expiration date, country of issuance, and country of residence. Credit card numbers were encrypted and were not compromised. [Read More]

FBI Looking For Tech to Foil Fingerprint Obliteration | Next Gov

Police started using fingerprints to identify criminals more than a century ago and ever since criminals have been trying to remove the prints from their fingers entirely. In the 1930’s, the infamous bank robber John Dillinger poured acid into cuts in his fingertips in an attempt to erase them. Now the FBI thinks artificial intelligence could help catch those especially ambitious offenders. It has issued an RFI for how AI tools could detect altered fingerprints and match them to their unaltered counterparts in the Next Generation Identification System, the FBI’s massive biometric database. “The [Criminal Justice Information Services] Division has identified a growing trend in which criminals intentionally alter their fingerprints to defeat identification within the NGI System,” officials wrote in a request for information. “As those who seek to avoid identification continue to evolve their alteration techniques, it is critical that the NGI System maintain pace through the ability to learn in real time.” [Read More]

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