Tag Archives: banking

Bank Robbery Tactic

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/08/bank_robbery_ta.html

This video purports to be a bank robbery in Kiev. He first threatens a teller, who basically ignores him because she’s behind bullet-proof glass. But then the robber threatens one of her co-workers, who is on his side of the glass. Interesting example of a security system failing for an unexpected reason.

The video is weird, though. The robber seems very unsure of himself, and never really points the gun at anyone or even holds it properly.

Piracy Narrative Isn’t About Ethics Anymore, It’s About “Danger”

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/piracy-narrative-isnt-about-ethics-anymore-its-about-danger-170812/

Over the years there have been almost endless attempts to stop people from accessing copyright-infringing content online. Campaigns have come and gone and almost two decades later the battle is still ongoing.

Early on, when panic enveloped the music industry, the campaigns centered around people getting sued. Grabbing music online for free could be costly, the industry warned, while parading the heads of a few victims on pikes for the world to see.

Periodically, however, the aim has been to appeal to the public’s better nature. The idea is that people essentially want to do the ‘right thing’, so once they understand that largely hard-working Americans are losing their livelihoods, people will stop downloading from The Pirate Bay. For some, this probably had the desired effect but millions of people are still getting their fixes for free, so the job isn’t finished yet.

In more recent years, notably since the MPAA and RIAA had their eyes blacked in the wake of SOPA, the tone has shifted. In addition to educating the public, torrent and streaming sites are increasingly being painted as enemies of the public they claim to serve.

Several studies, largely carried out on behalf of the Digital Citizens Alliance (DCA), have claimed that pirate sites are hotbeds of malware, baiting consumers in with tasty pirate booty only to offload trojans, viruses, and God-knows-what. These reports have been ostensibly published as independent public interest documents but this week an advisor to the DCA suggested a deeper interest for the industry.

Hemanshu Nigam is a former federal prosecutor, ex-Chief Security Officer for News Corp and Fox Interactive Media, and former VP Worldwide Internet Enforcement at the MPAA. In an interview with Deadline this week, he spoke about alleged links between pirate sites and malware distributors. He also indicated that warning people about the dangers of pirate sites has become Hollywood’s latest anti-piracy strategy.

“The industry narrative has changed. When I was at the MPAA, we would tell people that stealing content is wrong and young people would say, yeah, whatever, you guys make a lot of money, too bad,” he told the publication.

“It has gone from an ethical discussion to a dangerous one. Now, your parents’ bank account can be raided, your teenage daughter can be spied on in her bedroom and extorted with the footage, or your computer can be locked up along with everything in it and held for ransom.”

Nigam’s stance isn’t really a surprise since he’s currently working for the Digital Citizens Alliance as an advisor. In turn, the Alliance is at least partly financed by the MPAA. There’s no suggestion whatsoever that Nigam is involved in any propaganda effort, but recent signs suggest that the DCA’s work in malware awareness is more about directing people away from pirate sites than protecting them from the alleged dangers within.

That being said and despite the bias, it’s still worth giving experts like Nigam an opportunity to speak. Largely thanks to industry efforts with brands, pirate sites are increasingly being forced to display lower-tier ads, which can be problematic. On top, some sites’ policies mean they don’t deserve any visitors at all.

In the Deadline piece, however, Nigam alleges that hackers have previously reached out to pirate websites offering $200 to $5000 per day “depending on the size of the pirate website” to have the site infect users with malware. If true, that’s a serious situation and people who would ordinarily use ‘pirate’ sites would definitely appreciate the details.

For example, to which sites did hackers make this offer and, crucially, which sites turned down the offer and which ones accepted?

It’s important to remember that pirates are just another type of consumer and they would boycott sites in a heartbeat if they discovered they’d been paid to infect them with malware. But, as usual, the claims are extremely light in detail. Instead, there’s simply a blanket warning to stay away from all unauthorized sites, which isn’t particularly helpful.

In some cases, of course, operational security will prevent some details coming to light but without these, people who don’t get infected on a ‘pirate’ site (the vast majority) simply won’t believe the allegations. As the author of the Deadline piece pointed out, it’s a bit like Reefer Madness all over again.

The point here is that without hard independent evidence to back up these claims, with reports listing sites alongside the malware they’ve supposed to have spread and when, few people will respond to perceived scaremongering. Free content trumps a few distant worries almost every time, whether that involves malware or the threat of a lawsuit.

It’ll be up to the DCA and their MPAA paymasters to consider whether the approach is working but thus far, not even having government heavyweights on board has helped.

Earlier this year the DCA launched a video campaign, enrolling 15 attorney generals to publish their own anti-piracy PSAs on YouTube. Thus far, interest has been minimal, to say the least.

At the time of writing the 15 PSAs have 3,986 views in total, with 2,441 of those contributed by a single video contributed by Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel. Despite the relative success, even that got slammed with 2 upvotes and 127 downvotes.

A few of the other videos have a couple of hundred views each but more than half have less than 70. Perhaps most worryingly for the DCA, apart from the Schimel PSA, none have any upvotes at all, only down. It’s unclear who the viewers were but it seems reasonable to conclude they weren’t entertained.

The bottom line is nobody likes malware or having their banking details stolen but yet again, people who claim to have the public interest at heart aren’t actually making a difference on the ground. It could be argued that groups advocating online safety should be publishing guides on how to stay protected on the Internet period, not merely advising people to stay away from certain sites.

But of course, that wouldn’t achieve the goals of the MPAA Digital Citizens Alliance.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

ESET Tries to Scare People Away From Using Torrents

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/eset-tries-to-scare-people-away-from-using-torrents-170805/

Any company in the security game can be expected to play up threats among its customer base in order to get sales.

Sellers of CCTV equipment, for example, would have us believe that criminals don’t want to be photographed and will often go elsewhere in the face of that. Car alarm companies warn us that since X thousand cars are stolen every minute, an expensive Immobilizer is an anti-theft must.

Of course, they’re absolutely right to point these things out. People want to know about these offline risks since they affect our quality of life. The same can be said of those that occur in the online world too.

We ARE all at risk of horrible malware that will trash our computers and steal our banking information so we should all be running adequate protection. That being said, how many times do our anti-virus programs actually trap a piece of nasty-ware in a year? Once? Twice? Ten times? Almost never?

The truth is we all need to be informed but it should be done in a measured way. That’s why an article just published by security firm ESET on the subject of torrents strikes a couple of bad chords, particularly with people who like torrents. It’s titled “Why you should view torrents as a threat” and predictably proceeds to outline why.

“Despite their popularity among users, torrents are very risky ‘business’,” it begins.

“Apart from the obvious legal trouble you could face for violating the copyright of musicians, filmmakers or software developers, there are security issues linked to downloading them that could put you or your computer in the crosshairs of the black hats.”

Aside from the use of the phrase “very risky” (‘some risk’ is a better description), there’s probably very little to complain about in this opening shot. However, things soon go downhill.

“Merely downloading the newest version of BitTorrent clients – software necessary for any user who wants to download or seed files from this ‘ecosystem’ – could infect your machine and irreversibly damage your files,” ESET writes.

Following that scary statement, some readers will have already vowed never to use a torrent again and moved on without reading any more, but the details are really important.

To support its claim, ESET points to two incidents in 2016 (which to its great credit the company actually discovered) which involved the Transmission torrent client. Both involved deliberate third-party infection and in the latter hackers attacked Transmission’s servers and embedded malware in its OSX client before distribution to the public.

No doubt these were both miserable incidents (to which the Transmission team quickly responded) but to characterize this as a torrent client problem seems somewhat unfair.

People intent on spreading viruses and malware do not discriminate and will happily infect ANY piece of computer software they can. Sadly, many non-technical people reading the ESET post won’t read beyond the claim that installing torrent clients can “infect your machine and irreversibly damage your files.”

That’s a huge disservice to the hundreds of millions of torrent client installations that have taken place over a decade and a half and were absolutely trouble free. On a similar basis, we could argue that installing Windows is the main initial problem for people getting viruses from the Internet. It’s true but it’s also not the full picture.

Finally, the piece goes on to detail other incidents over the years where torrents have been found to contain malware. The several cases highlighted by ESET are both real and pretty unpleasant for victims but the important thing to note here is torrent users are no different to any other online user, no matter how they use the Internet.

People who download files from the Internet, from ALL untrusted sources, are putting themselves at risk of getting a virus or other malware. Whether that content is obtained from a website or a P2P network, the risks are ever-present and only a foolish person would do so without decent security software (such as ESET’s) protecting them.

The take home point here is to be aware of security risks and put them into perspective. It’s hard to put a percentage on these things but of the hundreds of millions of torrent and torrent client downloads that have taken place since their inception 15 years ago, the overwhelming majority have been absolutely fine.

Security situations do arise and we need to be aware of them, but presenting things in a way that spreads unnecessary concern in a particular sector isn’t necessary to sell products.

The AV-TEST Institute registers around 390,000 new malicious programs every day that don’t involve torrents, plenty for any anti-virus firm to deal with.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

TVAddons Returns, But in Ugly War With Canadian Telcos Over Kodi Addons

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/tvaddons-returns-ugly-war-canadian-telcos-kodi-addons-170801/

After Dish Network filed a lawsuit against TVAddons in Texas, several high-profile Kodi addons took the decision to shut down. Soon after, TVAddons itself went offline.

In the weeks that followed, several TVAddons-related domains were signed over (1,2) to a Canadian law firm, a mysterious situation that didn’t dovetail well with the US-based legal action.

TorrentFreak can now reveal that the shutdown of TVAddons had nothing to do with the US action and everything to do with a separate lawsuit filed in Canada.

The complaint against TVAddons

Two months ago on June 2, a collection of Canadian telecoms giants including Bell Canada, Bell ExpressVu, Bell Media, Videotron, Groupe TVA, Rogers Communications and Rogers Media, filed a complaint in Federal Court against Montreal resident, Adam Lackman, the man behind TVAddons.

The 18-page complaint details the plaintiffs’ case against Lackman, claiming that he communicated copyrighted TV shows including Game of Thrones, Prison Break, The Big Bang Theory, America’s Got Talent, Keeping Up With The Kardashians and dozens more, to the public in breach of copyright.

