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Infosec Decoded Season 4 #81: Face Matching

With Doug Spindler and @sambowne@infosec.exchange

Recorded Fri, Oct 11, 2024

Sam Bowne

Lamborghini Carjackers Lured by $243M Cyberheist
The parents of a 19-year-old Connecticut honors student accused of taking part in a $243 million cryptocurrency heist were carjacked as part of a botched plan to hold the parents for ransom. Their son executed a sophisticated phone-based social engineering attack in which they stole $243 million worth of cryptocurrency from a victim in Washington, D.C.

Bitcoin creator suspect says he is not Bitcoin creator suspect

Salt Typhoon Hack Shows There's No Security Backdoor That's Only For The "Good Guys"
At EFF we’ve long noted that you cannot build a backdoor that only lets in good guys and not bad guys. Salt Typhoon's hack took advantage of systems built by ISPs to give law enforcement and intelligence agencies access to the ISPs’ user data. This gave China unprecedented access to data related to U.S. government requests to these major telecommunications companies.

Cards Against Humanity campaigns to encourage voting, expose personal data abuse
The "Cards Against Humanity Pays You to Give a Shit" campaign uses US citizens' personal data obtained from a broker to identify whether individuals voted in the 2020 US presidential election and how they lean politically. Those who didn't vote are asked to put info into the website, promise to vote in the upcoming election, make a voting plan, "and publicly post 'Donald Trump is a human toilet'" in exchange for up to $100.

GSA plows ahead with face matching tech despite its own reliability concerns
The US government's General Services Administration's (GSA) facial matching login service is now generally available to the public and other federal agencies, despite its own recent report admitting the tech is far from perfect. The best-performing product still failed 10 percent of the time, and the worst had a false negative rate of 50 percent, meaning its ability to properly match a selfie to a government ID was no better than chance. Higher rejection rates for people with darker skin tones were also noted.

Study Reveals a Striking Health Disparity Between US And UK Adults
British adults in their 30s and 40s are faring better than their similarly-aged counterparts in the US, particularly in terms of cardiovascular health. Differences in levels of exercise, diets and poverty, and limited access to free healthcare may be driving worse physical health in the US.

Justice Department calls for sanctions against Google in landmark antitrust case
The Department of Justice is proposing a series of sanctions against Google to ensure that it can no longer monopolize the search engine market. This process will take years, but may result in some sort of breakup of Alphabet.