The Lighthouse IT Podcast - June 18th, 2021
Matt and Griff go through exciting stuff this week, like how VW's data breach impacts 3.3 million, McDonald's getting hit by a data breach, the ALPACA — a TLS security vulnerability, Twitter Blue officially launched, and HBO Max released an ad-supported version!
Listen here!
Tech News
VW data breach impacted 3.3 million
- Volkswagen Group of America said an unauthorized third-party obtained limited info about customers and prospects from a vendor that its some of it's brands/dealers used for digital sales and marketing.
- The info was gathered between 2014-2019 and was in an electronic file the vendor left unsecured.
- The sensitive data was comprised of driver license numbers in more than 95% of cases
McDonald's Hit by a Data Breach
- McDonald's Corp. said hackers took data from its systems U.S., South Korea and Taiwan.
- The company said the breach disclosed some business contact info for U.S. employees and franchisees.
- McDonald's said no customer data was breached in the U.S., and that the employee data exposed wasn't sensitive or personal.
ALPACA — a TLS security vulnerability
ALPACA is short for Application Layer Protocols Allowing Cross-Protocol Attacks.
- ALPACA isn't a terribly usable attack, and there are some fairly simple ways to ensure it doesn't happen on your servers, so there isn't a clear and present danger to online commerce because of it.
- But, ALPACA is a family of vulnerability nevertheless and it exists because we haven't been quite as careful or as precise as perhaps we should have been when setting up our servers to use TLS in the first place.
Marketing News
Twitter Blue Officially Launched
Twitter Blue allows users to pay a monthly fee to gain access to a range of additional tweet features and tools. ($2.99 a month)- Undo tweets (retract their sent tweets within up to 30 seconds of posting)
- Bookmark Folders (categorize their saved tweets)
- Reader Mode (turn tweet threads into clutter-free, easy-to-read text)
- Color theme (change the display like it is on desktop)
- New selection of App icons
- Dedicated Support
HBO Max has released an ad-supported version
- Now you can pay $14.99/month for no ads, or $9.99 for an ad-supported tier.
- Ad-supported audiences won't get immediate access to some films
- Won't be able to download shows offline.
- HBO's original shows won't have ads.
- This may be the lowest commercial ad load in the streaming industry, at about four minutes every hour.