MHCC CyberSecurity In The News

The MHCC CyberSecurity program is highlighted in an OregonLive.com article along with the Health Informatics and Game Develoment programs. You can see that article here:

http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2013/04/mt_hood_community_college_resp.html

At the same time is another article talking about how the software industry in the Portland Metro area is exploding. You can see that article here:

http://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/index.ssf/2013/04/oregon_software_employment_is.html#incart_river_default

As we are now in the fifth year of "The Great Recession", it is very encouraging to see that the Information Technology industry remains strong. Even in east Multnomah County, we are seeing a definite increase in internships, job opportunities, and local drives for greater STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) development from high schools to the community college to industry.

This is a very good time to be in the technologies.

The Soul(lessness) of Spammers -- Spamming the Boston Marathon

Well, this did not take long. LiveScience.com is reporting that only hours after the Boston Marathon terror bombing, spammers were hard at working creating spam messages with links promising access to more information which were in fact opportunities to download viruses and Trojans onto unsuspecting users.

See the full story here http://news.yahoo.com/boston-bombings-used-malware-scam-bait-211508257.html.

Over the years, we have watched the various “Nigerian Scams” seeking your checking account, and seen them morph from various princesses promising millions to missionaries to American soldiers with hidden caches of riches. Some of these messages can be pretty sophisticated and recent advances using analytics can even customize messages specifically for you.

Last winter, I received a message from the “Oregon University” to click on a link for information about a conference that I supposedly asked for. The clue was “Oregon University” and not “University of Oregon”. I researched the link and saw that it sent me to a server with a Russian domain.

Yet, even these seem pretty obvious and if I sat down 100 people and asked each of them to give me their checking account in exchange for the promise of riches, all would say no. And still, FBI Cyber Security agents tell us that most victims of these various scams are in for about $70,000 before they come forward with a complaint.

And, one would think that intelligent, highly educated people could *never* be conned into such an obvious scheme. Right? Well, perhaps not. Check out this recent discovery from the University of Puerto Rico http://www.hispanicallyspeakingnews.com/latino-daily-news/details/university-of-puerto-rico-president-victim-of-scam-school-loses-150000/23322/.

Bottom line: we must all be vigilant because we can all be fooled.  

 

North Korean Cyber War?

You already know we are in a Cyber War with N Korea, and there is some chatter about an NK cyber attack tomorrow to coincide with the [suspected] missile [launch/test].

Found a few articles which you may find interesting.

This one is from S Korea and describes the NK CyberWar force at 12,000 "highly skilled hackers"

http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2013/04/08/2013040801313.html

This one from New Zealand identifies the force at only 3,000 but is concerned that NK will be coming after our credit cards:

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=10876056

(their analysis is a little sketchy and our CCs have been at risk for quite some time, so it's not entirely "news")

Here is an article from HuffPost from last year right after S Korean banks were hit with a cyber attack that caused some problems. The article is written better that you would expect and has some good, entry-level vocabulary. Note the terms "Red Star" and "asymmetrical". You may be seeing more of these in the coming days.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/24/north-korea-cyber-warfare-warriors-trained-teams_n_2943907.html

Personal note: I'm not entirely convinced about the "asymmetrical" part. We do have some quality cyber warriors here in the States. Still, apparently their IT people are willing to work (if you can call it "willingness") for only $1,190 per year. 

Bottom line: if you do a Goggle search on the terms "North Korea Cyber Warfare" you will likely get over a million-and-a-half hits. Take a look and get familiar with some of the players and terminology. For anyone interested in Cyber Security, look for words like "DoS attack" or "DDoS attack" or "infrastructure attack" along with the rest. 

One place where the New Zealand article could be accurate is in our critical infrastructure security. Simple things like ATM machines, traffic signals, and even electricity providers are very vulnerable. It would not take a nuclear missile to knock us down -- just turn off the lights for 3 days ---

Be | Informed

Be | Safe

Why I Still Like PowerPoint

Recently, I had the opportunity to fly to a conference in Southern California. Like most conferences, there were several break-out sessions and in one, the presenter was preparing the projector and had PowerPoint fired up. Out of habit I looked to the lower right of the screen and saw “Slide 1 of 187”. Groan, I thought, 187 slides for a 2-hour presentation. This will be ghastly. And it was.

Now, I do recall doing lectures with an overhead projector and swapping out “transparencies” or (gasp) writing long hand with a permanent marker on long plastic scrolls; and in comparison, the PowerPoint was a welcome relief. The PowerPoint presentation allowed for nicer presentations with color and font changes, images, videos, and animation. We would say that using PowerPoint “brings our lectures to life.”

What we forgot is that the lecturer needed to be alive first for the presentation to be alive as well. And unfortunately, folks began to use PowerPoint as a sort of crutch to (hopefully) create liveliness where none existed. Where the PowerPoint was supposed to support the presentation, it instead was the focus of it. And in many cases, the PowerPoint became the lecture with the lecturer turned presenter only droning on and on the very words that appeared on the screen (double gasp).

But wait, there’s more.

In our highly media saturated culture, students today are bombarded with massive amounts of light, images, video, and sound – as are we all -- to the point where we are literally in a constant noise. Seriously, check yourself. How long can you or I go with silence before we reach for the smart phone for music or to check messages or to… (you’ve heard this before). So the trap that many have fallen into is the thinking that we have to compete with the noise for your attention so that you will hear the lesson through all of the clatter around you. And the solution is to take PowerPoints and make the highly animated with a lot of color changes, sounds, and more.

A few years ago, I was at an education conference in Baltimore where an instructor was proposing this very thing. His PowerPoint presentation was just LOADED with flashy colors, drastic font changes, video, and very loud music. His point, of course, was to “pierce the veil” of noise that surrounds you and get the message (his lecture) home.

Instead, what I noticed for myself was that the presentation was so loud that I could not track my own thoughts. And then I looked around the room and saw everyone – and I mean everyone – passively watching the show. It’s a phenomenon we call “TV Mode”. Watch for this yourself. It is something that occurs when someone is watching television and they instantly become very passive. Some use it to sedate over-active children. It is amazing to watch. And everyone in the room was in TV Mode.

PowerPoints as a tool

All this said, PowerPoint presentation can be effective if you remember to use it as the tool it was designed to be: a support of the presentation and not the presentation itself. To poorly coin a phrase, “PowerPoints don’t bore people; people bore people.”

There are some good PowerPoint presentations, and I have seen many that support textbooks and do it well. Because of the limited format of the slide and the amount of information you can reasonable put on it, the PPT presentation can perfectly become the synopsis of the most important information derived from the chapter. For the student, the PPTs become the instant study-guide for any class. When you are short on time during the week, you can make a quick breeze through the PowerPoints and you will have the gist of the lecture.

In my own studies, I like to have the PowerPoints open while I am reading the text. This “following along” helps me to identify the information that the author thought was most important; thus providing me a greater efficiency in the lesson.

PowerPoints are still an effective tool for any good presentation. We just need to remember that they are here to support us and not the other way around.