Author: esimantiras

6 Ways to Delete Yourself From the Internet

Posted on by esimantiras

6 Ways to Delete Yourself From the Internet

source: wired.com | image by pexels.com

You’ll never be able to get a clean slate—but you can significantly downsize your digital footprint.

DEPENDING ON WHEN you were born, there’s a good chance you’ve spent either several decades online or have never known an offline world. Whatever the case, the internet and its advertising giants know a huge amount about your life.

Amazon, Facebook, and Google all have reams of data about you—including your likes and dislikes, health information and social connections—but they’re not the only ones. Countless murky data brokers that you’ve never heard of collect huge quantities of information about you and sell it on. This data is then used by other companies you’ve likely never heard of to nudge you into buying more stuff. On top of that, all your ancient web forum comments and ill-advised social media posts are still out there, waiting to turn you into a milkshake duck.

At this stage it’s going to be very difficult to completely delete yourself from the internet, but there are some steps you can take to remove a lot of it. Removing personal information and deleting accounts is a fiddly process, so it’s better to break it down into a few smaller steps and tackle them over time.

Opt Out From Data Brokers

Collecting and selling your data is big business. In 2019 the US state of Vermont passed a law requiring all companies buying and selling third-party personal information to register: In response, more than 120 firms logged their details. They included companies building search tools to look up individuals, firms handling location data, and those specializing in your health data. These companies collect everything from your name, address, and date of birth to your social security number, buying habits, and where you went to school and for how long.

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Meta alerts 50,000 users to targeting by ‘surveillance-for-hire’ companies

Posted on by esimantiras

Meta alerts 50,000 users to targeting by

‘surveillance-for-hire’ companies

 

source: theverge.com  |  image from meta.com. | contributed by FAN, Stephen Page

The users, including journalists and human rights activists, were based in more than 100 countries around the world

Facebook’s parent company Meta has alerted 50,000 users of Facebook and Instagram that their accounts were spied on by commercial “surveillance-for-hire” schemes around the globe.

The users were targeted by seven entities and located in more than 100 countries, according to an update posted on Meta’s news page today.

Targets included journalists, dissidents, critics of authoritarian regimes, families of opposition, and human rights activists, the post said. The surveillance was uncovered in a monthslong investigation in which Meta identified spying groups and removed them from the platform.

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Top 15 cybersecurity predictions for 2022

Posted on by esimantiras

Top 15 cybersecurity predictions for 2022

 

 

source: securitymagazine.com. |  image by pexels.com.

Over the past several years, cybersecurity risk management has become top of mind for boards. And rightly so. Given the onslaught of ransomware attacks and data breaches that organizations experienced in recent years, board members have increasingly realized how vulnerable they are. 

This year, in particular, the public was directly impacted by ransomware attacks, from gasoline shortages, to meat supply, and even worse, hospitals and patients that rely on life-saving systems. The attacks reflected the continued expansion of cyber-physical systems — all of which present new challenges for organizations and opportunities for threat actors to exploit.

There should be a shared sense of urgency about staying on top of the battle against cyberattacks. Security columnist and Vice President and Ambassador-At-Large in Cylance’s Office of Security & Trust, John McClurg, in his latest Cyber Tactics column, explained it best: “It’s up to everyone in the cybersecurity community to ensure smart, strong defenses are in place in the coming year to protect against those threats.”

As you build your strategic planning, priorities and roadmap for the year ahead, security and risk experts offer the following cybersecurity predictions for 2022.

Prediction #1: Increased Scrutiny on Software Supply Chain Security, by John Hellickson, Cyber Executive Advisor,Coalfire

“As part of the executive order to improve the nation’s cybersecurity previously mentioned, one area of focus is the need to enhance software supply chain security. There are many aspects included that most would consider industry best practice of a robust DevSecOps program, but one area that will see increased scrutiny is providing the purchaser, the government in this example, a software bill of materials. This would be a complete list of all software components leveraged within the software solution, along with where it comes from. The expectation is that everything that is used within or can affect your software, such as open source, is understood, versions tracked, scrutinized for security issues and risks, assessed for vulnerabilities, and monitored, just as you do with any in-house developed code. This will impact organizations that both consume and those that deliver software services. Considering this can be very manual and time-consuming, we could expect that Third-Party Risk Management teams will likely play a key role in developing programs to track and assess software supply chain security, especially considering they are usually the front line team who also receives inbound security questionnaires from their business partners.”

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World’s tiniest camera the size of a grain of salt

Posted on by esimantiras

World’s tiniest camera the size of a grain of salt

source: studyfinds.org. |. Photo by Polina Tankilevitch from Pexels.  | contributed by Artemus founder, Robert Wallace

 

PRINCETON, N.J. — The world’s smallest camera, the size of a grain of salt, may soon be coming to mobile phones everywhere. Computer scientists from Princeton University and the University of Washington say the small device they created can take crisp, full-color pictures just as well as conventional cameras which are 500,000 times bigger.

The new technology may help doctors to diagnose and treat diseases far less invasively than traditional endoscopy can today. It will also make imaging better, as thousands of tiny devices could cover the whole surface of a smartphone to become one giant camera

Traditional cameras use several curved glass or plastic lenses to bend light rays into focus, but the new device uses a “metasurface” which developers can make just like a computer chip. The metasurface is just half a millimeter wide and is made up of 1.6 million tiny posts, which are all shaped like cylinders but none of them look exactly the same.

When the antennae-like tiny posts interact with light, with the help of algorithms, they produce better pictures and capture a wider frame of view than any full-color metasurface camera created so far. The metasurfaces are made from silicon nitride, a glass-like material which can be manufactured easily and produced more cheaply than lenses in conventional cameras.

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