In a technology climate riddled with ransomware and other threats, there’s no room for complacency.

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Cybersecurity remains one of the most challenging issues for small business owners. And the problem leads small business owners to seek out managed service providers to present them with solutions.

But a new report from Continuum says the state of cybersecurity among small businesses in 2019 still needs to improve. The data suggests great opportunities for service providers who offer cyber security as part of their package.

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- Forty-three percent of cyberattacks are aimed at small businesses, but only 14% are prepared to defend themselves, according to Accenture.
- These incidents now cost small businesses $200,000 on average, reveals insurance carrier Hiscox, with 60% of them going out of business within six months of being victimized.
- More than half of all small businesses suffered a breach within the last year.
- Today it’s critical for small businesses to adopt strategies for fighting cyberthreats.

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The deadline for filing taxes in the United States is eight weeks away, but new research has shown that small businesses are already being hit by tax season–related cyber-attacks.

Research conducted by Proofpoint indicates that attackers are aggressively jumping into tax season, with the deployment of two main attack strategies.

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Title: Heart Attack (Myocardial Infarction)
Category: Diseases and Conditions
Created: 12/31/1997 12:00:00 AM
Last Editorial Review: 5/12/2022 12:00:00 AM

That's no easy feat even for an old navy man such as John McCain. He says bloggers are old enough to fight his damn wars but not enough to speak our mind.

Think Progress notes McCain's attack on the blogosphere:

When I was a young man, I was quite infatuated with self-expression, and rightly so because, if memory conveniently serves, I was so much more eloquent, well-informed, and wiser than anyone else I knew. It seemed I understood the world and the purpose of life so much more profoundly than most people. I believed that to be especially true with many of my elders, people whose only accomplishment, as far as I could tell, was that they had been born before me, and, consequently, had suffered some number of years deprived of my insights…It’s a pity that there wasn’t a blogosphere then. I would have felt very much at home in the medium.

Damn the torpedoes and full steam ahead. I think we've just been broadsided matey.

Very wittily said John, but all you've accomplished is to demonstrate your ignorance of the Blogosphere. If you only knew how old I really am (but don't you dare ask).

So I guess we've all been told. So much for freedom of speech. Maybe we should put an age limit on it. Now there's an idea for you John. There outta be a law.

In 2000, John McCain called Rev. Jerry Falwell an “agent of intolerance.” Yesterday, in a naked attempt to broaden his political base, McCain delivered the commencement speech at Falwell’s Liberty University. McCain’s hypocrisy was noted on many blogs. He returned the favor in his speech at Liberty by attacking the blogosphere.

A commentor also noted:

McCain’s lurch to the right begs the following question: Could it be possible that Republicans are also saddled with shitty consultants?

Psst... here's a dirtly little secret. McCain's a mole. So now you know.

Related links: daily fisk, news, us-news, in the news, news and politics, politics, political, john+mccain, blogging, blogosphere, humor, fisk

Mike Miller sent a clipping from the Tulsa Tribune. It includes a photo he shot of KTUL photog Bob Gregory under attack by Carol Jean Baker, one of the parking meter-emptying 'Kissing Burglars'. Mike tells the story.

The good folks from the Barbican Centre and the Japan Foundation have teamed up to bring the people of London a season of Japanese monster m...

JupiterOne, the leading cyber asset visibility and management company, today announced the release of its second annual State of Cyber Assets Report (SCAR). The report analyzed more than 291amp;nbsp;million assets, findings, and policies to establish the current state of enterprise cloud assets, including cloud and physical environments of devices, networks, apps, data,amp;nbsp;and users.amp;nbsp;

[Nile Post] Police have detained two men as part of their ongoing probe, raising concerns about the dangers of domestic disputes spiraling into deadly outcomes.

[Dabanga] Amsterdam -- Since the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and Rapid Support Forces (RSF) began clashing on April 15, 2023, independent media--particularly those operating abroad--have become critical sources of information. However, the warring parties have escalated efforts to silence these channels, seeking to enforce a total media blackout.

