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Security: Supply Chains, Office Depot Scam, Malware in Mar-a-Lago and More

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Security
  • Supplying the supply chain

    A long time ago Marc Andreessen said “software is eating the world”. This statement ended up being quite profound in hindsight, as most profound statements are. At the time nobody really understood what he meant and it probably wasn’t until the public cloud caught on that it became something nobody could ignore. The future of technology was less about selling hardware as it is about building software.

    We’re at a point now where it’s time to rethink software. Well, the rethinking happened quite some time ago, now everyone has to catch up. Today it’s a pretty safe statement to declare open source is eating the world. Open source won, it’s everywhere, you can’t not use it. It’s not always well understood. And it’s powering your supply chain, even if you don’t know it.

    In a previous post I talk about what open source dependencies are. This post is meant to explain how all these dependencies interact with each other and what you need to know about it. The topic of supply chains is coming up more and more and then and it’s usually not great news. When open source comes up in the context of the supply chain it’s very common for the story to center around how dangerous open source is. Of course if you just use this one tool, or this one vendor, or this one something, you’ll be able to sleep at night. Buying solutions for problems you don’t understand is usually slightly less useful than just throwing your money directly into the fire.

    Any application depends on other software. Without getting overly detailed it’s safe to say that most of us develop software using libraries, interpreters, compilers, and operating systems from somewhere else. In most cases these are open source projects. Purely proprietary software is an endangered species. It’s probably already extinct but there are a few deniers who won’t let it go quietly into the night.

  • Office Depot And Partner Ordered To Pay $35 Million For Tricking Consumers Into Thinking They Had Malware

    I have worked in the B2B IT services industry for well over a decade. Much of that time was spent on the sales side of the business. As such, I have become very familiar with the tools and tactics used to convince someone that they are in need of the type of IT support you can provide. One common tactic is to use software to do an assessment of a machine to determine whether it's being properly maintained and secured. If it is not, a simple report showing the risks tends to be quite persuasive in convincing a prospective client to sign up for additional support.

    Done the right way, these reports are factual and convincing. Done the Office Depot way, it seems only the latter is a requirement. The FTC announced on its site that Office Depot and its support partner, Support.com, Inc., has agreed to pay $35 million to settle a complaint in which the FTC alleged that consumers were tricked using a computer health application into thinking their machines were infected with malware when they often times were not.

  • Chinese Woman Carrying Malware Allegedly Got Into Mar-a-Lago

    A woman carrying two Chinese passports and a device containing computer malware lied to Secret Service agents and briefly gained admission to President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club over the weekend during his Florida visit, federal prosecutors allege in court documents.Yujing Zhang, 32, approached a Secret Service agent at a checkpoint outside the Palm Beach club early Saturday afternoon and said she was a member who wanted to use the pool, court documents said. She showed the passports as identification.
    Agents say she wasn’t on the membership list, but a club manager thought Zhang was the daughter of a member. Agents say that when they asked Zhang if the member was her father, she did not answer definitively but they thought it might be a language barrier and admitted her.

    Zhang’s story changed when she got inside, agents say, telling a front desk receptionist she was there to attend the United Nations Chinese American Association event scheduled for that evening. No such event was scheduled and agents were summoned.

    Agent Samuel Ivanovich wrote in court documents that Zhang told him that she was there for the Chinese American event and had come early to familiarize herself with the club and take photos, again contradicting what she had said at the checkpoint. She showed him an invitation in Chinese that he could not read.

  • Automation Could Help Organizations Manage Risk: Cybersecurity Research
  • Security updates for Tuesday

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today's howtos

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