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Waymo’s driverless cars nearly perfect on the road

In an article titled CH
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Waymo’s driverless cars were involved in two crashes and 18 ‘minor contact events’ over 1 mi which was spotted on Mastodon boosted by Herbie, we learn that Waymo may be the safest company car to be in for full automation.

I’ve been following driverless cars for as long as I’ve had the idea of doing tech podcasts or archives of articles as I started with.

We know that Google’s cars have been pretty good, although I’m never going to say its going to be 100 percent. In the earlier articles I’ve read on Google cars, they were only in certain areas and never got in to any accidents.

If you have read this article, what did you think?

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Dish network confirms cyberattack, not internal

Its coming out through Slashdot boosted by Herbie Allen that Dish suffered a Cyberattack. Slashdot has been known for good reporting, so this is good. Dish Network Confirms Network Outage Was a Cybersecurity Breach is the update.

Things are still down, says the 2 minute article.

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We have more info on Lastpass … news is worse

Hello folks,

Kim Komando sent out a breaking news about Lastpass’s recent breach.

I believe Security Now also has this, but I sent them the article from Kim in case.

Here is Steve’s tweet.

Steve Gibson: “The NSA @ Home”
Security Now! #912 show notes:
https://bit.ly/3EOcEML
A Windows Update goof, Pasting plaintext, Edge’s built-in VPN, LastPass’s breach update, Signal reacts to UK anti-privacy, A large PyPI attack, QNAP’s news, a BAD BIOS bug, and The NSA’s advice to home users.

These are show notes for SN 912.

Kim’s article is titled LastPass hacked again – Is it time to say goodbye?

I might just have to consider this. They link to Lastpass, but I couldn’t find anything definitive at the moment.

We can’t blame Lastpass as a company, but the problem is, they’ve never been forthright. The fact we’re now learning that an employee was phished doesn’t make it any better. To top it off, they installed a Keylogger.

Keystroke logging from Wikipedia

This means, they can get the employee’s master password and then its game over. Question, did the employee use two-factor as part of his access as an employee? From what I’ve read, it doesn’t seem like he did, but I don’t want to come out and say that it is true without some article indicating this.

Sans News Bites for today, February 28th also has notes on this. I have not read Sans yet. Sans also has stuff that has been sent to TSB’s email list that I have not read yet either. More from Sans later.

We better pay attention to this, I don’t think its over yet.

Thanks for reading, make it a great day!

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U.S. Marshalls now hit by cyberattack

Some time ago, the FBI was hit by an attack, and now, its the United States Marshalls service.

I heard about this when The Cyberwire mentioned as part of release. The JRN has not yet heard this podcast, but intends to.

One of my followers, Herbie Allen, boosted this via NPR. Hackers steal sensitive law enforcement data in a breach of the U.S. Marshals Service is the article.

The U.S. Marshalls office is the oldest law enforcement agency behind the FBI, according to the article. It has full details, I believe I read they’re first and then the FBI.

Regardless, now both agencies have been targeted. The article does not indicate whether its ransomware, as they’re not sure.

We don’t know who was behind the attack.

If we hear more, we’ll pass it along.

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Rapid 7 says that zero days or n days are being exploited in les time

In an article titled Vulnerabilities Being Exploited Faster Than Ever: Analysis it alks about the fact that vulnerabilities are being exploited in less time. Zero days or n days are vulnerabilities that are exploited in 0 to as little as a week.

Vulnerabilities, especially from Microsoft are exploited before the patches can be put out. Some of the vulnerabilities are not exploited quickly, but others are.

Rapid 7 is heavily interviewed in this article. Check it out!

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Siri soon able to take calls, screen calls and book tables?

Someone posted this article on Mastodon talking about a patent from Apple that will allow Siri to give out information and other things while on a phone call. It could even book a table, maybe find you the bus or train schedules if it were able to do that and more.

Let me say that this might be clever, but I don’t know if I want Siri to have any trust score on any of my people.

I don’t even have Hey Siri turned on, not that I don’t use it, but for me, I don’t want that option on. So if the option wasn’t on, how would this work?

The Apple Insider article I spotted is Future Siri could talk to whoever is calling you, and take notes.