February 2, 2006 – A computer worm that is believed to have infected about 300,000 computers is set to attack tomorrow. The worm will begin destroying a variety of files on the computers that it resides on, including Adobe PDF files, Microsoft Word documents, and other files created in Microsoft Office.

The violent suppression of voices advocating for justice and the rights of displaced communities is a grave threat to democracy and human rights.

Amulya, 19, was charged with sedition after shouting pro-Pakistan slogan at anti-CAA rally

1. Fact check: Amsterdam video doesn't show attack on Israelis  DW (English)
2. Opinion | A Worldwide ‘Jew Hunt’  The New York Times
3. Dutch lawmaker Wilders wants to deport those convicted of violence against Israeli soccer fans  ABC News
4. VIDEO: Tram set ablaze after violence erupted again in Amsterdam  CNN

1. 'Taking revenge on society': Deadly Zhuhai car attack sparks questions in China  BBC.com
2. Man Upset About Divorce Allegedly Rams Car into Crowd, Killing 35: Reports  PEOPLE
3. Video: 35 killed in mass hit-and-run in Zhuhai, China  CNN
4. Driver rams his car into crowd in China, killing 35. Police say he was upset about his divorce  The Associated Press
5. Zhuhai car attack: China clears memorial as government scrambles to respond  Reuters

Over the past three weeks, I’ve been assessing various aspects of the Canadian Urban Transit Research and Innovation Consortium’s (CUTRIC) positions, research, and publications on transit bus decarbonization. I’ve published ten articles directly about CUTRIC’s material and reports, or closely related and with serious implications for their claims that both ... [continued]

The post Canadian Transit Think Tank CUTRIC Chooses Inaccuracy, Irrelevancy, & Attack appeared first on CleanTechnica.

Home Secretary Amber Rudd tells MPs David Anderson QC will oversee a review of the way recent attacks were handled. in a statement on the terror attacks in Manchester and London.

The States of Jersey Ambulance Service campaign calls for greater respect and support for workers.

Guernsey Post issues customers with cards aimed at protecting their staff from dog attacks.

Police say a number of cars, a wheelie bin and fence were deliberately set alight.

Great North Air Ambulance says a green laser was shone into its helicopter on Monday evening.

The authority says there was a backlog of planning applications following the incident.

Officers say they believe someone accessed the rear of the property through a side alleyway.

By now, you may already be aware of Ashton Kutcher's campaign against the Village Voice, sparked by an article critical of the substance and message of his anti-trafficking adverts. The Voice has form on this one: their earlier article about dodgy stats that get bandied about in the trafficking discussion is a must-read.

The usual disclaimer... I am (as indeed all of Kutcher's critics are) opposed to trafficking in any form, including child sex trafficking. But we must not let emotion exclusively carry the day; it achieves nothing. The Voice hits the nail on the head when they sum up anti-trafficking efforts: "an emotional reaction, based on good intentions, but grounded in bogus information."

The problem of bogus information is this - campaigns such as Kutcher's conflate all sex work with child sex trafficking, and child sex trafficking with all trafficking. Approaches that do so not only encourage criminalisation legislation that harms consenting adults, but also obscures the real victims. How? By using vastly inflated numbers for one kind of trafficking, and pretty much ignoring everything else. Actual children being actually trafficked for actual sex are rarely, if ever, found by the kind of scatterhsot brothel raids and streetwalker crackdowns so many seem to consider "succeses" in the anti-trafficking effort.

Please, please stop kidding yourselves. The raids you hear about are not successes. They are vast wastes of time, money, and manpower. And many groups receiving funding meant to help victims of trafficking seem instead to be lining their own pockets. There is undoubtedly work to be done eliminating trafficking of men and women for any kind of labour. It almost certainly isn't the approach anti-traffickers think will work.

Kutcher’s response against the Village Voice has included tweeting advertisers on Backpage.com, accusing them of supporting slavery. So far, so "concerned". And then this tweet:

Like a lot of people, Ashton Kutcher seems to have some pretty confused ideas about sex work. To be in a position of wanting to help people, yet still falling back on ridicule and stereotype when talking about them, is inexcusable. Someone who says,

"I’ve spent the last 2 years meeting with every expert on the issue of Human Trafficking that I can find, reading countless books, meeting with victims and former traffickers, and studying effective international models to combat trafficking."

