2022.20.12.News You Should Know

Most of the Information Security community has fled Twitter in favor of a Mastodon instance Infosec.Exchange

Mastodon is a federated replacement for Twitter and has balloned from 100k user to over 2.5m users since Musk’s takeover of the Twitter platform. As most vendors, businesses, consultants, and infosec personalities made the move to Mastodon, so has the public zeitgeist of up-to-date security news and disclosures. To keep tabs, you can check out the public feeds CTI and ThreatIntel (These tags do not require an account to view.)

Video Game maker’s Epic have been hit by the FTC with a $500m fine for violating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and for utilizing “dark patterns” in their user interfaces. Dark patterns intentionally trick users into spending money or prevent the cancelling of services to persist revenue streams for the company. This marks the first significant enforcement of COPPA by the FTC.

Cloudflare and GoDaddy have acknowledged INC-5492776 in which some sites will on occassion return adult and pornagraphic material, instead of the expected site. This cause is currently unknown, the problem is not reproducible, and any company making use of Cloudflare and GoDaddy may be effected.

Paypal money request scams are on the rise as attackers utilize the note section of payment requests to scare victims in to “returning” money that was deposited to their accounts in error. In reality, no money has been deposited to the victims account and the phone number for PayPal support included in the note contacts the scammers call centers.

A woman employed by a legal firm has been ejected from Radio City Music Hall after being identified by facial recognition scanners. The woman, who is employed by a firm that is currently suing MSG Entertainement, was ejected after guards told her the facial recognition software had identified her in the lobby as an employee of the litigating firm.

Choose Boring Tech becomes a website

The wildly popular talk by Dan McKinley, Choose Boring Technology is now available as a website. Known for it’s tag line, “How to be old, for young people” the talk encourages developers to consider the total cost of ownership when pivoting between frameworks and technologies.

This is what we’re implicitly saying when we want to add a piece of semi-redundant technology.

We’re saying that the new tech is going to make our work so much easier in the near term that this benefit outweighs the cost of dealing with that technology indefinitely into the future.