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October 2020 LC LABS LETTERA Monthly Roundup of News and Thoughts from the Library of Congress Labs Team And the Winner Is… Our Director of Digital Strategy, Kate Zwaard, was awarded a 2020 Theodore Roosevelt (Teddy) Government Leadership Award for her leadership in expanding the Library’s use of technology and encouraging deeper exploration and discovery […]
In March 2020, KrebsOnSecurity alerted Swedish security giant Gunnebo Group that hackers had broken into its network and sold the access to a criminal group which specializes in deploying ransomware. In August, Gunnebo said it had successfully thwarted a ransomware attack, but this week it emerged that the intruders stole and published online tens of […]
I’m pleased to announce that Thib Guicherd-Callin has accepted the continuing role of Assistant Director and Program Manager for LOCKSS. Thib brings unsurpassed experience and skills to this role. He joined the LOCKSS Program as a Summer intern in 2005 and has been with it since then. In his own words, he is “the intern […]
For the second time in as many years, Google is working to fix a weakness in its Widevine digital rights management (DRM) technology used by online streaming sites like Disney, Hulu and Netflix to prevent their content from being pirated. The latest cracks in Widevine concern the encryption technology’s protection for L3 streams, which is […]
When the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG) set out in January 2015 to research the ability of students to judge the credibility of online information, they could never have predicted that their results would be disseminated precisely at a time when the level of public concern over the availability, spread, and impact of misinformation online […]
Some of the world’s largest Internet firms have taken steps to crack down on disinformation spread by QAnon conspiracy theorists and the hate-filled anonymous message board 8chan. But according to a California-based security researcher, those seeking to de-platform these communities may have overlooked a simple legal solution to that end: Both the Nevada-based web hosting […]
Kathleen O’Neill is a 2020 Staff Innovator with LC Labs and a Senior Archives Specialist in the Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress. She’s shared about Born Digital Access Now!, her Staff Innovator project, in previous posts. In this post, she discusses her analysis of the various file formats in the Manuscript Division’s born-digital […]
This week’s Princh Library Blog post was written by recurring guest writer Edgardo Civallero. The post elaborates on the nature of the people’s libraries, also known as popular libraries, in Latin America, and the different initiatives these libraries are taking for their communities. Popular Libraries In Latin America, a “popular” library would be —sticking to […]
A phone call to an Internet provider in Oregon on Sunday evening was all it took to briefly sideline multiple websites related to 8chan/8kun — a controversial online image board linked to several mass shootings — and QAnon, the far-right conspiracy theory which holds that a cabal of Satanic pedophiles is running a global child […]
One of the digital underground’s most popular stores for peddling stolen credit card information began selling a batch of more than three million new card records this week. KrebsOnSecurity has learned the data was stolen in a lengthy data breach at more than 100 Dickey’s Barbeque Restaurant locations around the country. An ad on the […]
Today’s guest-writer, Lucas Maxwell, has many years of experience working with teens in school and public library settings. In 2017 Lucas received the UK School Librarian of the Year Award, a prestigious honour recognizing his outstanding contribution to the excellent work carried out in school libraries every day. In this post, Lucas will discuss various […]
It’s Cybersecurity Awareness Month! In keeping with that theme, if you (ab)use Microsoft Windows computers you should be aware the company shipped a bevy of software updates today to fix at least 87 security problems in Windows and programs that run on top of the operating system. That means it’s once again time to backup […]
Microsoft Corp. has executed a coordinated legal sneak attack in a bid to disrupt the malware-as-a-service botnet Trickbot, a global menace that has infected millions of computers and is used to spread ransomware. A court in Virginia granted Microsoft control over many Internet servers Trickbot uses to plunder infected systems, based on novel claims that […]
A week ago, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that someone was attempting to disrupt the Trickbot botnet, a malware crime machine that has infected millions of computers and is often used to spread ransomware. A new report Friday says the coordinated attack was part of an operation carried out by the U.S. military’s Cyber Command. Image: […]
The COVID-19 pandemic poses many challenges to libraries, including the accessibility of physical materials in support of teaching and learning. In a more typical quarter, faculty would place books on reserve, so that students could come to the library and check them out for a designated window of study. With most students off campus for […]
There’s an old adage in information security: “Every company gets penetration tested, whether or not they pay someone for the pleasure.” Many organizations that do hire professionals to test their network security posture unfortunately tend to focus on fixing vulnerabilities hackers could use to break in. But judging from the proliferation of help-wanted ads for […]
Libraries have taken different initiatives to contribute to a global mission and make a positive impact on the environment through different green practices and reinforcing awareness on sustainability. Green libraries have been protecting the environment and developing alternative solutions to offer customers better eco-friendly services through different sustainable and environmental practices, such as minimizing the […]
September featured two stories on a phony tech investor named John Bernard, a pseudonym used by a convicted thief named John Clifton Davies who’s fleeced dozens of technology companies out of an estimated $30 million with the promise of lucrative investments. Those stories prompted a flood of tips from Davies’ victims that paints a much […]
Over the past 10 days, someone has been launching a series of coordinated attacks designed to disrupt Trickbot, an enormous collection of more than two million malware-infected Windows PCs that are constantly being harvested for financial data and are often used as the entry point for deploying ransomware within compromised organizations. A text snippet from […]
In today’s post, Sam Schireson interviews a By the People volunteer who has gone above and beyond! By the People is a crowdsourced transcription program launched in 2018 at the Library of Congress. Volunteer-created transcriptions are used to make digitized collections searchable and discoverable on loc.gov. In this interview we hear from Henry in Virginia who has been […]