Maybe Ashton should have made time for a little bit of victim sensitivity training in there somewhere? (Not that he's known for politically correct tweeting, mind. He seems to channel the spirit of Littlejohn every now and again.)

Kutcher's response has been strongly supported by the Family Research Council who are regarded by many as a hate group. The FRC is one of the main contributors to the Witherspoon Institute’s “research” on pornography that conflates the adult industry with trafficking. That report contained significant input from Patrick Fagan of The Heritage Foundation – you know, those people whose work inspired Reagan’s covert Cold War military actions.

The Witherspoon report encourages celebrities to “use the bully pulpit” and abuses suspiciously similar dodgy statistics as Kutcher’s campaign. And while it doesn't name particular celebrities to be promoted as faces of such bullying, a similar document from Abt Associates does - it specifically names Kutcher's wife, Demi Moore.

I know a little about what it's like to be asked to comment on issues you don't necessarily have expertise in. Sometimes, journalists and television shows approach people like me to provide commentary rather than, say, academics in the relevant fields. It's unfortunate but it's a fact of media life. And I do try, by following academic discussions and talking with friends who are professionals in, say, sex education or the porn industry, to at least not come off as too much of an ignorant tit. I would shudder in horror, though, to ever be described as a "leading player" in the debate around trafficking or related issues. Something that Kutcher and his wife Moore seem to have no problem with. The strategy clearly works, with significant numbers of Kutcher's followers joining in his Twitter tirade, and the man himself being promoted as somehow more of an expert on the issues than, ya know, actual experts.

Not bad for a guy whose credentials, according to his Twitter profile, are: "I make stuff up."

The Voice article pointed out that it's not known how many of the millions, if any, raised by Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher's campaign have actually gone to helping victims directly. With their charity having only been launched 5 months ago, and apparently no financial reports as yet available, it's hard to know when that pointed question will be resolved. I'd like to add another dimension to that question: how many of the millions raised by Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher could be coming from groups such as the Family Research Council?

The well-meaning Twitter fans following Kutcher's lead probably don't realise they're being taken for a ride on the facts front. It can actually be very hard to sort the real from the fake when people keep repeating made-up stuff as true. So I guess my question now is, why are Kutcher’s millions of fans seemingly totally okay with this movement's possible links to the far-right hawkish Christian lobbyists? And when will the likes of Kutcher and Moore realise they're the ones being used, not by evil evil sex traffickers, but by conservative groups with a frightening agenda?

Listen to this week's podcast (Podcast edit: I mistakenly mention Respond.js, which is actually a media query polyfill - I'm actually talking about Responsive images) Google Dart By far the biggest news of the week isn't JavaScript, but rather a language called Dart (formerly Dash?), which certain factions within Google hope will replace ...

Image forgery detection techniques refer to the process of detecting manipulated or altered images, which can be used for various purposes, including malicious intent or misinformation. Image forgery detection is a crucial task in digital image forensics, where researchers have developed various techniques to detect image forgery. These techniques can be broadly categorised into active, passive, machine learning-based and hybrid. Active approaches involve embedding digital watermarks or signatures into the image during the creation process, which can later be used to detect any tampering. On the other hand, passive approaches rely on analysing the statistical properties of the image to detect any inconsistencies or irregularities that may indicate forgery. In this paper for the detection of scaling and cropping attack a deep learning method has been proposed using ResNet. The proposed method (Res-Net-Adam-Adam) is able to achieve highest amount of accuracy of 99.14% (0.9914) while detecting fake and real images.

In today's world, malware has become a part and threat to our computer systems. All electronic devices are very susceptible/vulnerable to various threats like different types of malware. There is one subset of malware called ransomware, which is majorly used to have large financial gains. The attacker asks for a ransom amount to regain access to the system/data. When dynamic technique using machine learning is used, it is very important to select the correct set of features for the detection of a ransomware attack. In this paper, we present two novel algorithms for the detection of ransomware attacks. The first algorithm is used to assign the time stamp to the features (API calls) for the ordering and second is used for the ordering and ranking of the features for the early detection of a ransomware attack.

