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The Russian Hackers Are Coming! The Russian Hackers Are Coming!

Those damned Russians will stop at nothing! They stole the last U.S. Presidential election, according to highly esteemed sources close to Hillary Clinton (cough.. cough…). But now they’re up to something even more nefarious: hacking your office equipment so they can spy on you.

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The last statement actually is true. Microsoft announced last Monday that Russian hackers have been invading corporate computer networks by attacking their most vulnerable connected devices. Typically, these are devices we don’t think of as computers: VOIP phones, printers, refrigerators, and even coffee brewers.

How are the intruders getting in?

For such devices, security is often an afterthought, if thought about at all. Since IT experts seldom expect attacks on such devices, they often fail to update their security protocols. And the password for a peripheral- if it’s protected by a password at all- is usually an obvious one such as ‘password’ or a consecutive series of numerals.

The Russian hackers, who go by names such as Fancy Bear, Strontium, and APT28, are said to work in connection with the GRU, Russian military intelligence.

Their hacking activity dates to at least to 2007. It includes such infamous intrusions as:

  • the NoPetYa attacks in Ukraine,
  • attacks on NATO,
  • overriding of the French TV network TV5Monde’s programming in 2015,
  • hacking of the International Olympic Committee,
  • attempted 2018 thefts of data from U.S. conservative political think tanks.

For the Russian hackers, peripheral devices are beachheads, the weakest links in corporate communication systems. Once they have penetrated a poorly protected camera, printer, or video decoder, the hackers can easily take over other devices connected to them. This includes the supposedly impregnable central computer system.

We warned about this two years ago. We said that the Internet of Things (IoT) would multiply headaches for online security professionals– and for us.

What can you do about the threat?

The more connected devices we own: Alexa hubs, Fitbits, ‘smart’ TV sets, etc., the more avenues of attack we leave for hackers. This means we must be all the more vigilant about guarding everything.

We’re not suggesting you should panic about this. Just be careful. Use secure passwords or biometric authentication, or two-factor authentication. Be sure to keep your security protocols updated. And be sure to protect all of your devices, including the ones most of us never worry about.

For the internet connection you need, shop with Satellite Country. We can help.

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CONNECTED DEVICES & PRIVACY

Image result for cat dog conspiracy

Can you keep a secret? No, you can’t, at least not for long. With ever more of your electronic devices, appliances, utility meters, fitness trackers, and home security systems connected to the internet, it’s nearly certain that at least one of them will rat on you sooner or later.

Could Your Devices Be Subpoenaed?

Allison Berman, writing for Singularity Hub, warned that the connected devices in your home could be subpoenaed as witnesses against you. She cited a 2015 murder case, for which police asked Amazon to turn over cloud-based data sent by an Alexa-enabled Echo device in the home of James Andrew Bates, in whose hot tub detectives had found the body of his colleague, Victor Collins. On the night of the murder, the device had been used for streaming music. The Echo device, equipped with seven mikes, listens constantly for the ‘wake word’ that will activate it, making it receptive to commands. Just before and after sensing the wake word, Echo begins recording sound and transmitting it to Amazon’s cloud.

Police believe the Echo device may have recorded audio germane to their investigation.

In the near future, police may solve crimes by interrogating refrigerators, thermostats, TV sets, stereos, phones, tablets, and security systems. With multiple electronic witnesses, they can obtain fairly accurate and comprehensive pictures of the crimes, as they seek to do by interviewing multiple witnesses to an auto accident.

Privacy laws regarding connected devices are very weak. Because the information is stored in the cloud, the owner or user of the devices doesn’t own the data they transmit. It’s not protected to the same degree that documents in his house are.

Could Your Connected Devices Be Hacked?

Of course, any connected device can be hacked. If Alexa is hacked, could a hostile party listen to everything you say in your home? And if you have twenty connected devices in your home, a hacker might obtain eerily accurate and complete information about what you do all day. Could he use it to blackmail you? What could a stalker do if he knows where you’ll be, when, and for what reason?