The key claim is that Lackman achieved this by developing, hosting, distributing or promoting Kodi add-ons.

Adam Lackman, the man behind TVAddons (@adam.lackman on Instagram)

A total of 18 major add-ons are detailed in the complaint including 1Channel, Exodus, Phoenix, Stream All The Sources, SportsDevil, cCloudTV and Alluc, to name a few. Also under the spotlight is the ‘FreeTelly’ custom Kodi build distributed by TVAddons alongside its Kodi configuration tool, Indigo.

“[The defendant] has made the [TV shows] available to the public by telecommunication in a way that allows members of the public to have access to them from a place and at a time individually chosen by them…consequently infringing the Plaintiffs’ copyright…in contravention of sections 2.4(1.1), 3(1)(f) and 27(1) of the Copyright Act,” the complaint reads.

The complaint alleges that Lackman “induced and/or authorized users” of the FreeTelly and Indigo tools to carry out infringement by his handling and promotion of infringing add-ons, including through TVAddons.ag and Offshoregit.com, in contravention of sections 3(1)(f) and 27(1) of the Copyright Act.

“Approximately 40 million unique users located around the world are actively using Infringing Addons hosted by TVAddons every month, and approximately 900,000 Canadian households use Infringing Add-ons to access television content. The amount of users of Infringing add-ons hosted TVAddons is constantly increasing,” the complaint adds.

To limit the harm allegedly caused by TVAddons, the complaint asked for interim, interlocutory, and permanent injunctions restraining Lackman and associates from developing, promoting or distributing any of the allegedly infringing add-ons or software. On top, the plaintiffs requested punitive and exemplary damages, plus costs.

The interim injunction and Anton Piller Order

Following the filing of the complaint, on June 9 the Federal Court handed down a time-limited interim injunction against Lackman which restrained him from various activities in respect of TVAddons. The process took place ex parte, meaning in secret, without Lackman being able to mount a defense.

The Court also authorized a bailiff and computer forensics experts to take control of Internet domains including TVAddons.ag and Offshoregit.com plus social media and hosting provider accounts for a period of 14 days. These were transferred to Daniel Drapeau at DrapeauLex, an independent court-appointed supervising counsel.

The order also contained an Anton Piller order, a civil search warrant that grants plaintiffs no-notice permission to enter a defendant’s premises in order to secure and copy evidence to support their case, before it can be destroyed or tampered with.

The order covered not only data related to the TVAddons platform, such as operating and financial details, revenues, and banking information, but everything in Lackman’s possession.

The Court ordered the telecoms companies to inform Lackman that the case against him is a civil proceeding and that he could deny entry to his property if he wished. However, that option would put him in breach of the order and would place him at risk of being fined or even imprisoned. Catch 22 springs to mind.

The Court did, however, put limits on the number of people that could be present during the execution of the Anton Piller order (ostensibly to avoid intimidation) and ordered the plaintiffs to deposit CAD$50,000 with the Court, in case the order was improperly executed. That decision would later prove an important one.

The search and interrogation of TVAddons’ operator

On June 12, the order was executed and Lackman’s premises were searched for more than 16 hours. For nine hours he was interrogated and effectively denied his right to remain silent since non-cooperation with an Anton Piller order amounts to contempt of court. The Court’s stated aim of not intimidating Lackman failed.

The TVAddons operator informs TorrentFreak that he heard a disturbance in the hallway outside and spotted several men hiding on the other side of the door. Fearing for his life, Lackman called the police and when they arrived he opened the door. At this point, the police were told by those in attendance to leave, despite Lackman’s protests.

Once inside, Lackman was told he had an hour to find a lawyer, but couldn’t use any electronic device to get one. Throughout the entire day, Lackman says he was reminded by the plaintiffs’ lawyer that he could be held in contempt of court and jailed, even though he was always cooperating.

“I had to sit there and not leave their sight. I was denied access to medication,” Lackman told TorrentFreak. “I had a doctor’s appointment I was forced to miss. I wasn’t even allowed to call and cancel.”

In papers later filed with the court by Lackman’s team, the Anton Piller order was described as a “bombe atomique” since TVAddons had never been served with so much as a copyright takedown notice in advance of this action.

The Anton Piller controversy

Anton Piller orders are only valid when passing a three-step test: when there is a strong prima facie case against the respondent, the damage – potential or actual – is serious for the applicant, and when there is a real possibility that evidence could be destroyed.

For Bell Canada, Bell ExpressVu, Bell Media, Videotron, Groupe TVA, Rogers Communications and Rogers Media, serious problems emerged on at least two of these points after the execution of the order.

For example, TVAddons carried more than 1,500 add-ons yet only 1% of those add-ons were considered to be infringing, a tiny number in the overall picture. Then there was the not insignificant problem with the exchange that took place during the hearing to obtain the order, during which Lackman was not present.

Clearly, the securing of existing evidence wasn’t the number one priority.

Plaintiffs: We want to destroy TVAddons

And the problems continued.

No right to remain silent, no right to consult a lawyer

The Anton Piller search should have been carried out between 8am and 8pm but actually carried on until midnight. As previously mentioned, Adam Lackman was effectively denied his right to remain silent and was forbidden from getting advice from his lawyer.

None of this sat well with the Honourable B. Richard Bell during a subsequent Federal Court hearing to consider the execution of the Anton Piller order.

“It is important to note that the Defendant was not permitted to refuse to answer questions under fear of contempt proceedings, and his counsel was not permitted to clarify the answers to questions. I conclude unhesitatingly that the Defendant was subjected to an examination for discovery without any of the protections normally afforded to litigants in such circumstances,” the Judge said.

“Here, I would add that the ‘questions’ were not really questions at all. They took the form of orders or directions. For example, the Defendant was told to ‘provide to the bailiff’ or ‘disclose to the Plaintiffs’ solicitors’.”

Evidence preservation? More like a fishing trip

But shockingly, the interrogation of Lackman went much, much further. TorrentFreak understands that the TVAddons operator was given a list of 30 names of people that might be operating sites or services similar to TVAddons. He was then ordered to provide all of the information he had on those individuals.

Of course, people tend to guard their online identities so it’s possible that the information provided by Lackman will be of limited use, but Judge Bell was not happy that the Anton Piller order was abused by the plaintiffs in this way.

“I conclude that those questions, posed by Plaintiffs’ counsel, were solely made in furtherance of their investigation and constituted a hunt for further evidence, as opposed to the preservation of then existing evidence,” he wrote in a June 29 order.

But he was only just getting started.

Plaintiffs unlawfully tried to destroy TVAddons before trial

The Judge went on to note that from their own mouths, the Anton Piller order was purposely designed by the plaintiffs to completely shut down TVAddons, despite the fact that only a tiny proportion of the add-ons available on the site were allegedly used to infringe copyright.

“I am of the view that [the order’s] true purpose was to destroy the livelihood of the Defendant, deny him the financial resources to finance a defense to the claim made against him, and to provide an opportunity for discovery of the Defendant in circumstances where none of the procedural safeguards of our civil justice system could be engaged,” Judge Bell wrote.

As noted, plaintiffs must also have a “strong prima facie case” to obtain an Anton Piller order but Judge Bell says he’s not convinced that one exists. Instead, he praised the “forthright manner” of Lackman, who successfully compared the ability of Kodi addons to find content in the same way as Google search can.

So why the big turn around?

Judge Bell said that while the prima facie case may have appeared strong before the judge who heard the matter ex parte (without Lackman being present to defend himself), the subsequent adversarial hearing undermined it, to the point that it no longer met the threshold.

As a result of these failings, Judge Bell declared the Anton Piller order unlawful. Things didn’t improve for the plaintiffs on the injunction front either.

The Judge said that he believes that Lackman has “an arguable case” that he is not violating the Copyright Act by merely providing addons and that TVAddons is his only source of income. So, if an injunction to close the site was granted, the litigation would effectively be over, since the plaintiffs already admitted that their aim was to neutralize the platform.

If the platform was neutralized, Lackman could no longer earn money from the site, which would harm his ability to mount a defense.

“In considering the balance of convenience, I also repeat that the plaintiffs admit that the vast majority of add-ons are non-infringing. Whether the remaining approximately 1% are infringing is very much up for debate. For these reasons, I find the balance of convenience favors the defendant, and no interlocutory injunction will be issued,” the Judge declared.

With the Anton Piller order declared unlawful and no interlocutory injunction (one effective until the final determination of the case) handed down, things were about to get worse for the telecoms companies.

They had paid CAD$50,000 to the court in security in case things went wrong with the Anton Piller order, so TVAddons was entitled to compensation from that amount. That would be helpful, since at this point TVAddons had already run up CAD$75,000 in legal expenses.

On top, the Judge told independent counsel to give everything seized during the Anton Piller search back to Lackman.

The order to return items previously seized

But things were far from over. Within days, the telecoms companies took the decision to the Court of Appeal, asking for a stay of execution (a delay in carrying out a court order) to retain possession of items seized, including physical property, domains, and social media accounts.

Mid-July the appeal was granted and certain confidentiality clauses affecting independent counsel (including Daniel Drapeau, who holds the TVAddons’ domains) were ordered to be continued. However, considering the problems with the execution of the Anton Piller order, Bell Canada, TVA, Videotron and Rogers et al, were ordered to submit an additional security bond of CAD$140,000, on top of the CAD$50,000 already deposited.

So the battle continues, and continue it will

Speaking with TorrentFreak, Adam Lackman says that he has no choice but to fight the telcoms companies since not doing so would result in a loss by default judgment. Interestingly, both he and one of the judges involved in the case thus far believe he has an arguable case.

Lackman says that his activities are protected under the Canadian Copyright Act, specifically subparagraph 2.4(1)(b) which states as follows:

A person whose only act in respect of the communication of a work or other subject-matter to the public consists of providing the means of telecommunication necessary for another person to so communicate the work or other subject-matter does not communicate that work or other subject-matter to the public;

Of course, finding out whether that’s indeed the case will be a costly endeavor.

