Security News for the Week Ending February 3, 2023
Biden Admin Moves to Halt All Exports to Huawei
The Biden administration is continuing to tighten the grip on China. The feds have stopped approving licenses for the export of most items to Huawei, according to the Financial Times. The end game is for a total ban on sales to Huawei. Credit: BBC
Popular Derivatives Trading Platform Down Due to Cyber Attack
Dublin-based ION Trading UK was hit by a cyberattack that shut down some of parts of its trading platform. 42 of ION’s customers, including some US and EU based banks and brokers, either shut down their services or had to process transactions manually. In reality, except for a few large transactions, since timing makes all the difference in trading platforms, if you slow down the process to a crawl or do not have access to real time data, you are at a major disadvantage. It is not clear how long they will be down. Treasury says that since this attack was limited to part of only one player in the industry, this particular attack is not a systemic threat. Said differently, if this attack were more widespread, it would represent a systemic threat to the economy. Credit: Data Breach Today
Facebook Sues Data Scrapers While Paying for Scraped Data Itself
While Facebook continues to sue other companies for scraping its data, it is, itself, paying companies to scrape data from other sites for its own marketing purposes. Double standard? These facts came out in legal documents filed in a lawsuit where Facebook is suing Bright Data for practices it doesn’t like others to do, but does itself. Credit: Bloomberg
Singapore Can Now Order Social Media to Block Content or be Banned Itself
Another day, another master for social media sites to obey. The challenge is, how do they keep it all straight. In the Singapore case, content or users can be blocked for egregious content, a term which is not defined, and platforms can be fined or the social media platform, itself, can be banned in Singapore. The law also requires large social media platforms like Twitter and others to comply with codes of (safety) practices, i.e. blocking content categories the government doesn’t like, AKA censorship. How free speech advocate Twitter and others will respond is unknown, but it likely all boils down to money – money or principles, pick one. So far, for virtually every platform, every time, money rules. Credit: ZDNet
Electrify America Fast Chargers – Easy Hack
Electrify America has over 3,500 charging units across the country and now there are videos showing how to easily breach them to either steal electricity or do damage. EA’s response was “gee, that is a crime”. Duh. Not a great response. They say that now that they have been outed, they are investigating. Probably should have done that earlier. Credit: Teslarati
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