Hackers could also hijack your devices to spread false information about you. Patrick Frey, who blogs as ‘Patterico’, suffered a ’SWATting’ attack in 2011 after a hacker ‘spoofed’ his cellphone number to place a midnight 911 call. Pretending to be Frey, the caller said he had shot his wife.

Sheriff’s deputies pounded on Frey’s door and rang his doorbell. When he opened the door, they pointed their guns at him and told him to put his hands up. The deputies handcuffed Frey and placed him in a squad car. Then they awakened his wife, led her downstairs, and frisked her. After ascertaining that the children were safe, the police finally left.

The incident could easily have cost Frey his life. Cops are likely to be nervous in confronting a man they believe to be armed and to have just committed a murder.

Can You Trust Browsers and Social Media?

Loss of privacy need not require either hacking or law enforcement inquiry. Certain browsers, such as Google, and social media, such as Facebook, offer overly complicated terms of service– as long as 30,000 words. Few, if any, users read them. The rules are nearly inscrutable for a reason. They’re meant to protect providers from liability, not to protect your privacy.

Since you don’t pay for Google and Facebook services, you are their product. They earn their money through sale of advertising, so they want as much data about you as possible. Their advertisers demand it.

Two years ago, Facebook faced a media firestorm after the discovery that it had been manipulating the emotional states of thousands of users. Facebook had learned that the emotional impact of the images it showed users would affect the character of their posts. With this information, it could reinforce advertising messages.

You reveal far more through social media than you’d guess. MIT’s ‘Gaydar’ project confirmed that one could reliably infer that a particular subject was gay, based solely on his social media posts, even if he had never admitted it openly, and even if he was trying strenuously to keep it hidden. Another MIT project, called ‘Psychopath’, tracked social media posts to determine presence or absence of schizophrenia.

Can You Trust Your Smart TV Set?

On Monday, February 6, Vizio settled a lawsuit over claims that it had violated consumer privacy. The plaintiffs had alleged that Vizio’s connected ‘smart’ TV sets had been tracking ‘second by second’ data about customer viewing habits. To this, Vizio had allegedly added specific demographic information: age, sex, marital status, size of household, income, home ownership, and household value. The company is alleged to have sold this information to third parties. The third parties would use it to enable targeted advertising.

LG and Samsung have also been accused of collecting viewer data through their connected TV sets.

What Can You Do?

What can you do to protect yourself? Update your passwords often. Encrypt what you can. Always stay aware of when your connected devices are switched on.

It may help to assume that everything you do will become public- and live accordingly.

(For the most reliable connection, talk to us. We can help.)

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WARRIORS WIN WITH DATA

Winning in professional sports, we’ve long been told, is a result of talent and hard work. Lately, it also requires information technology.

Nobody knows this better than the NBA’s Golden State Warriors, who’ve used advanced analytics to pull themselves up from near the league cellar in the 2009-2010 season, when they finished in 13th place in the Western Conference. Last year, the Warriors posted a blistering 67 wins in the regular season, and went on to win the World Championship. This year, they won a record 73 games in the regular season, eclipsing the previous record (72) set by the Chicago Bulls in 1996.  They have stormed through the playoffs, and are heavy favorites to win their second straight title.

The dramatic reversal of Golden State’s fortunes began in 2010, when Joe Lacob, a venture capitalist, and Peter Gruber, a Hollywood producer, bought the team. At the time, the NBA had just begun experimenting with analytics, much as professional baseball had been doing.

The team installed SportVU, a six-camera motion-sensing system, which could track each player’s movements 25 times per second. It enabled tracking and analysis of each player’s shots, passes, dribbling, defensive moves, speed, distance between players, and distance run during the game.

The Warriors were slow to figure out how to wring victories out of the data. In the 2010-2011 and 2011-2012 seasons, they won fewer than half of their games, and failed to qualify for the playoffs. Eventually, though, they learned how to use the data to improve training and game strategy. For the 2013-2014 season, they won 57% of their regular season games. The following year they won 62%. In the 2014-2015 season, they won 82%, and this year they won an eye-popping 89%.

