A quick Saturday digest of cybersecurity news articles from other sources.
[HEADS UP] Aurora Police Department Warns of Contactless Payment Processors Scams
If you didn’t trust contactless payment processors before, you really won’t after hearing about this recent scam. The Aurora Police Department Economic Crimes Unit posted this tweet last week with a warning that scammers drill holes in contactless payment screens forcing customers to swipe their card where the criminals have placed skimmers.
Aurora Police Sergeant’s Dan Courtenay said: “Now they have Bluetooth, where they can just sit in the parking lot of the gas station and it feeds right onto their laptop,” Courtenay said. “All your information from your credit cards, it feeds right there.”
If you have end users that use your company credit cards for travel and expenses, your users’ credit card information could be compromised if they fall for this new scam.
Blog post with picture how criminals use this new tactic. Warn your road warriors!
https://blog.knowbe4.com/contactless-payment-scams
New Revelations from the Snowden Documents
By Bruce Schneier
[2023.09.21] Jake Appelbaum’s PhD thesis contains several new revelations from the classified NSA documents provided to journalists by Edward Snowden. Nothing major, but a few more tidbits.
Kind of amazing that that all happened ten years ago. At this point, those documents are more historical than anything else.
And it’s unclear who has those archives anymore. According to Appelbaum, The Intercept destroyed their copy.
I recently published an essay about my experiences ten years ago.
Signal Will Leave the UK Rather Than Add a Backdoor
By Bruce Schneier
[2023.09.26] Totally expected, but still good to hear:
Onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023, Meredith Whittaker, the president of the Signal Foundation, which maintains the nonprofit Signal messaging app, reaffirmed that Signal would leave the U.K. if the country’s recently passed Online Safety Bill forced Signal to build “backdoors” into its end-to-end encryption.
“We would leave the U.K. or any jurisdiction if it came down to the choice between backdooring our encryption and betraying the people who count on us for privacy, or leaving,” Whittaker said. “And that’s never not true.”
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About the Author:
I am a cybersecurity and IT instructor, cybersecurity analyst, pen-tester, trainer, and speaker. I am an owner of the WyzCo Group Inc. In addition to consulting on security products and services, I also conduct security audits, compliance audits, vulnerability assessments and penetration tests. I also teach Cybersecurity Awareness Training classes. I work as an information technology and cybersecurity instructor for several training and certification organizations. I have worked in corporate, military, government, and workforce development training environments I am a frequent speaker at professional conferences such as the Minnesota Bloggers Conference, Secure360 Security Conference in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, the (ISC)2 World Congress 2016, and the ISSA International Conference 2017, and many local community organizations, including Chambers of Commerce, SCORE, and several school districts. I have been blogging on cybersecurity since 2006 at http://wyzguyscybersecurity.com