“It all comes down to whether we will have the financial resources necessary to mount our defense and go to trial. We won’t have ad revenue coming in, since losing our domain names means that we’ll lose the majority of our traffic for quite some time into the future,” Lackman told TF in a statement.

“We’re hoping that others will be as concerned as us about big companies manipulating the law in order to shut down what they see as competition. We desperately need help in financially supporting our legal defense, we cannot do it alone.

“We’ve run up a legal bill of over $100,000 to date. We’re David, and they are four Goliaths with practically unlimited resources. If we lose, it will mean that new case law is made, case law that could mean increased censorship of the internet.”

In the hope of getting support, TVAddons has launched a fundraiser campaign and in the meantime, a new version of the site is back on a new domain, TVAddons.co.

Given TVAddons’ line of defense, the nature of both the platform and Kodi addons, and the fact that there has already been a serious abuse of process during evidence preservation, this is now one of the most interesting and potentially influential copyright cases underway anywhere today.

TVAddons is being represented by Éva Richard , Hilal Ayoubi and Karim Renno in Canada, plus Erin Russell and Jason Sweet in the United States.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Top Ten Ways to Protect Yourself Against Phishing Attacks

Post Syndicated from Roderick Bauer original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/top-ten-ways-protect-phishing-attacks/

It’s hard to miss the increasing frequency of phishing attacks in the news. Earlier this year, a major phishing attack targeted Google Docs users, and attempted to compromise at least one million Google Docs accounts. Experts say the “phish” was convincing and sophisticated, and even people who thought they would never be fooled by a phishing attack were caught in its net.

What is phishing?

Phishing attacks use seemingly trustworthy but malicious emails and websites to obtain your personal account or banking information. The attacks are cunning and highly effective because they often appear to come from an organization or business you actually use. The scam comes into play by tricking you into visiting a website you believe belongs to the trustworthy organization, but in fact is under the control of the phisher attempting to extract your private information.

Phishing attacks are once again in the news due to a handful of high profile ransomware incidents. Ransomware invades a user’s computer, encrypts their data files, and demands payment to decrypt the files. Ransomware most often makes its way onto a user’s computer through a phishing exploit, which gives the ransomware access to the user’s computer.

The best strategy against phishing is to scrutinize every email and message you receive and never to get caught. Easier said than done—even smart people sometimes fall victim to a phishing attack. To minimize the damage in an event of a phishing attack, backing up your data is the best ultimate defense and should be part of your anti-phishing and overall anti-malware strategy.

How do you recognize a phishing attack?

A phishing attacker may send an email seemingly from a reputable credit card company or financial institution that requests account information, often suggesting that there is a problem with your account. When users respond with the requested information, attackers can use it to gain access to the accounts.

The image below is a mockup of how a phishing attempt might appear. In this example, courtesy of Wikipedia, the bank is fictional, but in a real attempt the sender would use an actual bank, perhaps even the bank where the targeted victim does business. The sender is attempting to trick the recipient into revealing confidential information by getting the victim to visit the phisher’s website. Note the misspelling of the words “received” and “discrepancy” as recieved and discrepency. Misspellings sometimes are indications of a phishing attack. Also note that although the URL of the bank’s webpage appears to be legitimate, the hyperlink would actually take you to the phisher’s webpage, which would be altogether different from the URL displayed in the message.

By Andrew Levine – en:Image:PhishingTrustedBank.png, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=549747

Top ten ways to protect yourself against phishing attacks

  1. Always think twice when presented with a link in any kind of email or message before you click on it. Ask yourself whether the sender would ask you to do what it is requesting. Most banks and reputable service providers won’t ask you to reveal your account information or password via email. If in doubt, don’t use the link in the message and instead open a new webpage and go directly to the known website of the organization. Sign in to the site in the normal manner to verify that the request is legitimate.
  2. A good precaution is to always hover over a link before clicking on it and observe the status line in your browser to verify that the link in the text and the destination link are in fact the same.
  3. Phishers are clever, and they’re getting better all the time, and you might be fooled by a simple ruse to make you think the link is one you recognize. Links can have hard-to-detect misspellings that would result in visiting a site very different than what you expected.
  4. Be wary even of emails and message from people you know. It’s very easy to spoof an email so it appears to come from someone you know, or to create a URL that appears to be legitimate, but isn’t.

For example, let’s say that you work for roughmedia.com and you get an email from Chuck in accounting ([email protected]) that has an attachment for you, perhaps a company form you need to fill out. You likely wouldn’t notice in the sender address that the phisher has replaced the “m” in media with an “r” and an “n” that look very much like an “m.” You think it’s good old Chuck in finance and it’s actually someone “phishing” for you to open the attachment and infect your computer. This type of attack is known as “spear phishing” because it’s targeted at a specific individual and is using social engineering—specifically familiarity with the sender—as part of the scheme to fool you into trusting the attachment. This technique is by far the most successful on the internet today. (This example is based on Gimlet Media’s Reply All Podcast Episode, “What Kind of Idiot Gets Phished?“)

  1. Use anti-malware software, but don’t rely on it to catch all attacks. Phishers change their approach often to keep ahead of the software attack detectors.
  2. If you are asked to enter any valuable information, only do so if you’re on a secure connection. Look for the “https” prefix before the site URL, indicating the site is employing SSL (Secure Socket Layer). If there is no “s” after “http,” it’s best not to enter any confidential information.
By Fabio Lanari – Internet1.jpg by Rock1997 modified., GFDL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20995390
  1. Avoid logging in to online banks and similar services via public Wi-Fi networks. Criminals can compromise open networks with man-in-the-middle attacks that capture your information or spoof website addresses over the connection and redirect you to a fake page they control.
  2. Email, instant messaging, and gaming social channels are all possible vehicles to deliver phishing attacks, so be vigilant!
  3. Lay the foundation for a good defense by choosing reputable tech vendors and service providers that respect your privacy and take steps to protect your data. At Backblaze, we have full-time security teams constantly looking for ways to improve our security.
  4. When it is available, always take advantage of multi-factor verification to protect your accounts. The standard categories used for authentication are 1) something you know (e.g. your username and password), 2) something you are (e.g. your fingerprint or retina pattern), and 3) something you have (e.g. an authenticator app on your smartphone). An account that allows only a single factor for authentication is more susceptible to hacking than one that supports multiple factors. Backblaze supports multi-factor authentication to protect customer accounts.

Be a good internet citizen, and help reduce phishing and other malware attacks by notifying the organization being impersonated in the phishing attempt, or by forwarding suspicious messages to the Federal Trade Commission at [email protected]. Some email clients and services, such as Microsoft Outlook and Google Gmail, give you the ability to easily report suspicious emails. Phishing emails misrepresenting Apple can be reported to [email protected].

Backing up your data is an important part of a strong defense against phishing and other malware

The best way to avoid becoming a victim is to be vigilant against suspicious messages and emails, but also to assume that no matter what you do, it is very possible that your system will be compromised. Even the most sophisticated and tech-savvy of us can be ensnared if we are tired, in a rush, or just unfamiliar with the latest methods hackers are using. Remember that hackers are working full-time on ways to fool us, so it’s very difficult to keep ahead of them.

The best defense is to make sure that any data that could compromised by hackers—basically all of the data that is reachable via your computer—is not your only copy. You do that by maintaining an active and reliable backup strategy.

Files that are backed up to cloud storage, such as with Backblaze, are not vulnerable to attacks on your local computer in the way that local files, attached drives, network drives, or sync services like Dropbox that have local directories on your computer are.

In the event that your computer is compromised and your files are lost or encrypted, you can recover your files if you have a cloud backup that is beyond the reach of attacks on your computer.

The post Top Ten Ways to Protect Yourself Against Phishing Attacks appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Is Continuing to Patch Windows XP a Mistake?

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/06/is_continuing_t.html

Last week, Microsoft issued a security patch for Windows XP, a 16-year-old operating system that Microsoft officially no longer supports. Last month, Microsoft issued a Windows XP patch for the vulnerability used in WannaCry.

Is this a good idea? This 2014 essay argues that it’s not:

The zero-day flaw and its exploitation is unfortunate, and Microsoft is likely smarting from government calls for people to stop using Internet Explorer. The company had three ways it could respond. It could have done nothing­ — stuck to its guns, maintained that the end of support means the end of support, and encouraged people to move to a different platform. It could also have relented entirely, extended Windows XP’s support life cycle for another few years and waited for attrition to shrink Windows XP’s userbase to irrelevant levels. Or it could have claimed that this case is somehow “special,” releasing a patch while still claiming that Windows XP isn’t supported.

None of these options is perfect. A hard-line approach to the end-of-life means that there are people being exploited that Microsoft refuses to help. A complete about-turn means that Windows XP will take even longer to flush out of the market, making it a continued headache for developers and administrators alike.

But the option Microsoft took is the worst of all worlds. It undermines efforts by IT staff to ditch the ancient operating system and undermines Microsoft’s assertion that Windows XP isn’t supported, while doing nothing to meaningfully improve the security of Windows XP users. The upside? It buys those users at best a few extra days of improved security. It’s hard to say how that was possibly worth it.

This is a hard trade-off, and it’s going to get much worse with the Internet of Things. Here’s me:

The security of our computers and phones also comes from the fact that we replace them regularly. We buy new laptops every few years. We get new phones even more frequently. This isn’t true for all of the embedded IoT systems. They last for years, even decades. We might buy a new DVR every five or ten years. We replace our refrigerator every 25 years. We replace our thermostat approximately never. Already the banking industry is dealing with the security problems of Windows 95 embedded in ATMs. This same problem is going to occur all over the Internet of Things.

At least Microsoft has security engineers on staff that can write a patch for Windows XP. There will be no one able to write patches for your 16-year-old thermostat and refrigerator, even assuming those devices can accept security patches.

Who Are the Shadow Brokers?

