Tag Archive for: pick

Trump’s DHS pick urges more coordination on cyberthreats

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President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for Homeland Security chief wants to forge closer ties with the private sector in the cyber arena.

Gen. John F. Kelly (Ret.), a more than four-decade veteran of the Marine Corps, appeared this week before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee for his confirmation hearing, the second of Trump’s appointees to begin that process.

In his testimony on cybersecurity, Kelly noted the challenges of keeping pace with an ever-evolving spate of threats from a variety of actors, and stressed the importance of the government coordinating its defense efforts and intelligence with the private-sector firms that could be targeted by attackers.

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Network World Security

Trump’s national security pick is a cybersecurity hawk

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Michael Flynn, the man President-elect Donald Trump plans to name as U.S. national security advisor, believes the government is falling behind on cybersecurity.

Trump named Flynn to his cabinet on Friday after the former military intelligence leader acted as the top military advisor to Trump’s presidential campaign. Flynn previously was director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and has served in U.S. intelligence operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Flynn holds strong views on cybersecurity. He’s called U.S. cyber capabilities “underwhelming.”

“We have competitors out there that are rapidly catching up with us,” he said in a speech posted online last year. In 2014, after retiring as a general, he started a consulting firm called Flynn Intel Group that specializes in preventing cyber threats for clients.

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Network World Security

Hackers can pick off, inject wireless keyboard keystrokes from 8 vendors, maybe more

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A vulnerability across at least eight brands of wireless keyboards lets hackers read keystrokes from 250 feet away, according to wireless security vendor Bastille.

The problem is that the keyboards transmit to their associated PCs without encryption, and it’s just a matter of reverse engineering the signals to figure out how to read what keys are being hit, say Bastille researchers. An attacker could inject keystrokes while the keyboard is idle and the machine is logged in, they say, using a dongle that can be fashioned for less than $ 100.

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Network World Tim Greene

17% of adult Internet users couldn’t pick Bill Gates out of a lineup

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Oh, sure, he’s not in the news quite as often as when he was running Microsoft day to day, but Bill Gates – richest man in the world – remains one of the most famous people on the planet.

Yet nearly 1 in 5 adult Internet users were unable to identify Gates as the man pictured above, despite the multiple-choice format, according to a “Web IQ” quiz of 1,006 people conducted by PewResearch.

I would have thought the question not worth asking. I was wrong.

By the way, if you’d like to take the quiz yourself, you can find it here.

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Network World Paul McNamara