It could be a digital assistant, says the article. If a call comes in saying they’re a senator, it could either hang it up or pass it along, depending on that trust score.

That is discussed in the article among other things too. Feel free to check this article out. It might be interesting.

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Snapchat, Reddit and others join the subscription bandwagon

Social Media has lost tons of revinue lately. I understand that we all need to make money, but for the people I target, we need to wonder if the services are worth paying for.

I see social media as a luxury. While I’m on Facebook, Twitter and now mastodon, I don’t feel like its worth paying for.

As I responded to Kim Komando, Facebook will offer phone support, but will they really deal with the scams if I were to call and report it by phone so they can see it and take proper action? Probably not.

The article titled Here’s how every social media company is adopting subscriptions goes in to details on what the major companies are offering. No, I’m not even on Snapchat and there’s no need for me to be there. Neither am i on instagram. Nor am I on reddit.

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Massachusetts Senator calls for answers to accessibility issues on Twitter

Hello folks,

I just saw a very good article that was written talking about the recent accessibility problems over at Twitter.

As we know, there have been big changes at twitter, some of them don’t make sense like getting rid of the accessibility team as well as the recent change to get rid of Closed Captioning.

These blog posts are some of what has been posted and you can search out twitter to find these and possibly others.

With the 11 questions that are highlighted within this article, This was a great read and Jonathan Mosen posted it and it was boosted by one of my followers on Mastodon.

The article is titled SENATOR MARKEY DEMANDS MUSK REINSTATE TWITTER’S ACCESSIBILITY TEAM, ONLINE FEATURES FOR USERS WITH DISABILITIES and comes from his Senate page itself.

This is great news! The work that Edward Markey has done for accessibility as a whole should be commended! You, sir, are a champion. I hope that by mid-march as stated in your article here, Twitter would provide some answers.

Keeping our fingers crossed on this one. Let’s see what happens.

As it stands now, we still have API access, although Elon said that it will go after the superbowl. We also learned last night that Twitter Blue’s Esther Crawford was recently fired.

blog post from The Verge titled Twitter Blue head Esther Crawford is out at Twitter

Some of us that participate and run TSB indicate that at this rate, Twitter has about 6 months to run. Is Twitter Elon’s playground? Tesla isn’t doing so well, cars are recalled for auto pilot problems.

Let’s see what they say and I’ll keep an eye on the tech sites for any further updates on this. Thanks for reading!

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Chat GPT having apps? Not so fast

Hello folks,

This time, I’m going through email and found this very interesting chat GPT article from Kim Komando and staff.

The article is titled Security warning: How to spot fake ChatGPT apps hiding malware.

Lots of people within this community might be using this tool, and we know that it has been not very accurate in some situations. I myself have not used the app and I know that it apparently has been used to do some very interesting things.

With that said, the app is only available in a web based platform. A link is available within the article.

One of the items under the heading “How to avoid falling victim to fake ChatGPT apps and sites” caught my attention. It says:

It is best to always download apps from official app stores such as Google Play Store or Apple App Store, as they have strict security measures to prevent
fake or malicious apps from being published. Even though some malicious apps make it past security, you’re safer sticking with official app stores.

Really? When we post articles and hand out information to tell people about more malicious apps in Google’s store than IOS, the Google play store is just as bad. The goal is to be more secure, and it is true to always trust your platform’s app store, but I really wonder about Android.

Sure, IOS’s app store can have problems. There is no 100 percent security, but when we only had so far 40 plus apps this year to nothing for IOS to our knowledge, thtat pushes the Android count to at least 300 to at least 7 that we know of. That is a huge number. I’m not completely sure how to do the math, dividing 300 by 7 gives me 42.85% but I don’t think that’s even accurate.

In any case, check out the article I present here as it might be of interest to you.

Make it a great day!

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NVDA 2023 Beta 2

I just saw the following on Mastodon.

Devin Prater: Boosting NV Access (NVAccess): NVDA 2023.1 Beta 2 is now available for download and testing. For anyone who is interested in trying out what the next version of NVDA has to offer before it is officially released, we welcome you to download the beta and provide feedback.

Changes introduced in Beta 2:
Updates to translations
Update to eSpeak, fixing a bug with Italian speech.
Fixed bug with the new global command to report the destination of a link.

https://www.nvaccess.org/post/nvda-2023-1beta2/

This is the link to learn more on the web.

