Up Times • Jan. 2024

Business Continuity Mixtape – Bryley-curated stories from around the internet:

When was the last time you thought about what happens when you press Submit? — Due to the cold temps, social and geological stability and remoteness, Nordic countries turn out to be ideal locations for data centers. For BBC’s Boring Talks podcast, Matt Parker visited an Icelandic data center and recorded the results.

Who are you submitting [your data] to? Mr Parker asks, Where are you submitting it? Are you submitting it to the air? the Cloud? What is the Cloud? Where is the Cloud? And he ventured out in search of answers … [30 min. listen] bbc.co.uk

Insurers deny claim: breach was an act of war

NJ Court: the insurers must cover the loss

A damaging ransomware attack, believed to have been the work of Russian government operatives, occurred in 2017, but pharmaceutical company Merck has just now reached a settlement with its insurers. The New Jersey Supreme Court wrote, insurers did nothing to change the language of the exemption to reasonably put this insured on notice that it intended to exclude cyber attacks.

As the Record reports, the years-long court battle … has attracted attention from the cybersecurity and insurance industries because of its implications for defining what constitutes “acts of war” in the cyber context. And how will this opinion affect cyber-insurance costs? [5 min. read] therecord.com

Inspired by the ancient game Go … [Hara] Masahiro came up with a new code in 1994, using black and white dots to encode over 200 times more information than a standard bar code —
QR codes are now all over the place, but it took the invention of smart phones and their 2017 QR-scanning-software integration – plus no-contact pandemic restrictions for the tech to gain this kind of ground in the US.

Here’s a look at why they beat the other methods people have invented – including the QR code’s ability to be read from different angles (the UPC code, by contrast, needs the reader’s laser to cross the entire width of the symbol): [7 min. read] popularmechanics.com

The Justice Dept. arrested a Nigerian national involved in Business Email Compromise — As Roy Pacitto presented in February, Business Email Compromise (BEC) is by far the most costly cybercrime, representing more than a third of all cybercrime losses tracked by the FBI. A BEC attack often plays out like this: criminals pose as an executive and email an employee with instructions to transfer money to an account the criminals control. And most BEC attacks originate with Nigerian criminal gangs.

[Nigerian national residing in Indianapolis, Olugbenga] Lawal worked directly with the Nigeria-based leader of an international criminal organization that defrauded individuals and businesses across the United States out of millions of dollars through sophisticated internet-based fraud schemes, including romance fraud and business email compromise schemes, and laundered the proceeds of those fraud schemes, per the US Attorney’s Office, District of Delaware … [4 min. read] justice.gov

^{Note: The Mixtape section is Bryley’s curated list of external stories. Bryley does not take credit for the content of these stories, nor does it endorse or imply an affiliation with the authors or publications in which they appear.}