For the week ending 18th Sept 2016
I’ve stopped even trying to understand digital ownership and how copyrights work. Getty images tries to make original photographer pay for her own photos.
Israeli Online Attack Service ‘vDOS’ Earned $600,000 in Two Years.
Apparently this has been running for a while, but only the payment details were made available for the last two years. According to Krebs, it looks as if two people were the masterminds behind the operation. So that would be an average of $150k each a year. Then you subtract costs of running the operation, any additional resources they need, the cost of laundering money and it’s likely they took home around something closer to $100k each a year. Now $100k is by no means anything to turn your nose up to. But, they probably could have ended up better off if they’d chosen a legit route to market.
Still in Israel, How Israel’s startup community shut down an IPO that one investor called a ‘sham’
If you look up the word ‘irony’ in the dictionary, you’ll probably see a link to this article where adblock itself is to begin selling advertisements. It illustrates the difficulty online businesses have in generating revenue streams outside of advertising. Thus lending credence to publications and sites that have a lot of adverts. All I can think of is the quote from The Dark Knight “You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” But seriously, is this where adblock moves from a pure ad-blocking service to an ad-moderating service. Will it spin up the security angle that it only serves ads free from malware? How long before an AV vendor buys it and bundles the capabilities into its consumer version?
A detailed account by Wired on how it made the move from plain old HTTP to the shiny HTTPS. I like real-life tech stories – and this is nicely written.
Uber, Square, Airbnb, and others form cybersecurity coalition for vetting vendors. I like the idea in principle – to save duplication of effort and standardize on some aspects. But actually effectively implementing something like this… ummm.
Discovering how Dropbox hacks your Mac.
I wasn’t able to make it to 44Con last week, but the feedback from the event has been great. I noticed Steve Armstrong posted his slides on Advanced Incident Remediation techniques. Steve’s a great presenter and really knows his stuff.
CB Insights has a wonderful periodic table of cybersecurity startups.
FBI trying to build legal cases against Russian hackers.
Not quite security, but a good post nonetheless on critical thinking for software engineers.
Finally, nothing is sacred. A ‘memory hacker’ explains how to plant false memories in people’s mind!
Javvad Malik 