While it’s a well-known concept, we’ve recently seen the growing sophistication of phishing campaigns, making detecting phishing domains harder, increase of spear phishing in APT attacks, and the increasing use of customized, targeted emails that ensure these campaigns are more successful than ever. Even if almost everyone nowadays is aware of possibly getting phished, by […]
The co-owners of vDOS, a now-defunct service that for four years helped paying customers launch more than two million distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that knocked countless Internet users and websites offline, each have been sentenced to six months of community service by an Israeli court. vDOS as it existed on Sept. 8, 2016. A judge […]
Today we will deep dive into a related topic: DNS intelligence, its main concept, how important it is inside the cybersecurity world, and much more. Definition of DNS intelligence DNS intelligence could be defined as ‘all the intelligence data that comes from the DNS system and the interactions of its users’. If you search for […]
An exhaustive inquiry published today by a consortium of investigative journalists says a three-part series KrebsOnSecurity published in 2015 on a Romanian ATM skimming gang operating in Mexico’s top tourist destinations disrupted their highly profitable business, which raked in an estimated $1.2 billion and enjoyed the protection of top Mexican authorities. [embedded content] The multimedia […]
The criminal group behind the REvil ransomware enterprise has begun auctioning off sensitive data stolen from companies hit by its malicious software. The move marks an escalation in tactics aimed at coercing victims to pay up — and publicly shaming those who don’t. But it may also signal that ransomware purveyors are searching for new […]
Some time ago, we talked about the cybersecurity skills gap, and the need to increase the cybersecurity workforce. We looked at how many cybersecurity positions are in high demand, how many of them are intermediate and advanced/managerial, and how security has now been ingrained into many IT roles that didn’t have these responsibilities in the […]
Illustration: Tom Deja On March 20, American Libraries Live hosted the webinar “Libraries and COVID-19: Managing Strategies and Stress.” Moderator Dan Freeman, director of ALA Publishing eLearning Solutions, led a discussion with librarians and health professionals on the front lines of the crisis about the library response to the pandemic and methods to reduce stress […]
The ALA Gay and Lesbian Task Force marching in the 1992 San Francisco Pride parade. Photo: ALA Archives Fifty years ago, under the auspices of the American Library Association’s Social Responsibilities Round Table, a small group of activists, librarians, and activist-librarians formed what was then known as the Task Force on Gay Liberation—the very first gay […]
Libby the Librarian greets students at University of Pretoria Libraries in South Africa. Photo: Mariki Uitenweerde/University of Pretoria in South Africa The world is changing rapidly: socially, technologically, and ecologically. Even while the “tech backlash” phenomenon is making headlines, libraries must still anticipate and adapt to digital advances and larger societal developments. How will these […]
Illustration: © Atstock Productions/Adobe Stock If your library were offered two chances to save a life, would it take them? The response might seem like an obvious “yes.” But for many public libraries the answer is more nuanced. In October 2018, Emergent BioSolutions, the company that manufactures the opioid overdose reversal drug Narcan (generic name: […]
Photos: © Adobe Stock All of us who teach copyright have been confronted with a person who says sheepishly, “I know I should know about copyright. I’m probably doing everything wrong and could go to jail!” This rueful self-declaration is really a way of saying, “Copyright has never been important to me, and I don’t […]
Cruise: The Guide to Gay Entertainment in the Southeast. Photo: Queer Music Heritage 1970Year the Rainbow Round Table (RRT) of the American Library Association (ALA)—the nation’s first LGBT professional organization—was founded as the Task Force on Gay Liberation. (For more on the RRT and its 50th anniversary, see our story “The Rainbow’s Arc.”) 49Number of years […]
Staffers at Chicago Ridge (Ill.) Public Library, which closed its doors March 16 because of COVID-19, advertise the library’s remote-reference services in a group Zoom call. Photo: Chicago Ridge (Ill.) Public Library Much has changed since Chicago Ridge (Ill.) Public Library (CRPL) closed its doors March 16—but not the assistance the library strives to provide […]
Baldwin Public Library in Birmingham, Michigan, donated 100 3D-printed protective face shields to Beaumont Hospital in nearby Troy. Photo: Baldwin Public Library in Birmingham, Michigan. Personal protective equipment (PPE) for health care workers, including face shields, surgical masks, and N95 respirator masks, is in critically short supply. To mitigate the ongoing crisis, some public and […]
Salt Lake County (Utah) Library’s story sacks contain a blank book, a pencil, and other materials that serve as prompts to inspire storytelling. Photo: Melodie Kraft Ashley On March 12, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Coeur d’Alene (Idaho) Public Library (CDAPL) canceled its in-house programming. By March 13, Young Adult Coordinator Angela Flock and […]
Illustration: Tom Deja Keeping libraries safe is important for both workers and guests. But during the current COVID-19 pandemic, questions about how to do that—particularly when it comes to materials and surfaces—have complicated answers. It’s an unprecedented situation. Conservators, who are experienced in diagnosing and repairing collection damage, say that historical information on sanitizing library […]
When law enforcement agencies tout their latest cybercriminal arrest, the defendant is often cast as a bravado outlaw engaged in sophisticated, lucrative, even exciting activity. But new research suggests that as cybercrime has become dominated by pay-for-service offerings, the vast majority of day-to-day activity needed to support these enterprises is in fact mind-numbingly boring and […]
A Monthly Roundup of News and Thoughts from the Library of Congress Labs Team Our Projects Jamming with the Newspaper Navigator DatasetOn Thursday, May 7th, Innovator in Residence Ben Lee presented the Newspaper Navigator dataset containing over 100 million images extracted from the Chronicling America database using a machine learning algorithm. Over 130 participants tuned in remotely to get […]
The following is a repost from the blog Worlds Revealed: Geography & Maps at the Library of Congress. The author is Rachel Trent, Digital Collections and Automation Coordinator in the Geography and Maps Division. Interested in bulk downloading maps from the Library of Congress’s online collections? Need a corpus of historical map images to build a training dataset […]
The United Kingdom’s anti-cybercrime agency is running online ads aimed at young people who search the Web for services that enable computer crimes, specifically trojan horse programs and DDoS-for-hire services. The ad campaign follows a similar initiative launched in late 2017 that academics say measurably dampened demand for such services by explaining that their use […]
