Extracting Secrets →

Good news for those of you deeply entrenched (also known as enterprise-wide) in deep learning - deep machine learning, that is - when turned on it's artificial head, becomes artificial data loss in the form of secrets extracted... Today's non-secretive Must Read scholarly paper. Oops.

OPM, Le Nouveau Espionnage

Michael Hayden, GEN USAF (RET), former Director of the United States Central Intelligence Agency 2006 – 2009, former Director of the United States National Security Agency 1999 – 2005, and First Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence 2005 – 2006, has detailed the damage wrought with the OPM Breach, and in particular, adds a new, previously unforeseen outcome - the use of the purloined data to recruit spies...

SONY Investigation, Federal Bureau of Investigation Update

The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation has just issued an update to the Bureaus' ongoing investigation into the SONY [NYSE: SNE] breach, and the miscreants that committed the crime. The gist: North Korea has been implicated in the crime.

• Technical analysis of the data deletion malware used in this attack revealed links to other malware that the FBI knows North Korean actors previously developed. For example, there were similarities in specific lines of code, encryption algorithms, data deletion methods, and compromised networks.
• The FBI also observed significant overlap between the infrastructure used in this attack and other malicious cyber activity the U.S. government has previously linked directly to North Korea. For example, the FBI discovered that several Internet protocol (IP) addresses associated with known North Korean infrastructure communicated with IP addresses that were hardcoded into the data deletion malware used in this attack.
• Separately, the tools used in the SPE attack have similarities to a cyber attack in March of last year against South Korean banks and media outlets, which was carried out by North Korea. - via the Federal Bureau of Investigation, released 19 December 2014

MetaSnowden

Via bon vivant, prolific speculative fiction author, and polemic poster of Items of Interest, What-Not and Fanciful Futures - Charlie Stross; comes a diatribe of a sort, in which, Serious Import is Conveyed, discussing the oft-described, little understood and illusive, Edward Snowden. Today's Must Read.

Android Applications, The Evil Within

Well constructed how-to, targeting the detection of evil Google Inc. (NasdaqGS: GOOG) Android applications.