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/05/who_are_the_sha.html

In 2013, a mysterious group of hackers that calls itself the Shadow Brokers stole a few disks full of NSA secrets. Since last summer, they’ve been dumping these secrets on the Internet. They have publicly embarrassed the NSA and damaged its intelligence-gathering capabilities, while at the same time have put sophisticated cyberweapons in the hands of anyone who wants them. They have exposed major vulnerabilities in Cisco routers, Microsoft Windows, and Linux mail servers, forcing those companies and their customers to scramble. And they gave the authors of the WannaCry ransomware the exploit they needed to infect hundreds of thousands of computer worldwide this month.

After the WannaCry outbreak, the Shadow Brokers threatened to release more NSA secrets every month, giving cybercriminals and other governments worldwide even more exploits and hacking tools.

Who are these guys? And how did they steal this information? The short answer is: we don’t know. But we can make some educated guesses based on the material they’ve published.

The Shadow Brokers suddenly appeared last August, when they published a series of hacking tools and computer exploits­ — vulnerabilities in common software — ­from the NSA. The material was from autumn 2013, and seems to have been collected from an external NSA staging server, a machine that is owned, leased, or otherwise controlled by the US, but with no connection to the agency. NSA hackers find obscure corners of the Internet to hide the tools they need as they go about their work, and it seems the Shadow Brokers successfully hacked one of those caches.

In total, the group has published four sets of NSA material: a set of exploits and hacking tools against routers, the devices that direct data throughout computer networks; a similar collection against mail servers; another collection against Microsoft Windows; and a working directory of an NSA analyst breaking into the SWIFT banking network. Looking at the time stamps on the files and other material, they all come from around 2013. The Windows attack tools, published last month, might be a year or so older, based on which versions of Windows the tools support.

The releases are so different that they’re almost certainly from multiple sources at the NSA. The SWIFT files seem to come from an internal NSA computer, albeit one connected to the Internet. The Microsoft files seem different, too; they don’t have the same identifying information that the router and mail server files do. The Shadow Brokers have released all the material unredacted, without the care journalists took with the Snowden documents or even the care WikiLeaks has taken with the CIA secrets it’s publishing. They also posted anonymous messages in bad English but with American cultural references.

Given all of this, I don’t think the agent responsible is a whistleblower. While possible, it seems like a whistleblower wouldn’t sit on attack tools for three years before publishing. They would act more like Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning, collecting for a time and then publishing immediately­ — and publishing documents that discuss what the US is doing to whom. That’s not what we’re seeing here; it’s simply a bunch of exploit code, which doesn’t have the political or ethical implications that a whistleblower would want to highlight. The SWIFT documents are records of an NSA operation, and the other posted files demonstrate that the NSA is hoarding vulnerabilities for attack rather than helping fix them and improve all of our security.

I also don’t think that it’s random hackers who stumbled on these tools and are just trying to harm the NSA or the US. Again, the three-year wait makes no sense. These documents and tools are cyber-Kryptonite; anyone who is secretly hoarding them is in danger from half the intelligence agencies in the world. Additionally, the publication schedule doesn’t make sense for the leakers to be cybercriminals. Criminals would use the hacking tools for themselves, incorporating the exploits into worms and viruses, and generally profiting from the theft.

That leaves a nation state. Whoever got this information years before and is leaking it now has to be both capable of hacking the NSA and willing to publish it all. Countries like Israel and France are capable, but would never publish, because they wouldn’t want to incur the wrath of the US. Country like North Korea or Iran probably aren’t capable. (Additionally, North Korea is suspected of being behind WannaCry, which was written after the Shadow Brokers released that vulnerability to the public.) As I’ve written previously, the obvious list of countries who fit my two criteria is small: Russia, China, and­ — I’m out of ideas. And China is currently trying to make nice with the US.

It was generally believed last August, when the first documents were released and before it became politically controversial to say so, that the Russians were behind the leak, and that it was a warning message to President Barack Obama not to retaliate for the Democratic National Committee hacks. Edward Snowden guessed Russia, too. But the problem with the Russia theory is, why? These leaked tools are much more valuable if kept secret. Russia could use the knowledge to detect NSA hacking in its own country and to attack other countries. By publishing the tools, the Shadow Brokers are signaling that they don’t care if the US knows the tools were stolen.

Sure, there’s a chance the attackers knew that the US knew that the attackers knew — ­and round and round we go. But the “we don’t give a damn” nature of the releases points to an attacker who isn’t thinking strategically: a lone hacker or hacking group, which clashes with the nation-state theory.

This is all speculation on my part, based on discussion with others who don’t have access to the classified forensic and intelligence analysis. Inside the NSA, they have a lot more information. Many of the files published include operational notes and identifying information. NSA researchers know exactly which servers were compromised, and through that know what other information the attackers would have access to. As with the Snowden documents, though, they only know what the attackers could have taken and not what they did take. But they did alert Microsoft about the Windows vulnerability the Shadow Brokers released months in advance. Did they have eavesdropping capability inside whoever stole the files, as they claimed to when the Russians attacked the State Department? We have no idea.

So, how did the Shadow Brokers do it? Did someone inside the NSA accidentally mount the wrong server on some external network? That’s possible, but seems very unlikely for the organization to make that kind of rookie mistake. Did someone hack the NSA itself? Could there be a mole inside the NSA?

If it is a mole, my guess is that the person was arrested before the Shadow Brokers released anything. No country would burn a mole working for it by publishing what that person delivered while he or she was still in danger. Intelligence agencies know that if they betray a source this severely, they’ll never get another one.

That points to two possibilities. The first is that the files came from Hal Martin. He’s the NSA contractor who was arrested in August for hoarding agency secrets in his house for two years. He can’t be the publisher, because the Shadow Brokers are in business even though he is in prison. But maybe the leaker got the documents from his stash, either because Martin gave the documents to them or because he himself was hacked. The dates line up, so it’s theoretically possible. There’s nothing in the public indictment against Martin that speaks to his selling secrets to a foreign power, but that’s just the sort of thing that would be left out. It’s not needed for a conviction.

If the source of the documents is Hal Martin, then we can speculate that a random hacker did in fact stumble on it — ­no need for nation-state cyberattack skills.

The other option is a mysterious second NSA leaker of cyberattack tools. Could this be the person who stole the NSA documents and passed them on to someone else? The only time I have ever heard about this was from a Washington Post story about Martin:

There was a second, previously undisclosed breach of cybertools, discovered in the summer of 2015, which was also carried out by a TAO employee [a worker in the Office of Tailored Access Operations], one official said. That individual also has been arrested, but his case has not been made public. The individual is not thought to have shared the material with another country, the official said.

Of course, “not thought to have” is not the same as not having done so.

It is interesting that there have been no public arrests of anyone in connection with these hacks. If the NSA knows where the files came from, it knows who had access to them — ­and it’s long since questioned everyone involved and should know if someone deliberately or accidentally lost control of them. I know that many people, both inside the government and out, think there is some sort of domestic involvement; things may be more complicated than I realize.

It’s also not over. Last week, the Shadow Brokers were back, with a rambling and taunting message announcing a “Data Dump of the Month” service. They’re offering to sell unreleased NSA attack tools­ — something they also tried last August­ — with the threat to publish them if no one pays. The group has made good on their previous boasts: In the coming months, we might see new exploits against web browsers, networking equipment, smartphones, and operating systems — Windows in particular. Even scarier, they’re threatening to release raw NSA intercepts: data from the SWIFT network and banks, and “compromised data from Russian, Chinese, Iranian, or North Korean nukes and missile programs.”

Whoever the Shadow Brokers are, however they stole these disks full of NSA secrets, and for whatever reason they’re releasing them, it’s going to be a long summer inside of Fort Meade­ — as it will be for the rest of us.

This essay previously appeared in the Atlantic, and is an update of this essay from Lawfare.

Netflix Use of Google DRM Means Rooted Android Devices Are Banned

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/netflix-use-of-google-drm-means-rooted-android-devices-are-banned-170515/

With more ways to consume multimedia content than ever before, locking down music, movies and TV shows continues to be big business online.

The key way this is achieved is via Digital Rights Management, which is often referred to by the initials DRM. In a nutshell, DRM is achieved via various technologies which dictate where and when digital content can be accessed.

While DRM is popular with providers seeking to exercise control over their content while preventing piracy, DRM is viewed by some consumers as a restrictive practice that only inconveniences genuine customers.

This weekend, further fuel was poured on that fire when Android Police reported that subscribers to Netflix who access the service via ‘rooted’ Android devices can no longer download the official Android app from Google Play.

The app’s changelog reports that Netflix’s V5 software “only works with devices that are certified by Google and meet all Android requirements” but what underlies this claim is a desire by Netflix to ensure that subscribers are DRM compliant.

“With our latest 5.0 release, we now fully rely on the Widevine DRM provided by Google; therefore, many devices that are not Google-certified or have been altered will no longer work with our latest app and those users will no longer see the Netflix app in the Play Store,” Netflix confirmed.

Widevine is a company owned by Google and its DRM platform claims to be able to “license, securely distribute and protect playback of content on any consumer device.”

To meet those claims, Google requires that its partners running Widevine-protected systems live up to its standards by becoming a Certified Widevine Implementation Partner (CWIP). A part of that requires that software platforms are only allowed to run on approved hardware/software combinations.

It is no surprise that ‘rooted’ Android devices fail to meet those requirements. When a user ‘roots’ their device they effectively gain administrator rights, which allows them to get into the nuts and bolts of the machine and carry out modifications.

Many users do this to innocently customize how legally purchased hardware performs, including making the Netflix experience better, as illustrated by the Google Play review on the right.

However, it’s clear that this kind of low-level access also has the potential to make piracy easier, whether that’s through the defeating of licensing checks or indeed the wholesale extraction of video content.

For this reason, ‘rooted’ devices raise red flags, not only for content delivery companies like Netflix and partners Google, but also for certain banking companies whose apps won’t run on devices with extended administrator capabilities. These companies want a predictable and secure environment in which to offer their services and ‘rooted’ platforms do not offer that.

The problem, however, is that for every potentially malicious user, there are many thousands of others who want to have the freedom to run a ‘rooted’ device while also being a legal consumer of Netflix. For them, the frustration could even boil over into what DRM was designed to prevent in the first place.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

Stealing Voice Prints

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/05/stealing_voice_.html

This article feels like hyperbole:

The scam has arrived in Australia after being used in the United States and Britain.

