SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
[Editor's Note: This is a little different from our usual offerings, but if you have 10 minutes to spare, it is an interesting read. It explains how users of Limewire - a file sharing program popular 20 or so years ago - were unintionally leaking personal and private data which gave one person an idea that just grew and grew.]
Long, interesting story on cyber-security, in The New Yorker magazine.
Before Robert Boback got into the field of cybersecurity, he was a practicing chiropractor in the town of Sewickley, Pennsylvania, twelve miles northwest of Pittsburgh. He was also selling used cars on eBay and flipping houses purchased at police auctions. The decision to branch out into computers came in 2003, after he watched a "60 Minutes" report by Lesley Stahl about pirated movies. For years, while digital piracy was devastating the music industry, Hollywood had largely been spared; limitations on bandwidth curtailed the online trade in movies. But this was changing, Stahl noted: "The people running America's movie studios know that if they don't do something, fast, they could be in the same boat as the record companies.
The story gets more interesting. Bob visits Langley.
Inside, the head of the Directorate of Science and Technology was joined by an official representing In-Q-Tel, a corporation that the C.I.A. had set up to fund new technologies. (The "Q" refers to the technician in James Bond films.) A follow-up call from one of the participants led to more trips to D.C., and suddenly Boback and Hopkins were journeying through the shadow world of the post-9/11 national-security establishment.
And, file-sharing detection as a service.
Tiversa's prominent supporters quickly helped Boback assemble an impressive client list: Capital One, Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, American Express. The companies were paying for a monthly monitoring service, in which Tiversa scanned for breached corporate information, or the personal data of top executives. By this time, EagleVision X1 could access more than a million users, and its capabilities were expanding. Because peer-to-peer networks were constantly in flux, as people turned their computers on and off,
Hopkins had designed a stable repository for the system, which became known as the Data Store. EagleVision X1, programmed with search terms that were set for clients (for instance, "Lloyd Blankfein," for Goldman Sachs), would scour the networks, then deposit what it found in the Data Store. Each file was labelled to indicate when it was downloaded and what I.P. address it came from, so that its behavior could be tracked—if it remained in the same location, or if it was being shared, or if it suddenly vanished.
What happens to this respository is one of the interesting, and unanswered, questions in the article. Suffice it to say, it does not end well, to get people to buy data security services, sometimes you have to scare them by stealing or faking a theft of their data. Interesting read.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 03 2019, @02:58AM (2 children)
I had always wondered what became of this flim-flam man. Thank you, Aristarchus, for finding this.
Back in 2007, I took a business class at CMU on Financing Entrepreneurship. 12 years ago is a long time, and I currently don't have my class notes from back then on me. I'll check later, and if I see I messed up details, I'll follow up. Anyway, the teacher brought in a few local entrepreneurs, like Luke Skurman who wrote a series of college guides. And this Boback guy.
He didn't hide his background in chiropraxis, and he recounted the CIA headquarters anecdote. I got the distinct impression that he and his company were a nothingburger, but he met the right people and was able to profit by dazzling the security and intelligence apparatus in Baby Bush's post-9/11 America.
I had used Gnutella back around 2002, but it was not very usable. A query was sent to all nodes, and you got partial substring matches back from files that other people were sharing, or malware made to look like your query. By 2007, Bittorrent and Pirate Bay was the popular way to download files.
The guy's pitch was showing responses to queries purporting to be maps of a US base in Djibouti to politicians and they would flip their shit and hand over money to them. I saw it as something anyone with a client could find, and what was their value add?
I think I voiced my concerns in the discussion after he left, but in a room full of future unicorn hucksters, who cares what a technical person says?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 03 2019, @07:24PM (1 child)
I found my materials from the class. Unfortunately there were no notes of his visit (perhaps I still did his on paper then, or I thought they were worthless), but we were asked to write up a set of follow up questions on his visit:
1) Why do you only have a placeholder web page after apparently being active for five years now?
3) How does your patent on improving peer-to-peer communications fit in with your business?
4) How is Sam's pond doing?
I tried to find more information on what patent he talked about, but a search shows that Samuel P Hopkins has been granted a ton of patents, including ones about small handicrafts. No idea what was going on with Sam's pond, but his ex-wife probably took everything.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 04 2019, @02:42AM
>No idea what was going on with Sam's pond, but his ex-wife probably took everything.
Women's rights!