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//]]>// >By John P. Mello Jr.
Apr 7, 2021 5:00 AM PT
Businesses fearful their workers may be targeted by fraudsters will want to take a look at the free Tax Scam Awareness Kit offered by Proofpoint, a data protection company in Sunnyvale, Calif.
The kit, for both Windows and macOS, includes materials for an employee education campaign about tax fraud, three educational videos, an infographic, answers to frequently asked questions about tax scams, and a tax scam flyer.
The kit is designed to be used over a two-week period to educate employees about tax fraud. During the first week, employees are encouraged to visit an IRS website that focuses on tax scams aimed at consumers and to copy and distribute at the office, as well as at home, the Attack Spotlight flyer included with the kit.
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//]]>// >By John P. Mello Jr.
Apr 6, 2021 4:00 AM PT
A rich cache of data on some 533 million Facebook users was posted to a hacker forum over the weekend and is available to download for practically free. The information is from a data breach that occurred in 2019, but hasn t been widely available until now.
The data was posted to an English-speaking cybercriminal forum called RaidForums by a hacker going by the handle TomLiner. The Facebook data was first listed for sale on RaidForums on June 6, 2020, but the initial sale allegedly asked users for US$30,000 in exchange for the data, explained Ivan Righi, a cyber threat intelligence analyst with Digital Shadows, a San Francisco-based provider of digital risk protection solutions.
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//]]>// >By John P. Mello Jr.
Mar 9, 2021 4:22 AM PT
Skeptics of giving computers control over high-risk activities like driving cars were given some ammunition last week when researchers at OpenAI discovered their two-month-old machine vision system could be tricked with a pen and paper into misidentifying objects.
The AI laboratory published a paper March 4 that revealed their new system could be fooled into identifying an apple as an iPod by attaching a note to the apple with the word iPod on it.
In another flub, the system also identified a chainsaw as a piggy bank when dollar signs were sprinkled over a photo of the tool.
Mar 23, 2021 4:00 AM PT
A Big Bang of cash is needed to bring rural Americans into the Information Age, according to a report released Monday by a Washington, D.C. think tank.
Nearly one-in-five rural Americans don t have broadband Internet access, but that could change with the use of carefully targeted subsidies through a process known as a reverse auction, noted the report by the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation. If we do a one-time, large infusion of funds focused on covering the capital expenditures to build new networks where they don t exist and make significant upgrades where they do, we can have a Big Bang in rural broadband that will go a long way toward solving this problem, ITIF Director of Broadband and Spectrum Policy Doug Brake, a coauthor of the report, told TechNewsWorld.
Jan 26, 2021 4:45 AM PT
Google sent a shock wave through the advertising and publishing industries last year when it announced it planned to scrap third-party tracking cookies, which are an important tool for online marketers. Not to worry, the company announced Monday. It has a viable alternative in the wings. It might be hard to imagine how advertising on the Web could be relevant, and accurately measured, without third-party cookies, Google s Group Product Manager for User Trust and Privacy Chetna Bindra wrote in the company s Ads & Commerce blog. When the Privacy Sandbox technology for interest-based advertising (FLoC) was first proposed last year, we started with the idea that groups of people with common interests could replace individual identifiers, she continued. Today, we re releasing new data showing how this innovation can deliver results nearly as effective as cookie-based approaches.