The scammer may ask several times “can you hear me?”, to which people would usually reply “yes.”

The scammer is then believed to record the “yes” response and end the call.

That recording of the victim’s voice can then be used to authorise payments or charges in the victim’s name through voice recognition.

Are there really banking systems that use voice recognition of the word “yes” to authenticate? I have never heard of that.

Securing Elections

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/05/securing_electi.html

Technology can do a lot more to make our elections more secure and reliable, and to ensure that participation in the democratic process is available to all. There are three parts to this process.

First, the voter registration process can be improved. The whole process can be streamlined. People should be able to register online, just as they can register for other government services. The voter rolls need to be protected from tampering, as that’s one of the major ways hackers can disrupt the election.

Second, the voting process can be significantly improved. Voting machines need to be made more secure. There are a lot of technical details best left to the voting-security experts who can deal with them, but such machines must include a paper ballot that provides a record verifiable by voters. The simplest and most reliable way to do that is already practiced in 37 states: optical-scan paper ballots, marked by the voters and counted by computer, but recountable by hand.

We need national security standards for voting machines, and funding for states to procure machines that comply with those standards.

This means no Internet voting. While that seems attractive, and certainly a way technology can improve voting, we don’t know how to do it securely. We simply can’t build an Internet voting system that is secure against hacking because of the requirement for a secret ballot. This makes voting different from banking and anything else we do on the Internet, and it makes security much harder. Even allegations of vote hacking would be enough to undermine confidence in the system, and we simply cannot afford that. We need a system of pre-election and post-election security audits of these voting machines to increase confidence in the system.

The third part of the voting process we need to secure is the tabulation system. After the polls close, we aggregate votes — ­from individual machines, to polling places, to precincts, and finally to totals. This system is insecure as well, and we can do a lot more to make it reliable. Similarly, our system of recounts can be made more secure and efficient.

We have the technology to do all of this. The problem is political will. We have to decide that the goal of our election system is for the most people to be able to vote with the least amount of effort. If we continue to enact voter suppression measures like ID requirements, barriers to voter registration, limitations on early voting, reduced polling place hours, and faulty machines, then we are harming democracy more than we are by allowing our voting machines to be hacked.

We have already declared our election system to be critical national infrastructure. This is largely symbolic, but it demonstrates a commitment to secure elections and makes funding and other resources available to states. We can do much more. We owe it to democracy to do it.

This essay previously appeared on TheAtlantic.com.

Shadow Brokers, or the hottest security product to buy in 2018

Post Syndicated from Michal Zalewski original http://lcamtuf.blogspot.com/2017/04/shadow-brokers-or-hottest-security.html

For the past three years and a change, the security industry has been mesmerized by a steady trickle of leaks that expose some of the offensive tooling belonging to the Western world’s foremost intelligence agencies. To some folks, the leaks are a devastating blow to national security; to others, they are a chilling peek at the inner workings of an intrusive security apparatus that could be used to attack political enemies within.

I find it difficult to get outraged at revelations such as the compromise of some of the banking exchanges in the Middle East, presumably to track the sources of funding for some of our sworn enemies; at the same time, I’m none too pleased about the reports of the agencies tapping overseas fiber cables of US companies, or indiscriminately hacking university e-mail servers in Europe to provide cover for subsequent C&C ops. Still, many words have been written on the topic, so it is not a debate I am hoping to settle here; my only thought is that if we see espionage as a legitimate task for a nation state, then the revelations seem like a natural extension of what we know about this trade from pre-Internet days. Conversely, if we think that spying is evil, we probably ought to rethink geopolitics in a more fundamental way; until then, there’s no use complaining that the NSA is keeping a bunch of 0-days at hand.

But in a more pragmatic sense, there is one consequence of the leaks that I worry about: the inevitable shifts in IT policies and the next crop of commercial tools and services meant to counter this supposedly new threat. I fear this outcome because I think that the core exploitation capabilities of the agencies – at least to the extent exposed by the leaks – are not vastly different from those of a talented teenager: somewhat disappointingly, the intelligence community accomplishes their goals chiefly by relying on public data sources, the attacks on unpatched or poorly configured systems, and the fallibility of human beings. In fact, some of the exploits exposed in the leaks were probably not developed in-house, but purchased through intermediaries from talented hobbyists – a black market that has been thriving over the past decade or so.

Of course, the NSA is a unique “adversary” in many other ways, but there is no alien technology to reckon with; and by constantly re-framing the conversation around IT security as a response to some new enemy, we tend to forget that the underlying problems that enable such hacking have been with us since the 1990s, that they are not unique to this actor, and that they have not been truly solved by any of the previous tooling and IT spending shifts.

I think that it is useful to compare computer spies to another, far better understood actor: the law enforcement community. In particular:

  1. Both the intelligence agencies and law enforcement are very patient and systematic in their pursuits. If they want to get to you but can’t do so directly, they can always convince, coerce, or compromise your friends, your sysadmins – or heck, just tamper with your supply chain.

  2. Both kinds of actors operate under the protection of the law – which means that they are taking relatively few risks in going after you, can refine their approaches over the years, and can be quite brazen in their plans. They prefer to hack you remotely, of course – but if they can’t, they might just as well break into your home or office, or plant a mole within your org.

  3. Both have nearly unlimited resources. You probably can’t outspend them and they can always source a wide range of tools to further their goals, operating more like a well-oiled machine than a merry band of hobbyists. But it is also easy to understand their goals, and for most people, the best survival strategy is not to invite their undivided attention in the first place.

Once you make yourself interesting enough to be in the crosshairs, the game changes in a pretty spectacular way, and the steps to take might have to come from the playbooks of rebels holed up in the mountains of Pakistan more than from a glossy folder of Cyberintellics Inc. There are no simple, low-cost solutions: you will find no click-and-play security product to help you, and there is no “one weird trick” to keep you safe; taping over your camera or putting your phone in the microwave won’t save the day.

And ultimately, let’s face it: if you’re scrambling to lock down your Internet-exposed SMB servers in response to the most recent revelations from Shadow Brokers, you are probably in deep trouble – and it’s not because of the NSA.

Court Orders PayPal to Identify Pirate Site Owner

Post Syndicated from Ernesto original https://torrentfreak.com/court-orders-paypal-to-identify-pirate-site-owner-170408/

For several years PayPal has been trying to limit how much business it does with sites and services linked to copyright infringement.

The payment provider previously banned several BitTorrent sites, Usenet providers and file-hosting services to avoid any associations with piracy.

The disconnections are often the result of complaints from copyright holders who want to limit the financial resources of these platforms. In addition, the same companies are also interested in finding out who the operators are.

This puts PayPal in a more tricky position. Handing over personal details of clients is not something most financial companies would do voluntarily. In Germany, this prompted Sony Music to take the matter to court.

This week, the Hamburg District Court ruled that PayPal must hand over the information they have on the operator of an unnamed pirate site. In this case, Luxemburg’s banking secrecy provisions do not shield the website operator.

Internet and copyright lawyer Clemens Rasch, whose law firm handled the case, is happy with the outcome. He says that the ruling allows music producers, film companies and other copyright holders to identify pirates more easily, something they can use to enforce their rights.

“The decision makes it easier to identify offenders and make them liable,” the lawyer comments. The present ruling sets a precedent that could also be applied to other pirates and payment providers.

“According to the ‘follow-the-money’ approach, PayPal and any other payment service, including credit card providers, are obliged to provide information in the event of an infringement. This is the case, for example, if the web server on which the infringements occur is financed through the payment service,” Rasch adds.

In recent years copyright holders have started to rely more heavily on this “follow-the-money” approach. One of the goals is to dry up the resources of alleged copyright infringers. With the German ruling, they now have an ulterior motive to go after sites’ payment providers, at least in Germany.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

AWS Hot Startups- January 2017

Post Syndicated from Ana Visneski original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-hot-startups-january-2017-2/

It is the start of a new year and Tina Barr is back with many more great new startups to check out.
-Ana

Welcome back to another year of hot AWS-powered startups! We have three exciting new startups today:

  • ClassDojo – Connecting teachers, students, and parents to the classroom.
  • Nubank – A financial services startup reimagining the banking experience.
  • Ravelin – A fraud detection company built on machine learning models.

If you missed any of last year’s featured startups, be sure to check out our Year in Review.

ClassDojo (San Francisco)
ClassDojo imageFounded in 2011 by Liam Don and Sam Chaudhary, ClassDojo is a communication platform for the classroom. Teachers, parents, and students can use it throughout the day as a place to share important moments through photos, videos and messaging. With many classrooms today operating as a one-size-fits-all model, the ClassDojo founders wanted to improve the education system and connect the 700 million primary age kids in the world to the very best content and services. Sam and Liam started out by asking teachers what they would find most helpful for their classrooms, and many expressed that they wanted a more caring and inclusive community – one where they could be connected to everyone who was part of their classroom. With ClassDojo, teachers are able to create their own classroom culture in partnership with students and their parents.

In five years, ClassDojo has expanded to 90% of K-8 schools in the US and 180 other countries, and their content has been translated into over 35 languages. Recently, they have expanded further into classrooms with video series on Empathy and Growth Mindset that were co-created with Harvard and Stanford. These videos have now been seen by 1 in 3 kids under the age of 14 in the U.S. One of their products called Stories allows for instantly updated streams of pictures and videos from the school day, all of which are shared at home with parents. Students can even create their own stories – a timeline or portfolio of what they’ve learned.

Because ClassDojo sees heavy usage during the school day and across many global time zones, their traffic patterns are highly variable. Amazon EC2 autoscaling allows them to meet demand while controlling costs during quieter periods. Their data pipeline is built entirely on AWS – Amazon Kinesis allows them to stream high volumes of data into Amazon Redshift for analysis and into Amazon S3 for archival. They also utilize Amazon Aurora and Amazon RDS to store sensitive relational data, which makes at-rest encryption easy to manage, while scaling to meet very high query volumes with incredibly low latency. All of ClassDojo’s web frontends are hosted on Amazon S3 and served through Amazon CloudFront, and they use AWS WAF rules to secure their frontends against attacks and unauthorized access. To detect fraudulent accounts they have used Amazon Machine Learning, and are also exploring the new Amazon Lex service to provide voice control so that teachers can use their products hands-free in the classroom.

