An anonymous reader quotes Bloomberg’s report on the contractor Equifax first hired to investigate their breach:
Equifax and Mandiant got into a dispute just as the hackers were gaining a foothold in the company’s network… Mandiant warned Equifax that its unpatched systems and misconfigured security policies could indicate major problems, a person familiar with the perspectives of both sides said. For its part, Equifax believed Mandiant had sent an undertrained team without the expertise it expected from a marquee security company…
That rift, which appears to have squelched a broader look at weaknesses in the company’s security posture, looks to have given the intruders room to operate freely within the company’s network for months. According to an internal analysis of the attack, the hackers had time to customize their tools to more efficiently exploit Equifax’s software, and to query and analyze dozens of databases to decide which held the most valuable data. The trove they collected was so large it had to be broken up into smaller pieces to try to avoid tripping alarms as data slipped from the company’s grasp through the summer… By the time they were done, the attackers had accessed dozens of sensitive databases and created more than 30 separate entry points into Equifax’s computer systems. “They may not have immediately grasped the value of their discovery, but, as the attack escalated over the following months, that first group — known as an entry crew — handed off to a more sophisticated team of hackers,” reports Bloomberg, suggesting that the attack may have been sponsored by a nation-state.

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Source: Slashdot – Squabble With Contractor Delayed Equifax’s Response To Data Breach

Bill Gates uses an Android phone now. “It may not be the most surprising revelation, given profits are sinking faster than a boat without a hull and big-name partners are jumping ship left and right, but the founder of Microsoft has presumably left Windows Mobile,” reports Neonwin. Long-time Slashdot reader Billly Gates (no relation) writes:
I would assume this is the final nail in the coffin for Windows Phone and the rumored Surface Phone which may never see the light of day. Over the past few months we have seen a change in Microsoft with them being friendly to Linux with stories of porting .NET core over to Linux, helping write a custom Linux kernel, as well as introducing the not-so-popular-on-slashdot WSL Ubuntu for WIndows 10.
Noting the Android emulators in Visual Studio, he’s wondering if the company’s ambitions go beyond developers, and if they’re planning a Microsoft version of Android, “as the tools are in place with Ubuntu, Node.js, Python, Microsoft Code editor, and the Visual Studio 2017 Community Edition.”

His original submission points out that 10 years ago these stories would have been unimaginable, but he also asks a second question: has Microsoft really changed? “Could we be seeing a new Microsoft now that the world is moving to mobile and they have no operating system in it?”

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Source: Slashdot – Bill Gates Has An Android Phone. Has Microsoft Changed?

An anonymous reader writes: InfoWorld announced the winners of this year’s “Best of Open Source Software Awards” — honoring 68 different projects, spread across five categories. Besides the 15 best software development tools, they also recognized the best cloud computing software, machine learning tools, and networking and security software (as well as the best databases and analytics tools).

“Open source software isn’t what it used to be,” writes Doug Dineley, the site’s executive editor. “The term used to conjure images of the lone developer, working into the night and through weekends, banging out line after line of code to scratch a personal itch or realize a personal vision… But as you wend your way through our Bossie winners, you’re bound to be struck by the number of projects with heavyweight engineering resources behind them… Elsewhere in the open source landscape, valuable engineering resources come together in a different way — through the shared interest of commercial software vendors.”
More than 10% of the awards went to the Apache Software Foundation — 7 of the 68 — though I was surprised to see that five of the best software development tools are languages — specifically Kotlin, Go, Rust, Clojure, and Typescript. Two more of the best open source software development tools were Microsoft products — .Net Core and Visual Studio Code. And in the same category was OpenRemote a home automation platform, as well as Ethereum, which “smells and tastes like an open source project that is solving problems and serving developers.”

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Source: Slashdot – Best Open Source Software Identified By InfoWorld Listicles

“If you don’t place a Capable Engineering crew to oversee a project that involves lives, you’re asking for trouble,” writes Slashdot reader Neuronwelder. Consumer Reports writes:
Congress is moving ahead with plans to let self-driving cars be tested on U.S. roads without having to comply with the same safety rules as regular vehicles… The House passed its version of the legislation earlier this month with little opposition. The Senate is expected to vote on its bill in the coming weeks… “Federal law shouldn’t leave consumers as guinea pigs,” said William Wallace, policy analyst for Consumers Union. “We were hopeful that this bill would include much stronger measures to protect consumers against known emerging safety risks. Unfortunately, in the bill’s current form, it doesn’t.”
The legislation, which would take effect in 18 months, would allow the deployment of up to 50,000 self-driving vehicles per company in the first year of its application, rising to 100,000 vehicles annually by the third year, exempt from essential federal safety standards… Automakers might be able to go beyond the limits by getting exemptions for more than one model. The bill also creates a means to go beyond 100,000 cars for each company, by allowing automakers to petition the NHTSA after five years for more vehicles.
“The bill pre-empts any state safety standards,” argues the group Consumer Watchdog, “but there are none yet in place at the national level.”

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Source: Slashdot – US Consumer Groups Warn ‘Robot Car Bill’ Threatens Safety

Vortex.com is one of the oldest domains on the internet — one of the first 40 ever registered, writes Slashdot reader Lauren Weinstein. So why does Google sometimes block the email he sends?
Here’s why. First, my message had the audacity to mention “Google Account” or “Google Accounts” in the subject and/or body of the message. And secondly, one of my mailing lists is “google-issues” — so some (digest format) recipients received the email from “google-issues-request@vortex.com”… Apparently what we’re dealing with here is a simplistic (and frankly, rather haphazard in this respect at least) string-matching algorithm that could have come right out of the early 1970s…! [A]t least in this case, it appears that Google is basically using the venerable old UNIX/Linux “grep” command or some equivalent, and in a rather slipshod way, too.
In addition, the article concludes, “I’ve never found a way to get Google to ‘whitelist’ well-behaved senders against these kinds of errors, so some users see these false phishing warnings repeatedly.

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Source: Slashdot – Why Google’s Gmail Phishing Warnings Give False Positives