OBJECTIVES: I will investigate how "Nefarious Actors" gain access to Big Data during today's class

HACK/ATTACK PROJECT: Requirements for the project are HERE

WORDS FOR TODAY:

• Big Data - a broad term for datasets so large or complex that traditional data processing applications are inadequate.
• Moore's Law - a predication made by Gordon Moore in 1965 that computing power will double every 1.5-2 years, it has remained more or less true ever since.
• Field - A holder of unique data of a unique data type (For example an AGE field contains integer data that stores a person's age. A field named FNAME would store character data that stores a person's first name
• Record - A "Row" of data related to a specific topic. For example FNAME, LNAME, ADDRESS, CITY, STATE, ZIP would contain data relating to a specific person.
• Table - A "Table" of data contains a bunch of rows of data. For example a spreadsheet is a table of data.
• Data Types:int | long | boolean | date | text

WORK O' THE DAY:

Phishing - Here's what the district sent to us to help us avoid being phished!

We need to be a wee bit careful because here's how the AP defines phishing:

Phishing is a technique that attempts to trick a user into providing personal information. That personal information can then be used to access sensitive online resources, such as bank accounts and emails.

Here are 3 areas of attack the AP wants you to know:

• DOS/DDOS - Denial Of Service (or Distributed Denial of Service) attack occurs when a nefarious actor sends massive/repeated "Ping" or other commands to targeted servers in an attempt to crash that server
• Phishing - A process where a nefarious actor(s) tries to gain access to a corporate/organization/personal computer or network by sending disguised email(s) loaded with nasty code to individuals in that organization
• Keyboard Capturing - *yikes*

 

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Here's a note that a former student received from an online website DURING this unit a few years ago:

We are writing to let you know that we recently discovered that some user data was compromised as a result of unauthorized access to our systems by a malicious third party. We are very sorry for any concern or inconvenience this may cause. We are working rapidly to investigate the situation further and take the appropriate steps to prevent such incidents in the future.
What Happened
On Friday we discovered that some user data was compromised by a third party who gained unauthorized access to our systems. We're still investigating the precise causes and in addition to the work being conducted by our internal security teams, we have retained a leading digital forensics and security firm to assist us. We have also notified law enforcement officials.
While the investigation is still ongoing, we have already taken steps to contain the incident, and our efforts to protect our users and prevent this type of incident from happening in the future are our top priority as a company.
What information was involved
The following information of yours may have been compromised:

• Account and user information, e.g. name, email, IP, user ID, encrypted password, user account settings, personalization data
• Public actions and content including drafts, e.g. questions, answers, comments, blog posts, upvotes
• Data imported from linked networks when authorized by you, e.g. contacts, demographic information, interests, access tokens (now invalidated)

Questions and answers that were written anonymously are not affected by this breach as we do not store the identities of people who post anonymous content.
What we are doing
While our investigation continues, we're taking additional steps to improve our security:

• We’re in the process of notifying users whose data has been compromised.
• Out of an abundance of caution, we are logging out all Quora users who may have been affected, and, if they use a password as their authentication method, we are invalidating their passwords.
• We believe we’ve identified the root cause and taken steps to address the issue, although our investigation is ongoing and we’ll continue to make security improvements.

We will continue to work both internally and with our outside experts to gain a full understanding of what happened and take any further action as needed.
What you can do
We’ve included more detailed information about more specific questions you may have in our help center, which you can find here.
While the passwords were encrypted (hashed with a salt that varies for each user), it is generally a best practice not to reuse the same password across multiple services, and we recommend that people change their passwords if they are doing so.
Conclusion
It is our responsibility to make sure things like this don’t happen, and we failed to meet that responsibility. We recognize that in order to maintain user trust, we need to work very hard to make sure this does not happen again. There’s little hope of sharing and growing the world’s knowledge if those doing so cannot feel safe and secure, and cannot trust that their information will remain private. We are continuing to work very hard to remedy the situation, and we hope over time to prove that we are worthy of your trust.