News Bites for the Week Ending March 27, 2020

Hacker Sells 538 Million Weibo Accounts

Karma is a B**tch.

With all of the Chinese hacking efforts, someone is hacking back.  Is it us?  Not clear.  In any case, the data includes information like real names, site names, location, etc. and 172 million of the 538 million records include users’ phone numbers, but not passwords.  The data is available for $250.  Given China’s iron grip on the Internet, they should be able to catch this guy.  Unless he is not in China.  Source: ZDNet

Pentagon Increases Progress Payments to Primes

The Pentagon is trying to keep the Defense Industrial Base afloat during these trying times by increasing so-called progress payments to primes and other measures.  Whether it will be enough to keep small subs in business is not clear, but what we have seen is that the bankruptcy courts have seen that these companies’ intellectual property as an asset and sells it off during liquidation – even selling defense information to the Chinese.  In theory, CFIUS should allow the government to stop these (and it absolutely can if it moves fast enough) and FIRRMA (aka CFIUS 2.0) gives the government even more power to stop it but the bankruptcy courts have, for the most part, thumbed their noses at it, possibly (kindly) because they are clueless about the risk.  Source: National Defense Magazine

Experts See Over 600 Percent Spike in Malicious Emails During Covid-19

Barracuda Networks researchers saw a 667% spike in malicious emails using Coronavirus.  The goal is to get you to click on malicious links or download attachments that include viruses.  They saw almost 10,000 coronavirus linked emails attacks in the last three weeks compared to 1,800 in February and less in January.  Phishing attacks are nothing if not tied to current events. Source: The Hill

Netflix Reduces Video Quality in Europe Over Bandwidth Crunch

According to Variety, Netflix uses one out of every eight bits traversing the Internet (12%).  As general  Internet usage goes up, Europe has asked Netflix and other streaming video providers to reduce their video quality from HD to SD.

“As a result of social distancing measures put in place across Europe to fight the Coronavirus pandemic, the demand for Internet capacity has increased, be it for teleworking, e-learning or entertainment purposes. This could put networks under strain at a moment when they need to be operational at the best possible level. In order to prevent congestion and to ensure the open Internet, Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton has called on the responsibility of streaming services, operators and users. Streaming platforms are advised to offer standard rather than high definition and to cooperate with telecom operators.”

Netflix has agreed to reduce its video stream bitrate by 25% for the next month.  Source: Bleeping Computer

by