Security Stories From 2019

These are the stories we talked about in 2019

Cops can’t use biometrics for unlocking our devices

This came out from Gizmodo in early 2019. This was a ruling in California that stated that the coppers can’t compel you to use finger prints or facial recognition (yay new iPhone “security”) to unlock your phone.

DerbyCon ends after nine years

The largest conference in the south east, DerbyCon, decided to call it after nine years. The organizers cited a growing amount of drama and bullshit behind the scenes as the reason for calling it quits. What started as something around friends and community has devolved into a tiring and stressful exercise in planning the event. I get it and I don’t blame the organizers for calling it quits. What did come out of the final year was an announcement on communities. Which is similar to a CitySec type of meetup.

Windows 7 enters its final year of free support

Upgrade soon. 2019 was the last full year of Windows 7 support. It stops January 14, 2020. That’s about a week away.

ZombieLoad

Another year; another set of named vulnerabilities. ZombieLoad is, “not something that will haunt us and it’s also not a meltdown…rather something that you suddenly discover maybe in a cellar, maybe some loads rising from the graves.” Hence the name.

Capital One Breach

A former Amazon employee stole more than 100 million consumer applications for credit from Capital One. The breach occurred because of a misconfiguration in the Web Application Firewall being used on AWS.

Project Nightingale

It was discovered that Google Cloud had a project with Ascension to process tens of millions of patient records. This making us one step closer to the dystopian future of companies replacing countries as far as our allegiances.

Disney+ Accounts Hacked

This was on the user not Disney+. It appears people were able to get into other people’s Disney+ accounts by using the same credentials that were compromised on another site. Like say…Netflix.