Monthly Archives: December 2015

US-CERT

IRS Releases Sixth Tax Security Tip

Original release date: December 28, 2015

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has released the sixth in a series of tips intended to help the public protect personal and financial data online and at home. A new tip will be available each Monday through the start of the tax season in January. This tip describes the types of fraud alerts provided by the three major credit bureaus that may help protect financial information from identity theft.

US-CERT encourages users and administrators to review the IRS Security Awareness Tax Tip Number 6 and the US-CERT Tip Preventing and Responding to Identity Theft for additional information.

This product is provided subject to this Notification and this Privacy & Use policy.

Hackers News

191 Million US Voters' Personal Info Exposed by Misconfigured Database

BREAKING: A misconfigured database has resulted in the exposure of around 191 Million voter records including voters’ full names, their home addresses, unique voter IDs, date of births and phone numbers.

The database was discovered on December 20th by Chris Vickery, a white hat hacker, who was able to access over 191 Million Americans’ personal identifying information (PII) that are just

NVD

CVE-2015-6850

EMC VPLEX GeoSynchrony 5.4 SP1 before P3 and 5,5 before Patch 1 has a default password for the root account, which allows local users to gain privileges by leveraging a login session.

NVD

CVE-2015-6852

Directory traversal vulnerability in the API in EMC Secure Remote Services Virtual Edition 3.x before 3.10 allows remote authenticated users to read log files via a crafted parameter.

Avast

Facebook hoax promises giveaway of 4.5 million company shares

When I was checking my Facebook News Feed this morning, I found this message.

Facebook newsfeed hoax

Facebook newsfeed hoax

It seems one of my friends was very excited because Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, was scheduled to give away 4.5 million shares of Facebook stock at midnight. To enter this lottery-like giveaway, all you had to do was copy and paste the message to your own news feed. The message, and variations like it, go on to say that the winners will be announced  live on today’s Good Morning America. Other variations look like this,

Facebook newsfeed hoax Metro

Facebook hoax image via metro.co.uk

Like others before it, this viral Facebook message is a hoax. You will not be entered by copying and pasting a message. And Mr. Zuckerberg is not giving away 4.5 billion dollars to 1,000 random Facebook users. If this message makes its way to your News Feed, please do not copy and paste it or share with your friends. The best action is to delete it and maybe go buy yourself a lottery ticket. The odds will be a little better. ;-)

Using surveys to better understand viral stories

Facebook is actually doing something about these hoaxes. Early in December, the Facebook newsroom published a News Feed FYI: Using Surveys to Better Understand Viral Stories. In the article they described how they have started using surveys to improve the news feed experience. Every day they ask thousands of people to rate their experience, share suggestions for improvement, and help them infer what might be an interesting story so they can work their algorithms to take that into account when ranking. Here’s what they say about that,

People also take story surveys where they see two stories that could be in their News Feed and answer which they’d most want to see. We compare their answer to the order we would have put these stories in their News Feed. If the story picked is the one News Feed would have shown higher up, that’s a good sign that things are working well. If the story picked is the one we would have put lower down, this highlights an area for improvement.

So if you receive one of these surveys, make sure you fill it out – your feedback will help to eliminate this type of clutter in everyone’s News Feed. :-)

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Hackers News

Bitcoin Core Developers Quit Bitcoin Project to Launch a New Digital Currency

Some of Bitcoin’s Core developers have left the Bitcoin project and started building their separate cryptocurrency called DECRED.

Decred aims to prevent the issues Bitcoin is currently facing regarding project governance and development funding.

CEO of ‘Company 0’, Mr. Jacob Yocom-Piatt, who has funded Bitcoin development since early 2013, said the actual development of the Bitcoin