TaoSecurity Blog

Anyone involved in cybersecurity reporting needs a strong sense of numeracy, or mathematical literacy. I see two sorts of examples of innumeracy repeatedly in the media. The first involves the time value of money. Recently CNN claimed Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was the "richest person in history" and Recode said Bezos was "now worth more than Bill Gates ever was." Thankfully both Richard Steinnon and Noah Kirsch recognized the foolishness of these reports, correctly noting that Bezos would only rank number 17 on a list where wealth was adjusted for inflation . This failure to recognize the time value of money is pervasive. Just today I heard the host of a podcast claim that the 1998 Jackie Chan movie Rush Hour was "the top grossing martial arts film of all time." According to Box Office Mojo , Rush Hour earned $244,386,864 worldwide. Adjusting for inflation , in 2017 dollars that's $367,509,865.67 -- impressive! For comparison, I researched the ...

I read Brian Krebs story  Tech Firm Ubiquiti Suffers $46M Cyberheist just now. He writes: Ubiquiti, a San Jose based maker of networking technology for service providers and enterprises, disclosed the attack in a quarterly financial report filed this week  [6 August; RMB]  with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The company said it discovered the fraud on June 5, 2015, and that the incident involved employee impersonation and fraudulent requests from an outside entity targeting the company’s finance department. “This fraud resulted in transfers of funds aggregating $46.7 million held by a Company subsidiary incorporated in Hong Kong to other overseas accounts held by third parties,” Ubiquiti wrote. “As soon as the Company became aware of this fraudulent activity it initiated contact with its Hong Kong subsidiary’s bank and promptly initiated legal proceedings in various foreign jurisdictions. As a result of these efforts, the Company has recovered $...