Eliana Willis

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    in Information Technology

    Apple should fix this privacy issue, not try to keep it quiet

    The story that an iPhone owner’s personal data was leaked online while it was in the hands of an authorized Apple repair center should bring chills to any owner of Apple hardware out there.And Apple’s response to the matter is even more worrying.This incident happened in 2016 at a Pegatron facility in California.It’s quite shocking. Our devices contain a vast array of private and personal data, ranging from health and financial data, our communications, movements, and personal photos and videos.The idea that someone could be going through this when a device is in for repair and go as far as to share that information is appalling.Must read: I just found my lost AirTag… you’ll never guess where it went

    Apple is a company that claims to put privacy at the core of everything it does. And yet, everything about how it handled this, to its inaction since, suggests Apple is more concerned about its image rather than user privacy.

    The fact that Apple’s involvement in this was kept confidential, becoming public only as a result of a legal dispute between Pegatron and its insurer over the cost, doesn’t look good.Now, there are always going to be people who end up in positions of trust that shouldn’t be trusted. It’s a fact of life. But Apple is supposedly leading the way when it comes to user privacy, and that should include the privacy of users wanting their devices repaired.It’s unclear here whether the repair center asked for access to the iPhone in question, or whether the device was unprotected, but either way, the best way to prevent this from happening is to make it so that it can’t happen.Just as some cars, such as Tesla, have a valet mode that secures certain features of the vehicle from access, Apple needs to implement a similar feature for its devices. This “repair mode” feature would allow repairers access to the device but no access to any of the data on the device. This would be a great addition to newer devices, closing a privacy loophole.I would also expect authorized repair centers to offer an environment where snooping on data, and being able to copy or share it, would be hard to do. I’ve seen secured repair facilities where CCTV is in use, the test networks don’t have access to the internet and are managed, and employees are not allowed to bring their own tech into the repair areas. This is somewhat extreme, but as users are asked to trust Apple with more and more of their data, there needs to be a barrier between repair agents and the user’s personal data. An alternative is a secure backup followed by a wipe before a device is handed over for repair, with the data reloaded following the repair. I know that companies try to cut costs when to comes to repair, especially when it comes to warranty work, but for a company rolling in cash, that’s a poor excuse.Also, while taking control of the privacy and security of user data during repair sounds costly, privacy breaches are costly, both in monetary terms and bad publicity.Apple does offer users tips on getting their device ready for service, which shifts the responsibility to the user. Problem is, depending on what’s wrong with a device or how it is damaged, this is not always possible. For example, on an iPhone with a dead screen, suffering from water intrusion, or stuck in a boot loop, this isn’t going to be possible. Owners should be confident they can send in their hardware for service without having that data snooped on even if they can’t securely erase it. You might also think that this is a lot for Apple in response to a single case from 2016, but given that Apple wanted to keep this quiet, we must bear in mind that this could be the one case we know of out of many that we don’t.Suppressing its involvement in these things isn’t helping secure end users. It just allows Apple to pretend that it’s not an issue.And it clearly is a problem. More

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    in Information Technology

    Card Broken: 1000 arrests made in Chinese crackdown on fraud, cryptocurrency laundering

    Chinese law enforcement has made over 1,100 arrests in a nationwide crackdown on telecoms and banking fraud.

    The Ministry of Public Security announced the operation on June 9, dubbed “Card Broken,” which aims to destroy criminal gangs that are conducting cybercriminal activities. In particular, Card Broken is focused on telecommunications network fraud, including the sale of phone, payment cards, and money laundering services over China and across borders. The department specifically notes “coin farmers” as being involved, in which accomplices or members of criminal groups facilitate money laundering through cryptocurrency to avoid the scrutiny of law enforcement in the country.  Coin farmers would allegedly sign up for different cryptocurrency exchanges and set up personal accounts. These traders would then buy or sell cryptocurrency based on their handler’s instructions and funds issued to them. The virtual currency would then be sent to wallets controlled by gang members and designated elsewhere.  In return for their activity, coin farmers would receive a commission of between 1.5% and 5%.  “The high illegal income attracts a large number of people to participate, causing serious social harm,” the department says. 