I hope people who want to take advantage of it will do so. When I tested beta 1 for the hot key within the browser, I found it working well. The key i tested was nvda+k and the double press of it, but I believe that global hotkey is undefined by default. I don’t have enough knowledge on this.

Thanks for reading!

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This week on the security box, schemes scams and the open forum edition

On this weeks edition, its more of an open forum than one particular topic. We’ll talk about schemes and scams through the years as well as open it up for other topics as well.

I hope you enjoy the program and thanks for listening!

It’ll first air on Wednesday at 11 am PT, 1 PM CT. It then airs on Friday on Bluestreak and next Monday on InternationalFriends.

Thanks so much for listening to TSB, and we’ll look forward in your participation!

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Dish Network down, possible Cyber Attack

Saw the following on Mastodon.

BrianKrebs: Boosting gh0sti :pika: (gh0sti): @briankrebs any chance it’s about Dish network being hacked or is there any info on that story? https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/dish-network-goes-offline-after-likely-cyberattack-employees-cut-off/

Thtat link links to this article titled Dish Network goes offline after likely cyberattack, employees cut off which was updated today.

This affects users and employees and there’s not much we really have except what is written here. This can’t necessarily be good. Make it a great one!

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Another Android app, another deletion

This app may not be too familiar to the majority of readers, but Kim Komando and staff are writing about it and its in the newsletter. You never know who might be using the app, so its better to get the word out and let people know about this.

This time, the app is an androdoid app that may be similar to the popular Whatsapp. It records voice messages just like whatsapp. The difference is, it stores the data on an unprotected server, which the company failed to close.

The article is titled This messaging app was leaking customer voice data. Is it on your phone?

Feel free to take a look at the details and act accordingly.

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A company making their products accessible and inclusive

I spotted this article from a company called Domino Printing and it was posted to Mastodon. Its a lengthy read but i found it quite interesting.

The article is titled P&G™ Chooses D-Series for Tactile Labeling on Shampoo and Conditioner.

I can agree that I even have had trouble. Although I can see some color, and I have a pump for both soap and shampoo, it’d be nice to have another method to tell what is what.

We shouldn’t have to use bar code readers, Be My Eyes, Aira or any other service to tell us what our bottles are.

Aira makes it clear that you should not use their services in certain circumstances in a recent newsletter they sent to subscribers, so this article was quite cool to see.

This is our last article of the night. I hope that people find this one of interest.

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Another blow to twitter, the removal of closed captioning

Close captioning is for those who are deaf, but it could benefit other types of disabilities and situations too. In an article tweeted on Twitter, Vice has an article titled Twitter has removed captions from Spaces on iOS, and they don’t work on the web or Android/ and its by Jay Peters.

I’m going to lay it out here, if this trend continues, than twitter will be useless to any type of disability whether its blindness, deafness or any other disability that rely on things like this to use the platform successfully.

If this is indeed the case, all of my twitter will be abandoned and my main account will probably be bot posted as DLVR will still be connected unless the service eventually goes down.

If Elon Musk decides to remove the features of the web, follows through with breaking the API for our apps, as well as telling the devs to tak out the accessibility portions of Twitter, we’re all going to be screwed no matter what platform we’re using.

I still predict that it’ll be 6 months before we say good-bye to Twitter. Elon says that he wants to make it make money, but a good majority of users either have some type of disability which may include a physical impairment.

There are those who will say “I’m not disabled” and that’s great. But a good majority are, at least the ones I communicate with.

Its going to get interesting. I don’t know wwhat else to say or even think.

Make it a great day!

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Here’s some more news on AI generation voices

This may have been posted to Mastodon but I found this on Twitter. I’ve heard Joseph Cox on Vice’s podcast which I should catch up on.

The article he wrote this time is titled How I Broke Into a Bank Account With an AI-Generated Voice.

While this was a demo, I know several in this community was playing with the service but i never got involved.

I know that Jonathan Mosen, a podcaster who is blind, was scheduled to have a chat on one of his podcast episodes about the service and it may be out.

I wonder what they’ve put in place to prevent abuse? Time will only tell.