The Warriors are noted for unselfish play. The team’s use of video, electronic sensors, and analytics have been instrumental in enhancing its style and its performance on the court.. Marc Spears, a senior NBA writer for ESPN, said, “In some  shape or fashion, every team has become heavy on using tech. But the Warriors are having tremendous success with it.”

Coaches and team managers need to monitor every player’s level of fatigue and potential for injury. To get this information, they have the players wear small sensors that track their movements during practice. The monitors, worn between the shoulders under compression shirts, sense pressure on ankles and knees, and whether the players are moving at normal levels of fitness. Klay Thompson, a shooting guard, said, “Back in the day, we were just able to say, ‘He’s breathing hard; he might need to rest.’ Now they (the coaches) can actually see if you need a day of rest, or if you need to go harder.”

Golden State coaches believe brain function is as important as physical condition. With this is mind, their have players fitted with electrodes on their faces and hands. The electrodes measure neuron activity in the brain– data that’s critical in measuring physical and mental fatigue, which the players themselves might not recognize.

The team constantly explores any electronic technology that might provide a competitive advantage. This includes sleep masks that combat jet lag; smart clothing that measures breathing, heart rate, and muscle use; and head phones that improve muscle memory by transmitting electrical signals to the brain.

Golden State’s minor league team, the Santa Cruz Warriors, is often a guinea pig for new technologies, and it, too, benefits from the data. Last year, the Santa Cruz Warriors won the championship for their league.

To win in life, you also need data. If your internet service isn’t keeping up, talk to us. We can help.

(Editor’s note:  As we post this, the Golden State Warriors are ahead 3-1 in the NBA Championship Series. With one more win, they can take their second straight title.)

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THE THIRD GREAT LEAP

Are we on the verge of the third great technological leap in human history? Some economists and inventors say we are.

The First Great Leap, about 7, 000 years ago, was the development of agriculture. The hunter-gatherer societies that had existed until then were small, unstable, and at the mercy of the elements. People had to move frequently to follow game.

With agriculture, the human race developed a degree of control over nature. In planting and harvesting crops, we could build up food surpluses. The surpluses became a foundation for credit and trade. In domesticating animals, we had predictable supplies of meat, hides, milk, eggs, and wool. With predictable food supplies, permanent dwellings became practical, and man built the first cities. As trade accelerated, we built up further surpluses, which encouraged greater division of labor and some leisure time. This fostered sophisticated religion, philosophy, entertainment, scientific inquiry, and the arts.

The Second Great Leap, the Industrial Revolution, occurred about 200 years ago. Man’s output would no longer be limited to the product of his own muscles or the muscles of his livestock. With the invention of reliable steam engines, then electrical power, man could multiply his productivity many times beyond what was possible with muscle power alone.

The Industrial Revolution multiplied wealth for the masses. An ordinary citizen in America or Western Europe now enjoys comfort, leisure, and mobility that were unavailable even to royalty two centuries ago.

The Third Great Leap is the information revolution. We are on the cusp of it now. Computer technology has come a long way in the last forty years, but still is primitive compared to what it soon will be. The internet, scarcely dreamed of a generation ago, is still in its infancy.

The third leap is the use of information for more than training and education. We are about to use encoded information routinely to manipulate physical reality. With a VR headset and a control console, someone in Spain controls an earth mover in Sweden. A surgeon operates on a patient remotely, with robots cutting more precisely than his hand. A factory manager in Phoenix controls production in Tucson, with no staff on site in the Tucson factory. He can monitor and address any problems in real time.

Some of the most important emerging technologies include virtual reality, 3D printing, gene editing, and the ‘internet of things’. Sensors will be nearly everywhere. If we want, we can have nearly constant feedback about nearly everything in our environment.

Some experts believe the Third Great Leap will multiply average productivity more than fifty times within a few decades. If this happens, nearly all of us will be much richer. We could easily pay off the national debt. We would have cheap and abundant energy. We could solve problems that seem intractable now.

We cannot know now exactly how the Third Great Leap will affect us. We can make only the vaguest of guesses. It will, no doubt, bring us many new problems as well as opportunities. At any rate, we can be sure that our lives will be very different.

(To get the HughesNet data service that’s right for you, talk to us.)