With Mr. Boettcher out this week due to family illness, Ms. Berlin and I discussed a little bit of what is going on in the world.
Expensify unveiled a new 'feature' where random people would help train their AI to better analyze receipts. Problem is that the random people could see medical receipts, hotel bills, and other PII. We discuss how they allowed this and the press surrounding it. We also discuss why these kinds of issues are prime reasons to do periodic vendor reviews.
Our second story was on Apple's "passwordless root" account. We talk about the steps to mitigate it, why it was allowed to happen, and why the most straight forward methods of dealing with something like this may not always be the best way.
Direct Link: https://brakesec.com/2017-040
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---Show Notes---
Agenda:
Trip report from Amanda to New Zealand
Did we talk about Amanda’s appearance on PSW?
Discuss last week’s show about custom training
Comments? Suggestions for custom training solutions?
https://www.sans.org/mentor/class/sec504-seattle-01mar2018-bryan-brake
Expensify -
https://www.wired.com/story/not-always-ai-that-sifts-through-sensitive-info-crowdsourced-labor/
https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/28/16703962/expensify-receipts-amazon-turk-privacy-controversy
How is this different than like a medical transcriptionist?
Don’t you go in and modify the receipts yourself? Or is that a feature you can force?
It’s a privacy issue.
Hotel receipts, boarding passes, even medical receipts
Turn off ‘smart scan’?
Many companies like using it, and some will only accept smart scanned receipts
Fat fingering receipts isn’t ‘cool’
Snap a photo, move along
Expensify is global, and could have wide reaching effects for this new ‘feature’...
Expensify used Mechanical Turk, a ‘human intelligence tasks’
Micropayments to do menial tasks
Example of why periodic review of your 3rd parties is necessary
New ‘features’ = new nightmares
Privacy requirements change
Functionality not in alignment with your business goals
Apple ‘passwordless root’
HIgh Sierra before today (29 November 2017) had the ability to login as root with no password…
That is a problem… Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/lemiorhan/status/935578694541770752
It also works on remote services, like ARD (apple remote desktop), and file shares…
Rolling IR
Was it necessary?
Serious, yes
Was discovered two weeks prior https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/79235
Dev (chethan177) on the forum “didn’t realize it was a security issue”
Easy enough fix (Bryan IR story)
Open Terminal
Sudo passwd root
Change password
Do you trust users to do that? Not across a large enterprise
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