Check out their blog to see how teachers across the world are using ClassDojo in their classrooms!

Nubank (Brazil)
Nubank imageNubank is a technology-driven financial services startup that is working to redefine the banking standard in Brazil. Founder David Vélez with a team of over 350 engineers, scientists, designers, and analysts, they have created a banking alternative in one of the world’s fastest growing mobile markets. Not only is Brazil the world’s 5th largest country in both area and population, but it also has one of the highest credit card interest rates in the world. Nubank has reimagined the credit card experience for a world where everyone has access to smartphones and offers a product customers haven’t seen before.

The Brazilian banking industry is both heavily regulated and extremely concentrated. Nubank saw an opportunity for companies that are truly customer-centric and have better data and technology to compete in an industry that has seen little innovation in decades. With Nubank’s mobile app customers are able to block and unblock their credit cards, change their credit limits, pay their bills, and have access to all of their purchases in real time. They also offer 24/7 customer support through digital channels and clear and simple communication. This was previously unheard of in Brazil’s banking industry, and Nubank’s services have been extremely well-received by customers.

From the start, Nubank’s leaders planned for growth. They wanted to build a system that could meet the ever changing regulatory and business rules, have full auditing capability and scale in both size and complexity. They use many AWS services including Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, and AWS CloudFormation. By using AWS, Nubank developed its credit card processing platform in only seven months and are able to add features with ease.

Go to Nubank’s blog for more information!

Ravelin (London)
Ravelin imageLaunched in 2015, Ravelin is a fraud detection company that works with many leading e-commerce and on-demand companies in a range of sectors including travel, retail, food delivery, ticketing, and transport. The company’s founders (Martin Sweeney, Leonard Austin, Mairtain O’Riada, and Nicky Lally) began their work while trying to solve fraud issues in an on-demand taxi business, which required accurate fraud predictions about a customer with limited information and then making that fraud decision almost instantly. They soon found that there was nothing on the market that was able to do this, and so the founders left to start Ravelin.

Ravelin allows its clients to spend less time on manual reviews and instead focus on servicing their customers. Their machine learning models are built to predict good and bad behavior based on the relevant customer behavioral and payment data sent via API. Spotting bad behavior helps Ravelin to prevent fraud, and equally importantly, spotting good patterns means fewer good customers are being blocked. Ravelin chose machine learning as their core technology due to its incredible accuracy at a speed and scale that aligns with how their clients’ businesses operate.

Ravelin uses a suite of AWS services to help their machine learning algorithms detect fraud. Their clients are spread all over the world and their peak traffic times can be unpredictable so they scale their Amazon EC2 infrastructure multiple times a day, which helps with handling increased traffic while minimizing server costs. Ravelin also uses services such as Amazon RDS, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon ElastiCache, and Amazon Elasticsearch Service. Utilizing these services has allowed the Ravelin team more time to concentrate on building fraud detection software.

For the latest in fraud prevention, be sure to check out Ravelin’s blog!

-Tina Barr

Converging Data Silos to Amazon Redshift Using AWS DMS

Post Syndicated from Pratim Das original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/converging-data-silos-to-amazon-redshift-using-aws-dms/

Organizations often grow organically—and so does their data in individual silos. Such systems are often powered by traditional RDBMS systems and they grow orthogonally in size and features. To gain intelligence across heterogeneous data sources, you have to join the data sets. However, this imposes new challenges, as joining data over dblinks or into a single view is extremely cumbersome and an operational nightmare.

This post walks through using AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) and other AWS services to make it easy to converge multiple heterogonous data sources to Amazon Redshift. You can then use Amazon QuickSight, to visualize the converged dataset to gain additional business insights.

AWS service overview

Here’s a brief overview of AWS services that help with data convergence.

AWS DMS

With DMS, you can migrate your data to and from most widely used commercial and open-source databases. The service supports homogenous migrations such as Oracle to Oracle, as well as heterogeneous migrations between different database platforms, such as Oracle to Amazon Aurora or Microsoft SQL Server to MySQL. It also allows you to stream data to Amazon Redshift from any of the supported sources including:

  • Amazon Aurora
  • PostgreSQL
  • MySQL
  • MariaDB
  • Oracle
  • SAP ASE
  • SQL Server

DMS enables consolidation and easy analysis of data in the petabyte-scale data warehouse. It can also be used for continuous data replication with high availability.

Amazon QuickSight

Amazon QuickSight provides very fast, easy-to-use, cloud-powered business intelligence at 1/10th the cost of traditional BI solutions. QuickSight uses a new, super-fast, parallel, in-memory calculation engine (“SPICE”) to perform advanced calculations and render visualizations rapidly.

QuickSight integrates automatically with AWS data services, enables organizations to scale to hundreds of thousands of users, and delivers fast and responsive query performance to them. You can easily connect QuickSight to AWS data services, including Amazon Redshift, Amazon RDS, Amazon Aurora, Amazon S3, and Amazon Athena. You can also upload CSV, TSV, and spreadsheet files or connect to third-party data sources such as Salesforce.

Amazon Redshift

Amazon Redshift delivers fast query performance by using columnar storage technology to improve I/O efficiency and parallelizing queries across multiple nodes. Amazon Redshift is typically priced at 1/10th of the price of the competition. We have many customers running petabyte scale data analytics on AWS using Amazon Redshift.

Amazon Redshift is also ANSI SQL compliant, supports JDBC/ODBC, and is easy to connect to your existing business intelligence (BI) solution. However, if your storage requirement is in the 10s of TB range and requires high levels of concurrency across small queries, you may want to consider Amazon Aurora as the target converged database.

Walkthrough

Assume that you have an events company specializing on sports, and have built a MySQL database that holds data for the players and the sporting events. Customers and ticket information is stored in another database; in this case, assume it is PostgresSQL and this gets updated when customer purchases tickets from our website and mobile apps. You can download a sample dataset from the aws-database-migration-samples GitHub repo.

These databases could be anywhere: at an on-premises facility; on AWS in Amazon EC2 or Amazon RDS, or other cloud provider; or in a mixture of such locations. To complicate things a little more, you can assume that the lost opportunities (where a customer didn’t complete buying the ticket even though it was added to the shopping cart) are streamed via clickstream through Amazon Kinesis and then stored on Amazon S3. We then use AWS Data Pipeline to orchestrate a process to cleanse that data using Amazon EMR and make it ready for loading to Amazon Redshift. The clickstream integration is not covered in this post but was demonstrated in the recent Real-time Clickstream Anomaly Detection with Amazon Kinesis Analytics post.

Architecture

In this solution, you use DMS to bring the two data sources into Amazon Redshift and run analytics to gain business insights. The following diagram demonstrates the proposed solution.

DataSilos_1_1

After the data is available on Amazon Redshift, you could easily build BI dashboards and generate intelligent reports to gain insights using Amazon QuickSight. You could also take this a step further and build a model using Amazon Machine Learning. Amazon Machine Learning uses powerful algorithms to create ML models by finding patterns in your existing data stored in Amazon S3, or Amazon Redshift. It is also highly scalable and can generate billions of predictions daily, and serve those predictions in real time and at high throughput.

Creating source databases

For the purposes of this post, create two RDS databases, one with a MySQL engine, and the other with PostgreSQL and then load some data. These represent a real-life scenario where databases could be located on-premises, on AWS, or both. Just as in real life, there may be more than two source databases; the process described in this post would still be reasonably similar.

Follow the steps in Tutorial: Create a Web Server and an Amazon RDS Database to create the two source databases. Use the links from the main tutorial page to see how to connect to specific databases and load data. For more information, see:

Make a note of the security group that you create and associate all the RDS instances with it. Call it “MyRDSSecurityGroup”.

Afterward, you should be able to see all the databases listed in the RDS Instances dashboard.

DataSilos_2_1

Setting up a target Amazon Redshift cluster

Set up a two-node cluster as shown below, with a cluster name similar to “consolidated-dwh” and a database named similar to “mydwh”. You could also set up a one-node cluster based on the instance type; the instance type may be available on the AWS Free Tier.

DataSilos_3

In the next step, choose Publicly Accessible for non-production usage to keep the configuration simple.

Also, for simplicity, choose the same VPC where you have placed the RDS instances and include the MyRDSSecurityGroup in the list of security groups allowed to access the Amazon Redshift cluster.

Setting up DMS

You can set up DMS easily, as indicated in the AWS Database Migration Service post on the AWS blog. However, rather than using the wizard, you may take a step-by-step approach:

  1. Create a replication instance.
  2. Create the endpoints for the two source databases and the target Amazon Redshift database.
  3. Create a task to synchronize each of the sources to the target.

Create a replication instance

In the DMS console, choose Replication instances, Create replication instance. The instance type you select depends on the data volume you deal with. After setup, you should be able to see your replication instance.

DataSilos_4
Create endpoints

In the DMS console, choose Endpoints, Create endpoint. You need to configure the two source endpoints representing the PostgreSQL and MySQL RDS databases. You also need to create the target endpoint by supplying the Amazon Redshift database that you created in the previous steps. After configuration, the endpoints look similar to the following screenshot:

DataSilos_5

Create a task and start data migration

You can rely on DMS to create the target tables in your target Amazon Redshift database or you may want to take advantage of AWS Schema Conversion Tool to create the target schema and also do a compatibility analysis in the process. Using the AWS Schema Conversion Tool is particularly useful when migrating using heterogeneous data sources. For more information, see Getting Started with the AWS Schema Conversion Tool.

For simplicity, I avoided using the AWS Schema Conversion Tool in this post and used jump to DMS to create the target schema and underlying tables and then set up the synchronization between the data sources and the target.

