Tag Archive for: center

CDOT, CDPS and CSP celebrate opening of new, updated Eisenhower Johnson Memorial Tunnels Traffic Operations Center

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Statewide – Coloradans have experienced its first taste of snow in October, officially marking the start of the winter driving season. This year, the Colorado Department of Transportation is adding more to its arsenal to help keep traffic moving and travelers safe, especially along the Interstate 70 Mountain Corridor, by opening a new, updated Operations Center at the Eisenhower Johnson Memorial Tunnels and maintenance garage bays.

“We are now approaching an almost $2 million hit to the economy for every hour the I-70 Mountain Corridor is closed,” said Shoshana Lew, CDOT’s Executive Director. “Not only do closures delay important deliveries and transportation of goods, it also has a real impact on the livelihood of our travelers, which cannot be summed up by a figure. It is important to CDOT to do everything we can to alleviate those impacts and ensure a quick clearance of incidents along the interstate, which is why we invested in updating our technology at the Operations Center and constructing a new maintenance facility at the Eisenhower Johnson Memorial Tunnels.”

While an Operations Center inside the Eisenhower Johnson Memorial Tunnels has already existed for decades, the technology within the Center needed to be updated to improve response times and safety. Upgrades include replacing decades-old copper wires, installing fiber optic cables, putting up new cameras and screens, all of which will increase the speed and quality of the Center’s monitors inside the new building. Quality is imperative as it helps CDOT’s Operators see if there is something in the road that needs to be cleared or get more details on an incident.

“The new cameras and monitors will allow us to zoom all the way into the roadway, up to two miles away from the tunnels, to detect even small debris such as nails,” said Lew. “This allows our crews to remove it from the roadway before it becomes a hazard to motorists. We are also able to zoom in on incidents to better document and report what is going on. We will be able to see how many passengers are in a vehicle, license plate numbers and more. This helps aid our first responders, including CDOT maintainers, as they respond to an incident…

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Computer Whiz Stuck at Center of Documents Case

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One day in June of last year, at a time when federal investigators were demanding security footage from former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, Yuscil Taveras shared an explosive secret.

Taveras, who ran Mar-a-Lago’s technology department from a cramped workspace in the basement of the sprawling Florida property, confided in an office mate that another colleague had just asked him, at Trump’s request, to delete the footage that investigators were seeking.

Taveras later repeated that story to at least two more colleagues, who in turn shared it with others, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Before long, the story had ricocheted around the grounds of Trump’s gold-adorned private club and up the chain of command at Trump Tower in Manhattan, prompting Taveras’ superiors in New York to warn against deleting the tapes.

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But by then, Taveras had already balked at what prosecutors said was Trump’s request. Looking to steer clear of the investigation into whether the former president was hoarding classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, he told one colleague that he was unwilling to cross a line and potentially go to prison, according to another person with knowledge of the conversation.

Still, when he was summoned before a grand jury this spring, Taveras did not fully recount the incident. Only after prosecutors subsequently threatened to charge him for failing to tell all that he knew did Taveras shift course to become a potentially important witness in the case.

Facing indictment this summer, Taveras replaced his lawyer, who was being paid by Trump’s political action committee and also represented one of the former president’s co-defendants. Taveras then returned to the grand jury and offered a more detailed version of events, recounting how he had been asked to delete the surveillance footage. In exchange, prosecutors agreed not to charge him.

This account of Taveras’ turnabout, drawn from court records and interviews with nearly a dozen people who know him and are involved in the matter, reveals new details of the critical if at first reluctant role he played in helping investigators develop…

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The Data Center Ransomware Attack That Costs You Everything | Data Center Knowledge

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I work closely with our editorial team here at DCK, and we often throw ideas around as to what to cover. It’s not often that a topic of conversation breaks my heart.

When discussing security in the data center, we often discuss physical security, gates, fences, and biometrics. We also discuss cybersecurity, infrastructure segmentation, proper network security, and isolation. But I always wonder how many folks here take these little golden nuggets of wisdom and apply them.

Related: Data Centers Can Fend Off DoS Attacks by Taking a Layered Approach

In a recent post on DCK, I dove into physical security because, for the very first time, our AFCOM State of the Data Center 2023 report saw multiple types of physical human threats emerge into the top five of the biggest threats against critical infrastructure. Today, we focus on what topped that list — ransomware.

And I’ll fill you in on a little secret. It’s not the first year that ransomware was at the top of the charts. For the seventh year in a row, and surprising no one reading this, ransomware hit the top of the list. Remember, every connected device is a target as it relates to data. When asked to indicate the top five security and infrastructure threats to their companies, respondents were by far more likely to mention ransomware (52%), followed by loss of PII (39%) and outside human threats (39%).

Related: The Ransomware Crisis Deepens, While Data Recovery Stalls

All of these security threats can create downtime. And that quickly becomes costly. According to the Uptime Institute’s 2022 Outage Analysis, the consequences and cost of downtime are worsening, with 60% of failures now resulting in at least $100,000 in total losses. They also found that when significant outages happen, over 85% of the incidents stem from staff failing to follow procedures or flaws in the processes themselves.

Data Center Outage Math

But what happens when it’s not just downtime? What happens if a ransomware attack costs you everything?

After a devastating ransomware attack, that’s precisely what happened to a Danish cloud provider.

The ransomware encryption attack that cost CloudNordic everything

On the night of Friday,…

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Security News This Week: The Cloud Company at the Center of a Global Hacking Spree

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Between a cascade of indictments against former US president Donald Trump, a tumultuous 2024 election season (in which Trump is a main character), and the rapid rise of generative artificial intelligence, 2024 is shaping up to be a complete nightmare.

At the center of it will be a rise in personalized disinformation. Not only will there be more BS to sift through thanks to tools like ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, but the disinformation will likely be more effective, and even tailored to target specific groups with frightening consequences. Of course, some of this could be fixed with new regulations. But the US Congress still hasn’t figured out how to tackle privacy, and regulating AI will only be more difficult.

In addition to disinformation, people keep figuring out new ways to break through the guardrails that generative AI tools have in place to stop malicious activities. The latest is something called an “adversarial attack,” which researchers at Carnegie Mellon University found can be carried out simply by attaching a string of nonsense-looking instructions to the end of certain prompts entered into tools like ChatGPT. While it’s possible to block specific attack strings, nobody yet knows how to fix this flaw entirely.

AI might be the new frontier for security researchers. But regular ol’ platforms are still a wealth of terrible vulnerabilities. The latest is the Points platform, which provides the underlying tech for dozens of major travel rewards programs. Researchers recently discovered flaws in the Points API that exposed people’s private information. And a bug in a Points administrator website could have allowed an attacker to give themselves unlimited airline miles and hotel points. But don’t get any big ideas, hackers—all the flaws have since been fixed.

The Points bugs aren’t the only ones patched recently. If you use Apple iOS, Google Android, or Microsoft products, check our list of the recent security updates you’ll want to install right now.

But that’s not all. Each week, we round up the security and privacy stories we didn’t cover in depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

A single cloud firm has…

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