    Now in its fifth leg, the operation honed in on the criminal chains of these activities, breaking down at least 170 allegedly criminal groups. Action has been taken by law enforcement in provinces including Beijing, Hebei, and Shanxi.  In total, the Broken Card operation has resulted in the destruction of roughly 15,000 gangs and 311,000 individuals suspected of involvement have been arrested, according to the ministry.  China has taken a tough stance on cryptocurrency, outlawing exchanges and warning that trading disrupts “economic and financial order.”  While individuals are still allowed to own cryptocurrency assets, three state-backed financial authorities recently issued a joint warning reminding citizens that cryptocurrency cannot play a part in Chinese financial activities.  Previous and related coverage Have a tip? Get in touch securely via WhatsApp | Signal at +447713 025 499, or over at Keybase: charlie0 More

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    in Information Technology

    Feds strike Slilpp, a marketplace for flogging initial access credentials

    Law enforcement has seized one of the largest marketplaces for selling stolen account credentials. 

    The website’s infrastructure has been taken over by the police, according to the US Department of Justice (DoJ). A seizure warrant affidavit unsealed on Thursday outlined Slilpp’s past activities. In operation since at least 2012, the marketplace — with domains on both the clear and dark web — offered stolen credentials for services including PayPal, Wells Fargo, Amazon, Chase, Capital One, and more.  These included usernames and passwords, mobile phone accounts, and e-commerce accounts.  The DoJ says that over 80 million credentials were available for purchase from over 1,400 victim organizations worldwide. Law enforcement from the US, Germany, the Netherlands, and Romania was involved in the confiscation of servers supporting the platform’s infrastructure and various domain names.  Slilpp buyers would allegedly use these credentials to perform banking theft and fraud, such as wire transfers from victims to accounts owned by them. 

    “To date, over a dozen individuals have been charged or arrested by US law enforcement in connection with the Slilpp marketplace,” the DoJ says.  According to Acting Assistant Attorney General Nicholas McQuaid, Slilpp allegedly caused “hundreds of millions of dollars in losses to victims worldwide” — and at least $200,000 in losses in the US alone. However, the “full extent” of the marketplace’s role in the credential theft economy is “not known.” “The department will not tolerate an underground economy for stolen identities, and we will continue to collaborate with our law enforcement partners worldwide to disrupt criminal marketplaces wherever they are located,” McQuaid commented.  Previous and related coverage Have a tip? Get in touch securely via WhatsApp | Signal at +447713 025 499, or over at Keybase: charlie0 More

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    in Networking

    ACMA sees 15% drop in total telco complaints even though they're taking longer to resolve

    Latest figures from the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) has indicated there was a 15% year-on-year drop in telecommunications complaints from 323,804 to 274,290 during the January to March 2021 quarter. Based on complaints per 10,000 services that also decreased by nearly 15% year on year from 74 to 63 during the period. Of the total complaints, about half were about mobile services, followed by NBN broadband at 67,005, while complaints about other services accounted for 43,332, fixed-line broadband for 12,007, fixed-line voice 10,498, and 2,341 were about NBN voice-only services. Breaking down the complaints related to NBN broadband further, one third — 23,553 — were about fibre to the node, 18,262 were about HFC, and 10,825 were in relation to fibre to the curb.
    Image: ACMA
    The data matches up with what the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman reported earlier this month, which found there were 4,004 fewer total complaints year-on-year during the same January to March period.”Reports from the ACMA and the TIO continue to show decreasing complaint rates, underlining that telcos are improving customer service while deploying new technologies, increasing broadband speeds, and consistently offering more value,” Communications Alliance CEO John Stanton said. Despite a decrease in complaints, the latest ACMA telecommunications complaints data showed the weighted average days to resolve a complaint increased during the quarter by 7.5% from 9.3 to 10 days. The average telco took 5.5 days to resolve a complaint. One telco, which was the slowest, took 16 days to resolve a complaint.

    During the quarter, complaint escalation rates also rose by 1 percentage point from 9.8% to 10.8%, with a total of 29,533 escalated complaints recorded. The Communications Alliance attributed the slight increases to the possibility that given the significant decrease in overall complaint numbers, with fewer “quick to resolve” issues raising to the level of a complaint, it would mean consumers are seeing more straightforward issues resolved faster. “While there is still more work to be done and telcos will always continue working to improve customer experience, we are proud of the progress made thus far and hope to see this trend continue,” Stanton said. Related Coverage More

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    in Artificial Intelligence

    Speeding up clinical trials by making drug production local

    The Boston area has long been home to innovation that leads to impactful new drugs. But manufacturing those drugs for clinical trials often involves international partners and supply chains. The vulnerabilities of that system have become all too apparent during the Covid-19 pandemic.

    Now Snapdragon Chemistry, co-founded by MIT Professor and Associate Provost Tim Jamison, is helping pharmaceutical companies manufacture drugs locally to shorten the time it takes for new drugs to get to patients.

    Snapdragon essentially starts as a chemistry lab, running experiments on behalf of pharmaceutical customers to create molecules of interest. From there it seeks to automate production processes, often lessening the number of steps it takes to create those molecules. Sometimes the new process will require a technology — such as a specialized chemical reactor — the client doesn’t have, so Snapdragon builds the equipment for the client and teaches them to incorporate it into their processes.

    Some of those reactors are being used for the commercial production of approved drugs, although most are designed to help pharmaceutical and biotech companies get through clinical trials more quickly.

    “At the clinical stage, you just want to go as fast as possible to find out whether you have a useful therapeutic or not,” Snapdragon CEO Matt Bio says. “We’re really trying to stay focused on the technology for delivering drugs fast to the clinic.”

    Snapdragon has worked with over 100 companies, ranging from small biotechs to large multinationals like Amgen, for whom it has helped develop potential cancer treatments. The company has also worked with research agencies to push the frontiers of automated material production, including in a project with the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) to develop ribonucleotide triphosphates, which are the building blocks to mRNA-based Covid-19 vaccines.

    In March, Snapdragon announced plans to build a 51,000 square foot facility in Waltham, Massachusetts, that will enable it to produce more drugs in-house, removing yet another step to get new drugs into the clinic.

    “It’s about supplying the client with the fastest route possible to the molecule they need to test in the clinic,” Bio says.

    By focusing on the processes and technology for synthesizing chemicals, the company believes it has potential to transform the economics of drug manufacturing at every scale.

    “We can make [drugs] potentially a lot cheaper, and where that’s really interesting is [around questions like] how do you make a tuberculosis drug that’s, say, half a cent?” Bio says. “That’s a lot harder than making these complex drugs. But you need to save every penny if you’re going to roll out to parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Those are new opportunities we get to engage in.”

    An idea, and a pivot

    Jamison began thinking about starting a company when he noticed other scientists were interested in his research around continuous flow photochemistry, which uses light to spark chemical reactions and can offer huge cost and scale advantages over traditional chemistry processing done in batches.

    “Generally, chemistry has been done since its origins in what we call batch mode,” says Jamison, who was also a principal investigator at the Novartis-MIT Center for Continuous Manufacturing and has published a number of papers around continuous flow chemistry processes. “It’s like cooking. We make a set quantity, that’s a batch. But if you’re going to be a food manufacturer, for example, you’d want something that’s continuous to meet the throughput, like an assembly line.”

    In 2012, Jamison began mapping out what a company would look like with eventual co-founder Aaron Beeler, an associate professor of medicinal chemistry at Boston University.  After two years of developing, vetting, and “pressure testing” their business model by seeking guidance from colleagues in their networks and MIT’s Venture Mentoring Service, the founders set out to start a company that would manufacture specialty and fine chemicals, focusing on those that would be well-suited to continuous flow synthesis. Snapdragon officially formed in October 2014 as Firefly Therapeutics.

    Jamison likes to say the company pivoted on day one. Within a week of incorporating, the founders had secured two contracts — not to sell chemicals, but to help pharmaceutical companies develop continuous manufacturing processes.

    Bio joined in 2015 at a time when the company — by then renamed Snapdragon — had secured consulting and services contracts. Snapdragon’s customer base was growing so rapidly by then the company moved four times in the first four years as it went from needing one lab bench to dozens.

    Snapdragon’s work helping companies improve chemistry processes is still its most common service offering. Most of those improvements come from an understanding of what the latest reactor and automation technology can offer.

    “If you walked around our labs, you’d see a lot of automation and robotics that are doing things that people used to do less efficiently,” Bio says. “Instead of our scientists being in the lab setting up a reaction, breaking down a reaction, they can just think about the chemistry and then use some of the robotic tools to get the answers they want faster.”

    “One area where Snapdragon is really innovating is in lab [operating systems], which are a way of networking literally every single instrument in the company and gathering real-time information about processes,” Jamison says.

    Fulfilling an industry’s potential

    Snapdragon’s Waltham expansion will bring the company full circle, to the cofounders’ original idea of producing specialty chemicals in-house.

    Bio says the expansion will be particularly beneficial for developing treatments to diseases with smaller patient populations and smaller material requirements. He notes that in some mRNA-based treatments, for example, a kilogram of material can treat millions of people.

    The company also recently received a grant from DARPA to try turning plentiful commodities in the U.S., like natural gas and crop waste, into the starting materials for high-value pharmaceuticals.

    Moving forward, Jamison thinks Snapdragon’s machine-based production processes will only accelerate the company’s ability to innovate.

    “Chemistry of the future could be very different from what we’re doing right now, but we don’t have enough data yet,” Jamison says. “One of the longer-term visions for Snapdragon is creating automated systems capable of generating lots of data, and then using those data as training sets for machine learning algorithms toward any number of applications, from how to make something to predicting properties of materials. That unlocks a lot of exciting possibilities.” More

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    in Networking

    Skylo, Inmarsat team for first commercial narrowband IoT-over-satellite solution

    Each day, gazillions of tiny internet-borne communication instances ping around the internet in deference to the ones we most think about–those being messaging, web browsing, voice calls, video conferences and watching television. The wide range of lower-network-level yet important tasks in the internet of things include functions such as starting a car remotely, summoning an ambulance, sending a farmer an early storm warning or registering soil quality metrics from a faraway soybean field. These happen billions of times a day, and they can easily be taken for granted, but they’re all important to someone, somewhere.Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup Skylo, whose global IoT connectivity fabric software facilitates satellite-based narrow-band IoT communication services, specializes in these behind-the-scenes functions. The company made telecom news June 10 in announcing a partnership with UK-based Inmarsat, which has developed satellite-to-Earth communications software for more than four decades. The deal makes the world’s first commercial narrowband IoT-over-satellite solution a reality.Inmarsat will provide the satellite capacity backbone to deliver Skylo’s IoT packages internationally for connecting machines and sensors. Skylo will utilize existing Inmarsat satellites located in geostationary locations 35,000 kilometers in space.The deal pairs Inmarsat’s global satellite network with a Skylo IoT solution that provides remotely located application users with real-time, actionable data. This function fills in dead-area coverage gaps, improves efficiencies and can literally save lives in emergency situations, Skylo CPO and co-founder Tarun Gupta told ZDNet.”We had a situation last Thanksgiving off the coast of India, where a couple of boats were sinking,” Gupta said. “They were able to press the SOS button, which called back to the equivalent of the Coast Guard, and the Indian Coast Guard came out and saved their lives. So we’ve been actually able to save several dozen lives off the coast of India, and we’re really proud of that.”

    The Skylo solution is available now in India through a partnership with in-country partner BSNL. Expansion plans will be announced later this year, Gupta said.”Our software runs on satellites in the highest level in the atmosphere, the geostationary level,” Gupta said. “We provide a full-stack solution, starting from the CPU in the hardware device. We provide access to the network as well as the platform where the data resides. Our global partner, Inmarsat, provides that pipe connectivity to transport the data from, say, the middle of the ocean, back over satellite to where you want to go.”Global connectivity is rapidly expanding beyond people to connect billions of machines and devices, and geographic separation is becoming less of a problem thanks to fast improvements in bandwidth, power sources and next-generation narrow-band software, such as Skylo’s. Simultaneously, more and more IoT operations are requiring increasing always-available connectivity. Satellite IoT connectivity is changing how smart “things” are connected, enabling real-time data transmission and greater reliability and cost-effectiveness–particularly where there is inconsistent or no cellular coverage. “The most effective IoT solutions require a truly resilient and flexible network that can scale as demand grows,” Inmarsat CEO Rajeev Suri said in a media advisory. “Our L-band network provides a unique capability for enabling the billions of connected IoT devices in India and across the world that are being deployed at an extraordinary speed.”New deal with Softbank announcedSkylo also announced that it has signed an agreement with Japanese mobile carrier SoftBank Corp. to provide satellite communication services for internet-connected commercial devices. The agreement comes with a caveat: Softbank will charge only 10% of competing rates.SoftBank struck its alliance with Skylo late last month, after parent company SoftBank Group led a $103 million funding round for the startup in January. The goal is to launch an affordable network in Japan as early as next year. Boeing is also an investor in Skylo.The network also will serve areas that have insufficient coverage by base stations located on the ground.

    Internet of Things More

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    in Networking

    Wild weather sees Victorian NBN outages stretch into weekend

    Storm weather that pushed through Victoria this week has left behind power outages, homes destroyed, as well as a single fatality in its wake. Providing an update on its blog on Friday morning, NBN has continued to state that restoration could take days. “As at 8:00am on Friday 11 June, NBN Co has restored its infrastructure assets servicing approximately 54,000 premises in metropolitan areas of Melbourne, mainly in the city’s eastern suburbs,” it said. “As a result of impacts to other network infrastructure assets, approximately 75,000 NBN services remain affected across parts of the Greater Melbourne metropolitan area, Yarra Ranges, Gippsland, Gisborne, Ballarat, and small areas of other storm-impacted regions of Victoria. “It is likely that power restoration to some areas may take a number of days, which will delay the restoration of NBN services in these areas.” The company said many of its sites are running on battery backup systems, with generators deployed, and access restricted due to storms that swept through the state on Wednesday and Thursday. NBN added that power outages would impact whether it could restore services to premises.

    “NBN Co is working closely with power providers and Emergency Services in Victoria and will monitor the weather situation over coming days. It will continue to respond to network outages and is aiming to restore services as soon as possible,” it said. On Thursday morning, NBN said there were an estimated 200,000 premises across Victoria without power. Related Coverage More

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    in Information Technology

    Google ends push for Chrome address bar to only show domain name

    Farewell, not so sweet prince.
    Image: Google
    Google has reversed course and ended its experiment to only show Chrome users the domain name of the site they are on. Kicked off in August, the experiment randomly assigned users to test whether it could help users spot phishing sites. “Delete simplified domain experiment,” Google engineer Emily Stark wrote in a Chromium commit. “This experiment didn’t move relevant security metrics, so we’re not going to launch it. :(” Starting with Chrome 90, if a user did not specify the protocol to be used when accessing a site, Chrome would try first using HTTPS, before falling back to HTTP. Earlier this week, Android Police spotted that Google had killed off its augmented reality Measure app. Heading to its listing without being signed into an account that has the app installed returns a “Not Found” error, while users that previously installed it can continue to see its listing page. “This app is no longer supported and will not be updated,” the page states. “Users who previously installed this app can continue to use it on compatible devices.” Related Coverage More