Unsupervised Learning Newsletter No. 276

MEMBER EDITION | EP. 276 | April 12, 2021

SECURITY NEWS

User data from LinkedIn is supposedly being sold online in two separate databases of 500 and 827 million records, but LinkedIn is denying this. The dumps supposedly don't include passwords, but do include lots of other data that can be used to launch attacks, including job, name, emails, addresses, phone numbers, etc. More

Microsoft has released an AI tool that simulates attacks within an environment called CyberBattleSim. It builds a network simulation complete with various nodes running a particular OS with various services, and then simulates how attackers would move through the network. The tool then uses reinforcement learning to learn how to improve its attacks. More

The FBI and CISA are warning that attackers are actively targeting FortiOS vulnerabilities. They include path traversal, authentication, and configuration issues up to CVSS score 9.8. If you have Fortinet devices, the patches are available, so make sure they're applied. More

1.3 million user records were scraped from Clubhouse. The data includes userID, name, photo, Twitter handle, and a number of other fields. More

The Pwn2Own hacking competition had two researchers find a critical Zoom no-user-input RCE which earned them $200,000. More

The FBI has arrested a man for planning to blow up an AWS datacenter. He was trying to 'killl about 70% of the internet', supposedly. He was caught because he revealed the plot on the website MyMilitia. Then he tried to buy the explosives from an undercover FBI agent. More

Bitdefender says there was a 485% jump in ransomware attacks in 2020. More

Ubisoft has purchased GameBlocks, the company that built the server-side anti-cheating software FairFight. More

A nuclear site in Iran lost power on Sunday, and Iran is blaming Israel. Evidently, there was a massive explosion that destroyed their highly-protected power system that feeds the facility's uranium enrichment capabilities. More

Vulnerabilities:

• Attackers are actively targeting unpatched SAP systems. More

• Cisco has released patches for multiple products, including SD-WAN, Small Bussiness, Unified Communications, and Advanced Malware Protection. More

• There's a vulnerability in Domain Time II software that allows an attacker to observe traffic and prompt admins to take action to install malware. More

TECHNOLOGY NEWS

YouTube grew the most of the social media platforms in 2020. They saw usage rise from 73% of US adults in 2019 to 81% in 2021. More

There are 2 million total podcasts, but only around 700,000 have 10 or more episodes. More

China's government has fined Alibaba $2.75 billion dollars for behaving like a monopoly. More
 
Companies:

• Patreon has tripled its value to $4 billion dollars. More

HUMAN NEWS

We may have discovered a new particle and/or force of nature. A new experiment out of Fermilab is producing results that don't jive with the current standard model, and the physics world is quite excited about it. More

There have been Brexit-related riots in Northern Ireland for over a week between groups who want Ireland to stay part of the UK vs. those who want it separate. More

53% of Canadians say they're within $200 of not being able to meet their monthly bills, which is on top of the other 30% who said they have no money at all left over at the end of the month. Really? 83% have less than $200 left over at the end of the month? More

A new study says exercise improves your metabolism more if done in the afternoon instead of the morning. More

A new study out of Indiana University shows they can test for depression and bipolar disorder using a blood test. More

A study out of UC Riverside showed that young mice who eat a good diet and exercise have bigger brains and lower levels of anxiety as adults. More

Silicon Valley is betting a lot of money that young people's blood will allow older people to feel younger and age slower. More

Nearly 40% of Marines have declined the COVID vaccine. More


CONTENT, IDEAS & ANALYSIS

How to Avoid Losing Another Generation of Artists, Inventors, and Builders — Some thoughts on how parents might be able to jump off the upgrade train. More

4 Writing Styles I Admire — A basic look at the four main writing styles I look up to. More

What if We Made Paying Ransoms Illegal? — Exploring an idea from Twitter about fighting ransomware. More

AI is Coming to Security — I think this Microsoft tool for automating cyberattacks is the future of security. Or at least a major part of it. Here's what it looks like: you have constant discovery and mapping running in your environment. Basically Attack Surface Management. That up-to-date map is then sent over to a bunch of AI/ML that does two separate things: 1) it tells you what's most vulnerable and what your red team should attack first, and what your blue team should defend first. And 2) it continuously plays both attack and defense games against itself so it can find additional ways to improve security. The first approach can use automation and basic pattern matching to find the worst stuff in a giant environment. But over time that will also be supplemented with unsupervised learning (no relation) to find interesting patterns in systems that are worth looking into. And the last piece is the reinforcement learning bit, where computers learn how to play themselves to improve their attacks and defenses. And when you combine that all together into a single system you'll have companies and governments basically running these systems constantly against themselves and their enemies/customers. It takes advantage of automation to continuously monitor, attack, defend, and improve. So here's the question: where is the human security professional in this mix? I have an answer, but I'll leave that for another section!

Scraping vs. Hacking — I heard that Facebook said the recent scrape of 533 million records of their customers' data wasn't a "hack". This is why words matter. We can debate the definition of "hacking" all day long, but one of my favorite broad definitions is, "Getting something to work in a way other than it was intended." Scraping 533 million records off of a website seems to count, just as it did with the Parler database. And I don't see how you get any points for it being scraped vs. "hacked". If Facebook accidentally published a bunch of user records on a roadside billboard, and someone drove up and took a picture, that wouldn't be hacking either. But it sure wouldn't be good for Facebook. Same goes for scraping.


NOTES

Currently reading like four books for some reason, and I'm looking forward to finishing them all so I can start our UL Book of The Month, which is Island of Dr. Moreau.

Lower-back injuries suck. Guess I shouldn't have volunteered to help carry those 300 lbs. speakers up some stairs.


DISCOVERY  

House Stock Watcher — See the stock trades being made by your congressperson. More

Grex — A CLI tool where you provide a string and it gives you a regex that would match it. More

Thinkst Canary Tools [SUP] — Drop juicy little tokens all over your internal network to see if anyone is poking around. What I like about them is they don't rely on stopping the initial attack, and instead assume compromise. More

KICS — A free tool from Checkmarx that looks for vulnerabilities in your Terraform, Kubernetes, Docker, CloudFormation, Ansible, and Helm IaC configs. More

Exa — A modern-day replacement for ls. More

A script that automatically builds and deploys a Wireguard VPN using Axiom. More

Harmony will no longer make universal remotes. Anyone know a good alternative? More

Anxiety is in your body, not your brain. More

Rolex just released a new Daytona with a Meteorite dial. It's quite pretty. More

A free course on Reverse Engineering. More

Top Colleges Should Clone Themselves More


RECOMMENDATIONS

You Don't Need a GUI — A resource for those who do too much with the mouse. More


APHORISMS

“Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.”

~ Fitzgerald Kennedy