Security News for the Week Ending October 1, 2021

Women, Minorities are Hacked More Than Others

A new report, released this week, says that lower income and vulnerable populations are disproportionately affected by cyber crime. Shockingly (not), the report says that those with lower incomes, lower education and minority groups are more likely to fall victim to cyber crime. While the gap is not huge, it is consistent from question to question. Credit: Threatpost

Leaked Apple Training Video Shows It Trains Repair Partners to Disparage Third Party Repairs

Leaked videos show that Apple trains its authorized repair partners to disparage third party repair shops. While at one level this is not a surprise, at another level, as a dominant player in the market, they are going to take some serious heat over the videos. According to Motherboard, who reviewed the videos, it appears that some of the claims made are suspect. Bottom line, users need to review different choices and make an educated decision. Credit: Motherboard

Customs and Border Protection Uses Encrypted App Wickr As FBI Goes Dark

CBP is deploying encrypted messaging app Wickr enterprise wide. While the FBI lobbies Congress to ban end-to-end encryption, another executive branch department thinks encryption is pretty useful. They spent $900,000 to renew their Wickr software licenses (which is pretty reasonable for the size of the organization). Wickr is now owned by Amazon and they do have an enterprise version that can log message traffic as is required by law for CBP. It is unclear what version they are using, but it is likely that version. Credit: Vice

IKEA Admitted to Placing Surveillance Cameras in Warehouse Bathrooms

IKEA has now removed these cameras that were placed in men’s and women’s bathrooms and discovered in a warehouse in England. It is not clear whether cameras exist in other IKEA bathrooms, but the privacy commissioner’s office is likely not happy. IKEA admitted the cameras had been in place since 2015. Credit: The Register

Driverless Cars Could Generate 100 GB of Data Per Second

While predictions of driverless cars by 2020 only materialized in limited situations, driverless cars are coming and they will generate a ton of data. Test vehicles are generating between 20 and 40 Terabytes of data a day. Estimates say the average self-driving car will generate between 1 and 15 TB a day and a robotaxi might generate 450 TB. If most cars are driverless by 2030, that will create an amazing amount of data and I am sure that it will all be secure and private. Remember that these cars are collecting data of everything that it drives past – cars, buildings, roads, people, so just because YOU don’t drive a self-driving car, that doesn’t mean that one of those cars won’t catch you in a place where you should not be, doing something that you should not be doing. Credit: Cybernews

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