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Day: May 8, 2017

Links for 2017-05-08

  • The great British Brexit robbery: how our democracy was hijacked | Technology | The Guardian

    A map shown to the Observer showing the many places in the world where SCL and Cambridge Analytica have worked includes Russia, Lithuania, Latvia, Ukraine, Iran and Moldova. Multiple Cambridge Analytica sources have revealed other links to Russia, including trips to the country, meetings with executives from Russian state-owned companies, and references by SCL employees to working for Russian entities. Article 50 has been triggered. AggregateIQ is outside British jurisdiction. The Electoral Commission is powerless. And another election, with these same rules, is just a month away. It is not that the authorities don’t know there is cause for concern. The Observer has learned that the Crown Prosecution Service did appoint a special prosecutor to assess whether there was a case for a criminal investigation into whether campaign finance laws were broken. The CPS referred it back to the electoral commission. Someone close to the intelligence select committee tells me that “work is being done” on potential Russian interference in the referendum. Gavin Millar, a QC and expert in electoral law, described the situation as “highly disturbing”. He believes the only way to find the truth would be to hold a public inquiry. But a government would need to call it. A government that has just triggered an election specifically to shore up its power base. An election designed to set us into permanent alignment with Trump’s America. [….] This isn’t about Remain or Leave. It goes far beyond party politics. It’s about the first step into a brave, new, increasingly undemocratic world.

    (tags: elections brexit trump cambridge-analytica aggregateiq scary analytics data targeting scl ukip democracy grim-meathook-future)

  • Online security won’t improve until companies stop passing the buck to the customer

    100% agreed!

    Giving good security advice is hard because very often individuals have little or no effective control over their security. The extent to which a customer is at risk of being defrauded largely depends on how good their bank’s security is, something customers cannot know. Similarly, identity fraud is the result of companies doing a poor job at verifying identity. If a criminal can fraudulently take out a loan using another’s name, address, and date of birth from the public record, that’s the fault of the lender – not, as Cifas, a trade organisation for lenders, claims, because customers “don’t take the same care to protect our most important asset – our identities”.

    (tags: cifas uk passwords security regulation banking ncsc riscs advice)

  • Backdooring an AWS account

    eek. Things to look out for on your AWS setup:

    So you’ve pwned an AWS account?—?congratulations?—?now what? You’re eager to get to the data theft, amirite? Not so fast whipper snapper, have you disrupted logging? Do you know what you have? Sweet! Time to get settled in. Maintaining persistence in AWS is only limited by your imagination but there are few obvious and oft used techniques everyone should know and watch for.

    (tags: aws security hacks iam sts)

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