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Book review: Sandworm

Hello everyone,

On February 2, 2023, I posted to this blog my next read, Sandworm. I recently finished it, and boy was it good.

The book is 42 chapters and an epilogue. You can check out the resources and even the bibliogrophy if you wish.

The book defines several different terms like zero-day, rootkit and others.

The main portion of the book talks about the Russia/Ukraine conflict and what Russia supposedly has done to Ukraine. This was interesting, as some of the things talked about like Mimikatz, Olympic Destroyer and others were big topics on programs like Security Now.

It talked about the multiple blackouts that Ukraine had in power and other Internet troubles through the years. This was especially interesting because some of the current war they’re dealing with had some of the same things. The difference between now and then was the devistation and rippling effect of the Internet attacks back then.

While Ukraine has had more problems in this war they’re fighting now, it seems as though it wasn’t so bad as it could’ve been, unless Russia is still developing something we don’t know about yet.

Andy Greenberg’s writing and explanations of what took place was quite fascinating. We learn that Sandworm was actually developed in 2009, and in conjunction with Mimikatz and other tools, became a powerhouse of an attack vector that could in theory could be used anywhere.

The book itself is roughly 345 pages, and I did skip the references but did read the bibliogrophy. Some of the books mentioned I’ve read including Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World’s First Digital Weapon.

I’m wondering who will pick up this story as the publication of this book was in 2019. I recently spotted an article about Sandworm through Cyberscoop I believe and they’re still out there.

If you’re new to cybersecurity, this might be the book you want to start with. It isn’t too technical and I believe it describes what’s going on quite well.

You can find Sandworm through a link I’ll provide on the blog, or through Bookshare if you have an account with them. Its also available through Apple Books if you wish to use that service as well. It wouldn’t surprise me if it was available at the library and you can borrow it through there.

The price of the print digital copy is $14.95 with the audio version $16.95 through Kindle or other services.

I honestly hope that you’ll check this book out, it does explain a lot of what’s going on with the cyber warfare we’re hearing about either in the tech press or even in your local news.

Let me know what you think, did you read the book? What did you think of it? Let’s discuss the book right here!

Book

Other Books

Andy has several other books out. One was a 2018 write up, the other is a 2022 write up. Those are:

Final Thoughts

I hope you will check out these books. They’re definitely an educational read and can start you on the path of learning more about the ways they fight these things mentioned in this or any of the other books and you’ll start to understand why it is a big deal when something happens that we may not much care about.

Thanks for reading, have fun!

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Be My Eyes and APH join forces

APH had an article in 2015 talking about Be MY Eyes. This time, the connect center is now teaming up with them under blindness help. Be My Eyes and APH ConnectCenter: An Exciting Partnership comes from vision aware.

They wrote about the app back in 2015. Now, they’re teaming up to give you assistance with blindness related services.

I called google disability at some point, and while they were helpful, I couldn’t get anywhere.

In case you want to learn more, feel free to check out the article. David Goldfield posted this to Mastodon.

Thanks David!

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I believe i’ve seen this, have you seen a shark tank type email claiming you can get this great product shown on this show?

I believe i’ve seen these types of emails. An email claiming that there’s a product out there and its been on shark tank. Thing is, it uses domains that we’ve talked about before like .shop, .email, .top, .xyz and others.

While there was one legitimate service I found with the .xyz TLD, I’ve not seen too many with any of these domains.

Kim Komando and her staff is penning the article Latest shopping scam: Using ‘Shark Tank’ to trick you into thinking something is legit which is a must read for people who don’t know about these types of scams.

They link to the shark tank site through ABC. I’ve never watched the show, but I’ve heard of it.

Stay safe! Stay well! Stay aware!

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Scary things happening on Netflix

When I decided to sign up for Netflix, I didn’t even know how to spell it. I went to netflicks.com which did take me to the web site as I verified searching what I was looking for before signing up. I was watching things on a regular basis but haven’t lately.

I’m always on the lookout for emails about my account and its security. I believe I have a strong password one I don’t use elsewhere.

Thing is, Netflix is changing the fact that if you don’t live with someone, they can’t have your password and the article Someone left a creepy message in this woman’s Netflix – Check your account might be a good reason why.

Weird activity about things they didn’t watch and an interesting message they’ve never seen.

Check out this article, and please stay safe.

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