In the DMS console, choose Tasks, Create Tasks. Fill in the fields as shown in the following screenshot:

DataSilos_6

Note that given the source is RDS MySQL and you chose Migrate data and replicate on going changes, you need to enable bin log retention. Other engines have other requirements and DMS prompts you accordingly. For this particular case, run the following command:

call mysql.rds_set_configuration('binlog retention hours', 24);

Now, choose Start task on create. In the task settings, choose Drop tables on target to have DMS create the tables, if you haven’t already created the target tables using the AWS Schema Conversion Tool, as described earlier. Choose Enable logging but note that this incurs additional costs as the generated CloudWatch logs require storage.

In the table mappings, for Schema to migrate, ensure that the correct schema has been selected from the source databases. DMS creates the schema on the target if it does not already exist.

Repeat for the other data source, choosing the other source endpoint and the same Amazon Redshift target endpoint. In the table mappings section, choose Custom and customize as appropriate. For example, you can specify the schema names to include and tables to exclude, as shown in the following screenshot:

DataSilos_7

Using this custom configuration, you can perform some minor transformations, such as down casing target table names, or choosing a different target schema for both sources.

After both tasks have successfully completed, the Tasks tab now looks like the following:

DataSilos_8

Running queries on Amazon Redshift

In Amazon Redshift, select your target cluster and choose Loads. You can see all operations that DMS performed in the background to load the data from the two source databases into Amazon Redshift.

DataSilos_9

Ensure change data capture is working

Generate additional data on Amazon RDS PostgreSQL in the ticketing.sporting_event_ticket by running the script provided in the generate_mlb_season.sql aws-database-migration-samples GitHub repository. Notice that the tasks have caught up and are showing the migration in progress. You can also query the target tables and see that the new data is in the target table.

Visualization options

Set up QuickSight and configure your data source to be your Amazon Redshift database. If you have a Redshift cluster in the same account and in the same region, it will appear when you clock Redshift (Auto-discovered) from the data sets page, as shown below.

DataSilos_16

Access to any other Redshift cluster can be configured as follows using the Redshift (Manual connect) link:

DataSilos_10

Now, create your data set. Choose New Data Set and select either a new data source or an existing data source listed at the bottom of the page. Choose Ticketing for Sports.

DataSilos_11_1
In the next step, choose Create Data Set.

In the next step, when QuickSight prompts you to choose your table, you can select the schema and the required table and choose Select. Alternatively, you may choose Edit/Preview data.

DataSilos_11

You could use the graphical options shown below to start creating your data set. Given that you have data from multiple sources, it’s safe to assume that your target tables are in separate schemas. Select the schema and tables, select the other schemas, and bring the appropriate tables to the palette by selecting them using the check box to the right. For each join, select the join type and then map the appropriate keys between the tables until the two reds turn to one of the blue join types.

DataSilos_12

In this case, rather than preparing the data set in the palette, you provide a custom SQL query. On the left pane, choose Tables, Switch to Custom SQL tool.

Paste the following SQL query in the Custom SQL field and enter a name.

select to_char( e.start_date_time, 'YYYY-MM-DD' ) event_date, 
to_char( e.start_date_time, 'HH24:MI' ) start_time, e.sold_out, 
e.sport_type_name, l.name event_location, l.city event_city, 
l.seating_capacity, hteam.name home_team, hl.name home_field, 
hl.city home_city, ateam.name away_team, al.name away_field, 
al.city away_city, sum( t.ticket_price ) total_ticket_price, 
avg( t.ticket_price ) average_ticket_price, 
min ( t.ticket_price ) cheapest_ticket, 
max( t.ticket_price ) most_expensive_ticket, count(*) num_tickets

from ticketing.sporting_event_ticket t, sourcemysql.sporting_event e, 
sourcemysql.sport_location l, sourcemysql.sport_team hteam, 
sourcemysql.sport_team ateam, sourcemysql.sport_location hl, 
sourcemysql.sport_location al

where t.sporting_event_id = e.id
and t.sport_location_id = l.id
and e.home_team_id = hteam.id
and e.away_team_id = ateam.id
and hteam.home_field_id = hl.id
and ateam.home_field_id = al.id

group by to_char( e.start_date_time, 'YYYY-MM-DD' ), 
to_char( e.start_date_time, 'HH24:MI' ), e.start_date_time, 
e.sold_out, e.sport_type_name, l.name, l.city, l.seating_capacity, 
hteam.name, ateam.name, hl.name, hl.city, al.name, al.city;

DataSilos_13

You can choose Save and visualize and view the QuickSight visualization toolkit and filter options. Here you can build your story or dashboards and start sharing them with your team.

Now, you can choose various fields from the field list and the various measures to get the appropriate visualization, like the one shown below. This one was aimed to understand the date at which each event in each city reached the maximum capacity.

DataSilos_14

You can also combine many such visualizations and prepare your dashboard for management reporting. The analysis may also drive where you need to invent on campaigns and where things are going better than expected to ensure a healthy sales pipeline.

DataSilos_15

Summary

In this post, you used AWS DMS to converge multiple heterogonous data sources to an Amazon Redshift cluster. You also used Quicksight to create a data visualization on the converged dataset to provide you with additional insights. Although we have used an e-commerce use case related to an events company, this concept of converging multiple data silos to a target is also applicable to other verticals such as retail, health-care, finance, insurance and banking, gaming, and so on.

If you have questions or suggestions, please comment below.

About the Author

 

Pratim_DasPratim Das is a Specialist Solutions Architect for Analytics in EME. He works with customers on big data and analytical projects, helping them build solutions on AWS, using AWS services and (or) other open source or commercial solution from the big data echo system. In his spare time he enjoys cooking and creating exciting new recipes always with that spicy kick.

 

 

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AWS Hot Startups – A Year in Review

Post Syndicated from Ana Visneski original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-hot-startups-a-year-in-review/

It is the end of 2016! Tina Barr has a great roundup of all the startups we featured this year. Check it out and see if you managed to read about them all, then come back in January for when we start up all over again.

Also- I wanted to thank Elsa Mayer for her hard work in helping out with the startup posts.

-Ana

 

What a year it has been for startups! We began the Hot Startups series in March as a way to feature exciting AWS-powered startups and the motivation behind the products and services they offer. Since then we’ve featured 27 startups across a wide range of industries including healthcare, commerce, social, finance, and many more. Each startup offers a unique product to its users – whether it’s an entertaining app or website, an educational platform, or a product to help businesses grow, startups have the ability to reach customers far and wide.

The startups we showcased this year are headquartered all over the world. Check them out on the map below!

startup map

In case you missed any of the posts, here is a list of all the hot startups we featured in 2016:

March

  • Intercom – One place for every team in an Internet business to see and talk
    to customers, personally, at scale.
  • Tile – A popular key locator product that works with an app to help people find their stuff.
  • Bugsnag – A tool to capture and analyze runtime errors in production web and mobile applications.
  • DroneDeploy  – Making the sky productive and accessible for everyone.

April

  • Robinhood – Free stock trading to democratize access to financial markets.
  • Dubsmash – Bringing joy to communication through video
  • Sharethrough – An all-in-one native advertising platform.

June

  • Shaadi.com – Helping South Asians to find a companion for life.
  • Capillary– Boosting customer engagement for e-commerce.
  • Monzo – A mobile-first bank.

July

  • Depop– A social mobile marketplace for artists and friends to buy and sell products.
  • Nextdoor – Building stronger and safer neighborhoods through technology.
  • Branch – Provides free deep linking technology for mobile app developers to gain and retain users.

August

  • Craftsvilla– Offering a platform to purchase ethnic goods.
  • SendBird – Helping developers build 1-on-1 messaging and group chat quickly.
  • Teletext.io – A solution for content management, without the system.
  • Wavefront– A cloud-based analytics platform.

September

  • Funding Circle – The leading online marketplace for business loans.
  • Karhoo– A ride comparison app.
  • nearbuy – Connecting customers and local merchants across India.

October

  • Optimizely – Providing web and mobile A/B testing for the world’s leading brands.
  • Touch Surgery – Building technologies for the global surgical community.
  • WittyFeed – Creating viral content.

November

  • AwareLabs – Helping small businesses build smart websites.
  • Doctor On Demand– Delivering fast, easy, and cost-effective access to top healthcare providers.
  • Starling Bank – Mobile banking for the next generation.
  • VigLink – Powering content-driven commerce.

Thank you for keeping up with us as we shared these startups’ amazing stories throughout the year. Be sure to check back here in January for our first hot startups of 2017!

-Tina Barr

US Government Publishes New Plan to Target Pirate Sites

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/us-government-publishes-new-plan-to-target-pirate-sites-161213/

whitehouse-logoThe Office of the Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator (IPEC) has just released its Joint Strategic Plan (JSP) for Intellectual Property Enforcement, titled Supporting Innovation, Creativity & Enterprise: Charting a Path Ahead.

“The Plan – which incorporates views from a variety of individual stakeholders across government, industry, educational institutions, trade organizations and public interest groups — offers a blueprint for the work to be carried out over the next three years by the Federal Government in support of a healthy and robust intellectual property enforcement policy environment,” a White House statement reads.

The plan has four stated goals:

– Enhance National understanding of the economic and social impacts flowing from misappropriation of trade secrets and the infringement of intellectual property rights

– Promote a safe and secure Internet by minimizing counterfeiting and IP-infringing activity online

– Secure and facilitate lawful trade

– Enhance domestic strategies and global collaboration in support of effective IP enforcement.

The 163-page report leaves few stones unturned, with Section 2 homing in on Internet piracy.

Follow The Money

While shutting down websites is often seen as the ultimate anti-piracy tool, more commonly authorities are targeting what they believe fuels online piracy – money. The report says that while original content is expensive to create, copies cost almost nothing, leading to large profits for pirates.

“An effective enforcement strategy against commercial-scale piracy and counterfeiting therefore, must target and dry up the illicit revenue flow of the actors engaged in commercial piracy online. That requires an examination of the revenue sources for commercial-scale pirates,” the report says.

