Security News Update for November 8, 2024

Housing Market Bracing For Interest Hike Since Trump Won

Now that Donald Trump was elected this week, economists are betting that inflation will go up. Research firm Capital Economics plans to actually raise its interest-rate forecast because its economist Thomas Ryan suspects the Federal Reserve’s reaction will be to pull back on slashing rates. The market is reacting. The housing market is at a standstill, they say. We won’t know whether this is correct for a while, but given how important the housing market is to the overall economy, this is not great news. Credit: MSN

Canada Closes TikTok Offices Citing National Security

ByteDance, parent of TikTok is not having a good day. They have a deadline to sell or be blocked in the U.S. unless the courts intervene. In Canada, the Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development said the Canadian offices of TikTok must be shuttered due to national security risks. Users can still use the application however. TikTok will challenge this in court, of course. Credit: Dark Reading

FBI Admits What We All Know – Police Cybersecurity is Bad

Those of us in the industry already knew that hackers were hacking the cops and quietly using those hacked accounts to sell access to big tech’s data on you and me. This is how it works. The hackers compromise a cop’s account. Using that compromised account, the hacker quietly issues an “emergency” request to, say, Facebook, saying that this is a matter of life and death and the cops don’t have time to get a warrant and give us some information. There is such a legal procedure but there is no way for Facebook to know if this is true in any given request. Now the FBI has issued a public notice warning the cops to protect the cop house. We shall see what happens – probably not much, which is what the hackers are counting on. Credit: Tech Crunch

Why You Must Replace End of Life Equipment

D-Link said that they do not plan to issue a fix for a vulnerability in a number of their network attached storage devices even though a bug has a score of 9.2 out of 10. They say that even though a simple query found 60,000 of the devices open to the Internet and vulnerable with a very simple string, they are end-of-life and that means you are on your own. These will continue to be vulnerable forever. For businesses in regulated industries, they must, by regulation, replace devices that have reached their end of support, but for others, it is a matter of cost. The cost of a breach is pretty big, however. Credit: Bleeping Computer

Senate Bill Pushes Cyber Mandates for Medical Industry

Given the incoming president’s dislike for regulations that he doesn’t like, it is not clear what kind of future a bill like this has, but there is a bill in the Senate that would fund hospitals to the tune of $1.3 billion to support improved cybersecurity, face minimum cybersecurity standards, face annual audits and submit to stress tests like banks do for their money to see if they can quickly recover from an attack. Credit: The Record

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