[AxisOfEasy] Deluded, Out-Of-Touch Congressman Calls For Total Ban On Bitcoin

Last Week’s Quote was  “Don’t retaliate. Just get stronger” by Robert Kiyosaki, author of the “Rich Dad / Poor Dad” series, advice given to him by Buckminster Fuller (nobody got it, third week now).

This Week’s Quote: “If I am not asked I know what time is; but if I am asked, I do not.” …by ??

THE RULES: No searching up the answer, must be posted in the comments below:

• Deluded, out-of-touch congressman calls for total ban on Bitcoin
• Windows 10 will have a real Linux kernel 
• Microsoft Word’s auto-correct will promote gender neutrality
• How to access all those recordings Alexa has of you
• Free app using your private photos to train commercial facial recognition 
• City of Baltimore paralyzed by ransomware attack, again
• New Android phish fools you with fake address bar
• Twitter admits to “inadvertently” collecting and sharing location data
• Open MongoDB of the week: 275 million record data dump on Amazon S3

Deluded, out-of-touch congressman calls for total ban on Bitcoin

Isn’t it interesting how Bitcoin seems to be back in the news these days? It also seems to be going up in value again. While I’m not sure the crypto bear market is over, bears usually come replete with multiple head fakes to the upside, something sure has US Congressman Brad Sherman (D-CA) in a twist about it, saying that:

“lawmakers must act preemptively to impede the threat posed by cryptocurrencies and thus outlaw their purchase by American citizens. Crypto’s threat, he claimed, forebodes no less than a shake-up of America’s geopolitical influence due to its potential diminishing of the power of its sovereign currency”

..and he says it like that’s a bad thing. Imagine, people taking back control over their own purchasing power and savings.  Suddenly the narrative seems to have flipped over from “Bitcoin is vapourware and headed for zero”, to “it poses an existential threat to the monetary system and it needs to be banned” in fairly short order.

Read: https://cointelegraph.com/news/us-rep-sherman-calls-for-crypto-ban-says-it-threatens-to-diminish-american-power

( I’m currently writing a longer piece about a possible bottom in crypto-currencies over on Guerrilla-Capitalism, sign up for the list there to get a copy when that drops. )

Windows 10 will have a real Linux kernel 

To paraphrase on Gandhi’s old adage about inevitability of a good idea….

First they call you no more a threat than OS/2 (remember OS/2?)

Next they call you a “malignant cancer”

…and then, they add your kernel to their latest operating system.

City of Baltimore paralyzed by ransomeware attack, again

The City of Baltimore is investigating, and attempting to recover from another ransomware attack which spread through the municipal government’s computer systems and demanded a 3 bitcoin (roughly $27,000 CAD) ransom to decrypt the files. The ransomware variant, called “Robinhood” is not believed to be spreading via email, but the attack vector is as yet unknown.

This time critical systems like the city’s 911 and 311 phone systems were not affected, however in an earlier attack this year, those systems were infected and downed.

Reading between the lines here, it strikes me as though they are not backing up their systems. The takeaway: backup your systems. Then backup your backups. I use our easyBackup, I have a local pocket drive on my desks at home and the office always rsync-ing, and finally another cloud backup, offsite.

Read: https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/politics/bs-md-ci-it-outage-20190507-story.html

New mobile phish fools you with fake address bar

When I originally came across this the article said it was an Android issue, but when I read security researcher James Fischer’s original post, and then tested it on my iPhone, I can confirm this is a Chrome issue on mobile, not just Android. The upshot is he discovered a new technique where a phishing attack can create a complete, fake browser location bar in your browser canvas, that will then display the fake address (in his case for HSBC bank), complete with a fake “lock” icon denoting that the site is TLS secured and verified. As yet, no known fix.

Read: https://jameshfisher.com/2019/04/27/the-inception-bar-a-new-phishing-method/

Twitter admits to “inadvertently” collecting and sharing location data

Twitter called an “oopsie” when it revealed that  “we were inadvertently collecting and sharing iOS location data with one of our trusted partners in certain circumstances”. (Translation: we’ve probably been streaming your location to everybody, all the time).

Read: https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-05-13/twitter-admits-inadvertently-collecting-sharing-location-data-due-bug

And: https://help.twitter.com/en/location-data-collection

Open MongoDB of the week: 275 million record data dump on Amazon S3

For those keeping score at home, every week or every other week, a security researcher somewhere finds a wide open MongoDB, often times hosted on Amazon S3 buckets, with all kinds of personally identifying data of a lot of people. This week, it’s 275 million records of Indian citizens with details like name, address, employer, job history, and salaries. It is not known from whence this data dump originated. It was discovered by Bob Diachenko who has a knack for finding wide open MongoDB’s using Shodan and Google.

Read: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/over-275-million-records-exposed-by-unsecured-mongodb-database

Odds and Ends: