The Week In Brief: 24th October 2014

INFO SEC

Fancy knowing which VIPs are waltzing into an airport? Or want to grab some data centre access credentials? Simple: just try listening to pagers (remember them?). A thinktank recently suggested that data from the much-hyped (over hyped?) Internet of Things (IoT) should be treated as personal data. Staples in the US had a card data breach. Is a US retail breach even news anymore? The sooner the US catches up with chip-and-pin the better.

Lastly, there’s been a 40% rise on data traded on the black market, or so says Experian. That’s a staggering 110 million ‘pieces of data’.

DEVICES & OS

On the Android front, we have clever types saying they can hide malware in images and elsewhere there’s a variety of the Koler randsomware that’s spreading via SMS. In Apple-land, meanwhile, Cupertino has responded to the Spotlight search privacy fears in iOS8 and OS X Yosemite. Some readers might remember a similar issue being raised by the Linux community when Ubuntu returned Amazon results for local searches.

Speaking of Linux, here’s a nice piece I found on how Docker and Linux containerisation is changing cloud security.