“The operators of direct illicit download and streaming sites enjoy revenue through membership subscriptions serviced by way of credit card and similar payment-based transactions, as is the case with the sale and purchase of counterfeit goods, while the operators of torrent sites may rely more heavily on advertising revenue as the primary source of income.”

To cut-off this revenue, the government foresees voluntary collaboration between payment processor networks, online advertisers, and the banking sector.

Payment processors

“All legitimate payment processors prohibit the use of their services and platforms for unlawful conduct, including IP-infringing activities. They do so by way of policy and contract through terms of use and other agreements applicable to their users,” the JSP says.

“Yet, notwithstanding these prohibitions, payment processor platforms continue to be exploited by illicit merchants of counterfeit products and infringing content.”

The government says that pirates and counterfeiters use a number of techniques to exploit payment processors and have deployed systems that can thwart “test” transactions conducted by rightsholders and other investigators. Furthermore, the fact that some credit card companies do not have direct contractual relationships with merchants, enables websites to continue doing business after payment processing rights have been terminated.

The JSP calls for more coordination between companies in the ecosystem, increased transparency, greater geographic scope, and bi-lateral engagements with other governments.

“IPEC and USPTO, with private sector input, will facilitate benchmarking studies of current voluntary initiatives designed to combat revenue flow to rogue sites to determine whether existing voluntary initiatives are functioning effectively, and thereby promote a robust, datadriven voluntary initiative environment,” the report adds.

Advertising

The JSP begins with the comment that “Ad revenue is the oxygen that content theft to breathe” and it’s clear that the government wants to asphyxiate pirate sites. It believes that up to 86% of download and streaming platforms rely on advertising for revenue and the sector needs to be cleaned up.

In common with payment processors, the report notes that legitimate ad networks also have policies in place to stop their services appearing on pirate sites. However, “sophisticated entities” dedicated to infringement can exploit loopholes, with some doing so to display “high-risk” ads that include malware, pop-unders and pixel stuffing.

Collaboration is already underway among industry players but the government wants to see more integration and cooperation, to stay ahead of the tactics allegedly employed by sites such as the defunct KickassTorrents, which is highlighted in the report.

kat-ad

“IPEC and the IPR Center (with its constituent law enforcement partners), along with other relevant Federal agencies, will convene the advertising industry to hear further about their voluntary efforts. The U.S. Interagency Strategic Planning Committees on IP Enforcement will assess opportunities to support efforts to combat the flow of ad revenue to criminals,” the JSP reads.

“As part of best practices and initiatives, advertising networks are encouraged
to make appropriately generalized and anonymized data publicly available to permit study and analysis of illicit activity intercepted on their platforms and networks. Such data will allow study by public and private actors alike to identify patterns of behavior or tactics associated with illicit actors who seek to profit from ad revenue from content theft websites.”

Domain hopping

When pirate sites come under pressure from copyright holders, their domain names are often at risk of suspension or even seizure. This triggers a phenomenon known as domain hopping, a tactic most visibly employed by The Pirate Bay when it skipped all around the world with domains registered in several different countries.

tpb-hop

“To evade law enforcement, bad actors will register the same or different domain name with different registrars. They then attempt to evade law enforcement by moving from one registrar to another, thus prolonging the so-called ‘whack-a-mole’ pursuit. The result of this behavior is to drive up costs of time and resources spent on protecting intellectual property right,” the JSP notes.

The report adds that pirate sites are more likely to use ccTLDs (country code Top-Level Domains) than gTLDs (Generic Top-Level Domains) due to the way the former are administrated.

“The relationship between any given ccTLD administrator and its government will differ from case to case and may depend on complex and sensitive arrangements particular to the local political climate. Different ccTLD policies will reflect different approaches with respect to process for the suspension, transfer, or cancellation of a domain name registration,” it reads.

“Based on the most recent Notorious Markets lists available prior to issuance of this plan, ccTLDs comprise roughly half of all named ‘notorious’ top-level domains. Considering that ccTLDs are outnumbered by gTLDs in the domain name base by more than a 2-to-1 ratio, the frequency of bad faith ccTLD sites appear to be disproportionate in nature and worthy of further research and analysis.”

Once again, the US government calls for more cooperation alongside an investigation to assess the scope of “abusive domain name registration tactics and trend.”

Policies to improve DMCA takedown processes

As widely documented, rightsholders are generally very unhappy with the current DMCA regime as they are forced to send millions of notices every week to contain the flow of pirate content. Equally, service providers are also being placed under significant stress due to the processing of those same notices.

In its report, the government acknowledges the problems faced by both sides but indicates that the right discussions are already underway to address the issues.

“The continued development of private sector best practices, led through a multistakeholder process, may ease the burdens involved with the DMCA process for rights holders, Internet intermediaries, and users while decreasing infringing activity,” the report says.

“These best practices may focus on enhanced methods for identifying actionable infringement, preventing abuse of the system, establishing efficient takedown procedures, preventing the reappearance of previously removed infringing content, and providing opportunity for creators to assert their fair use rights.”

In summary, the government champions the Copyright Office’s current evaluation of Section 512 of the DMCA while calling for cooperation between stakeholders.

Social Media

The Joint Strategic Plan highlights the growing part social media has to play in the dissemination of infringing content, from driving traffic to websites selling illegal products, unlawful exploitation of third-party content, to suspect product reviews. Again, the solution can be found in collaboration, including with the public.

“[The government will] encourage the development of industry standards and best
practices, through a multistakeholder process, to curb abuses of social media channels for illicit purposes, while protecting the rights of users to use those channels for non-infringing and other lawful activities,” it notes.

“One underutilized resource may be the users themselves, who may be in a
position to report suspicious product offerings or other illicit activity, if provided a streamlined opportunity to do so, as some social media companies are beginning to explore.”

And finally – education

The government believes that greater knowledge among the public of where it can obtain content legally will assist in reducing instances of online piracy.

“The U.S. Interagency Strategic Planning Committees on IP Enforcement, and other relevant Federal agencies, as appropriate, will assess opportunities to support public-private collaborative efforts aimed at increasing awareness of legal sources of copyrighted material online and educating users about the harmful impacts of digital piracy,” it concludes.

The full report is available here (163 pages, PDF)

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

AWS Global Partner Summit – Report from re:Invent 2016

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-global-partner-summit-report-from-reinvent-2016/

My colleague Dorothy Copeland is the General Manager for the AWS Global Partner Program. She attended the AWS Global Partner Summit here at AWS re:Invent today and sent a full report, published here as a guest post.

— Jeff;

_2MM0323We just wrapped an eventful AWS Global Partner Summit at re:Invent. This full-day event is exclusive to AWS Partner Network (APN) Partners. This year, the event featured a keynote with senior AWS leaders, who discussed a number of APN launches, key trends in the market, and stories of APN Partners driving customer success on AWS. The APN team then hosted a number of business and technical sessions focused on topics intended to help APN Partners build a successful AWS-based business.

During the Summit, AWS announced that more than 10,000 new Partners have joined the APN in the past 12 months. For customers, this growth provides an expanded selection of software integrated with AWS from thousands of new APN Technology Partners, as well as thousands of new APN Consulting Partners that can help design, architect, build, migrate, and manage their workloads and applications on AWS. Let’s take a look at some of the other announcements the APN team made during the Global Partner Summit this year.

During the Global Partner Summit keynote, attendees heard from a number of AWS executives, including:

  • Terry Wise
  • James Hamilton
  • Dave McCann
  • Mike Clayville
  • Andy Jassy

The keynote also featured the following customer speakers:

  • Dan Zelem, CTO, Johnson & Johnson
  •  Adam Japhet, Head of Technology Services Architecture & Design, Scholastic

Keynote Theme – Driving Customer Success & Innovation on AWS
The world’s leading enterprises trust APN Partners to help them achieve the agility benefits of the AWS Cloud. The majority of the Fortune 500 and over 90 percent of Fortune 100 companies utilize APN Partner solutions and services. APN Partners have a unique opportunity to drive customer success on AWS by developing deep skills and specializations on AWS. And throughout the keynote, speakers discussed how APN Partners are successfully helping Enterprise customers drive digital transformation and innovation on AWS, along with key areas of opportunity for APN Partners moving forward. Of particular focus were opportunities APN Partners have to help customers migrate to AWS and maximize the benefits of AWS. Terry Wise discussed how AWS approaches Enterprise migrations, the value of next-generation cloud managed services for customers, and how APN Partners can deliver immense value to customers through automation and full lifecycle customer engagement. Terry also discussed the newly announced alliance with VMWare and VMWare Cloud on AWS and announced that the VMWare Cloud on AWS Partner Program will launch in 2017. Speaking to innovation, Terry discussed the interesting ways that APN Partners are innovating with Amazon Alexa, and how the APN and Alexa teams work together to help APN Partners develop key Alexa skills.

APN Program Launches
The APN team announced a number of exciting launches during the keynote. Here’s a summary, along with links to more information on the AWS Partner Network Blog:

  • The AWS IoT Competency: Showcases industry-leading APN Consulting and Technology Partners that provide proven technology and/or implementation capabilities for a variety of IoT use cases including (though not limited to) intelligent factories, smart cities, energy, automotive, transportation, and healthcare.
  • The AWS Financial Services Competency: Recognizes APN Consulting and Technology Partners offering services and solutions for customers in banking and payments, capital markets, and insurance.
  • The AWS Service Delivery Program: Helps AWS customers find APN Partners with validated experience in specific AWS services and skills such as Amazon Aurora or delivering AWS GovCloud (US) Workloads.
  • The AWS Public Sector Program: Helps qualified APN Partners build and accelerate their AWS Public Sector business.
  • The AWS Partner Solutions Finder: Enables AWS customers to easily search, discover, and connect with APN Partners, based on their business needs.

Meet Our New AWS Premier Consulting Partners!
We set an extremely high bar for a Consulting Partner to make the Premier tier in the APN (learn more here). We currently have 55 Premier Partners.

Congratulations to the following companies who we announced today have become AWS Premier Consulting Partners:

Join the APN Team at re:Invent
Do you want to learn more about the APN? Visit the APN team at the main AWS booth throughout the week!

— Dorothy Copeland