Smart home devices are vulnerable to various attacks, including distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. Current detection techniques face challenges due to nonlinear thought, unusual system traffic, and the fluctuating data flow caused by human activities and device interactions. Identifying the baseline for 'normal' traffic and suspicious activities like DDoS attacks from encrypted data is also challenging due to the encrypted protective layer. This work introduces a concept called synoptic crow search with recurrent transformer network-based DDoS attack detection, which uses the synoptic weighted crow search algorithm to capture varying traffic patterns and prioritise critical information handling. An adaptive recurrent transformer neural network is introduced to effectively regulate DDoS attacks within encrypted data, counting the historical context of the data flow. The proposed model shows effective performance in terms of low false alarm rate, higher detection rate, and accuracy.

A hybrid network system for mitigating errors due to jamming attacks in cognitive radio networks (CRNs) is named LeNet deep stacked autoencoder (LDSAE) and is developed. In this exploration, the sensing stage and decision-making are considered. The sensing unit is composed of four steps. First, the detected signal is forwarded to filtering progression. Here, BPF is utilised to filter the detected signal. The filtered signal is squared in the second phase. Third, signal samples are combined and jamming attacks occur by including false energy levels. Last, the attack is maliciously affecting the FC decision in the fourth step. On the other hand, FC initiated the decision-making and also recognised jamming attacks that affect the link amidst PU and SN in decision-making stage and it is accomplished by employing LDSAE-based trust model where the proposed module differentiates the malicious and selfish users. The analytic measures of LDSAE gained 79.40%, 79.90%, and 78.40%.

Many online are raising questions about a recent spate of public violence, as officials continue to censor discussion.

Fallen tracks and rubble from the bridge blocking the road below being cleared by authorities

Transport for London said it was contacting around 5,000 customers whose bank account data may have been accessed

Emergency personnel work near the site of a suspected hit-and-run attack, which left several wounded, outside a sports centre, in Zhuhai, China, November 11, 2024, in this still image taken from a social media video. — Reuters

62-year-old man detained outside sports...

A man faces a felony assault charge after an unprovoked attack on a fellow passenger who was sleeping during a cross-country flight this week, according to authorities.

Russia's government since the 1990s has had the type of microwave weapons that are suspected in the covert attacks on U.S. intelligence officials and diplomats that have caused what has come to be known as "Havana syndrome."

The Chinese navy has built three new cruise missile-firing nuclear submarines in what U.S. defense officials say is a significant advance in its attack submarine program.

Attackers assaulted Israeli fans overnight after a soccer match in Amsterdam, leaving five people hospitalized, Dutch authorities said Friday. Dozens were arrested.

Israeli fans were assaulted after a soccer game in Amsterdam by hordes of young people apparently riled up by calls on social media to target Jewish people, Dutch authorities said Friday. Five people were treated at hospitals and dozens were arrested after the attacks, which were condemned as antisemitic by authorities in Amsterdam, Israel and across Europe.

Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof on Saturday canceled a trip to United Nations climate talks in Azerbaijan so that he can stay in the Netherlands to deal with the fallout from assaults on fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv soccer team in Amsterdam that authorities condemned as antisemitic.

Russia attacked the Ukrainian capital Kyiv with a sophisticated combination of missiles and drones for the first time in 73 days on Wednesday, authorities reported, as the Pentagon said most of the North Korean troops sent to help Moscow's war effort are fighting to drive Ukraine's army off Russian soil in the Kursk border region.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu approved an audacious plan to employ booby-trapped pagers in September against members of the Iran-backed Hezbollah terror group in Lebanon, his office said Monday.

Iran openly threatening to strike back against Israel for its attacks on Iranian military facilities over the weekend, as Hezbollah threatens Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but appears willing to accept a ceasefire, the new international ... ...

People with untreated mental illness are 16 times more likely to be killed during encounters with law enforcement. The NCAA men and women tipped off earlier this week, making it a busy time for sports fans. Last year the Men's championship game ...

Netanyahu Says He and Trump 'Eye to Eye' on Iranian Threat; Israel Warns Europe After Anti-Jewish Attack