Payroll Processor Hacked, Bank Accounts Exposed

F

rom the Minneapolis Star Tribune:

“A hacker attack at payroll processing firm Ceridian Corp. of Bloomington has potentially revealed the names, Social Security numbers, and, in some cases, the birth dates and bank accounts of 27,000 employees working at 1,900 companies nationwide”

A corporation gets hacked, ordinary citizens get screwed. It happens so often that it’s hardly news.

This is interesting to me because Ceridian is a local company and the local media picked up the story. That’s a good thing. I’m glad our local media is still able to hire professional journalists. The executives of a company that fail like that need to read about themselves in their local paper and watch themselves on the evening news. They might learn something. If we’re lucky, the hack might even get mentioned at the local country club and the exec’s might get a second glance from the other suits.

We aren’t that lucky.

In a follow up story, the Star Tribune interviewed a man who claims that he has not had a relationship with Ceridian for 10 years, yet Ceridian notified him that his data was also stolen. The Star Tribune reports that Ceridian told the victim that the compromise of 10 year inactive customer data was due to a ‘computer glitch’:

“a Ceridian software glitch kept it in the company's database long after it should have been deleted.”

Sorry to disappoint the local media, but computer glitches are not the reason that 10 year old data is exposed to hackers.

Brain dead management is the cause.

But even brain dead management occasionally shows sings of life. According to the customer whose 10 year old data was breached:

"The woman from Ceridian said they're working on removing my information from the database now,”

Gee thanks. What’s that horse-barn-door saying again?

Given corporate America’s aversion to ‘DELETE FROM…WHERE…’ queries, my identity and financial information is presumably vulnerable to exposure by any company that I’ve had a relationship with at any time since computers were invented.

That’s comforting.

Home Energy – Greenyness (or cheapness)

A year and a half ago I went on a wall wart power measuring exercise. I concluded that going around unplugging wall warts (8 lbs CO2/yr) wasn’t going to save the planet. If you want to save the planet, you’ll have to do hard things, like hang your clothes out on the line (.3 tons CO2/yr), drive your car half as much (3 tons CO2/yr), or turn off your geeky home server (.3 ton CO2/yr).

For me, saving energy is nothing new. We grew up getting yelled at for leaving the fridge door open, we set our thermostat back before set-back thermostats were fashionable, and in winter we left the water in the bath tub until it had cooled so the heat from the tub water would warm the house instead of the drain (I ain’t paying to heat the $#*&$^ drain!). My dad super-insulated our house before the 1973 oil crisis. We weren’t saving energy to be green though, we were just cheap.

Surveillance

The future:

Cameras will be ubiquitous. Storage will be effectively infinite. CPU processing power will be effectively infinite. Cameras will detect a broad range of electromagnetic spectrum. The combination of cameras everywhere and infinite storage will inevitably result in all persons being under surveillance all the time. When combined with infinite processor power and recognition software, it will be impossible for persons to move about society without being observed by their government.

All governments eventually are corrupted and when corrupted will misuse the surveillance data. There is no particular reason to think that this is political party or left/right specific. Although it currently is fashionable to think that the right is evil and the left is good, there is no reason to think this will be the case in the future. The only certainty is that the party in power will misuse the data to attempt to control their ‘enemies’, whomever they might perceive them be at the time.

Surveillance advocates claim that cameras are simply an extension of law enforcement's eyes and therefore are not a significant new impingement on personal freedom.

I disagree.

Here’s how I’d build a surveillance system that allows the use of technology to maximize law enforcement effectiveness yet provide reasonable controls on the use of the surveillance against the population as a whole.

• The cameras are directly connected to a control room of some sort. The control room is monitored by sworn, trained law enforcement officers. The officers watch the monitors.

So far this is ordinary surveillance. Here’s how I’d protect individual privacy:

• The locations of the cameras are well known.
• All cameras record to volatile memory only. The capacity of the volatile memory is a small, on the order of one hour or so. Unless specific action is taken, all recorded data more than one hour old is automatically and irretrievably lost. A ring buffer of some sort.
• If a sworn officer sees a crime, the sworn officer may switch specific cameras to non-volatile storage. The action to switch a camera from volatile to non volatile storage is deliberate and only taken when an officer sees specific events that constitute probable cause that a crime is being committed, or when a crime has been reported to law enforcement. Each instance of the use of non-volatile storage is recorded, documented and discoverable by the general public using some well defined process.
• Once a camera is switched to non-volatile storage, it automatically reverts to volatile storage after a fixed time period (one hour, for example), unless the sworn officer repeatedly toggles the non-volatile switch on the camera.
• The non-volatile storage automatically expires after a fixed amount of time (24 hours, for example). If law enforcement believes that a crime has occurred and that the video will be evidence in the crime, law enforcement obtains a court order to retain the video evidence and move it to permanent storage. The court order must be for a specific crime and must name specific cameras and times.
• When a court so orders, the video is moved from non-volatile storage to whatever method law enforcement uses for retaining and managing evidence. If the court order is not obtained within the non-volatile expiration period, the video is irretrievably deleted. If the court order is obtained, the video becomes subject to whatever rules govern evidence in the legal jurisdiction of the cameras.

In the case of a 9/11 or 7/7 type of event, the officer would simply toggle all cameras non-volatile mode and would continue to re-enable non-volatile mode every hour for as long as necessary (days, if necessary). The action of toggling the cameras would again be recorded, documented and discoverable.

To prevent the system from being subverted by corrupt law enforcement, (think J Edgar Hoover and massive illegal surveillance) the systems would be physically sealed, the software and storage for the non-volatile and volatile storage would be unavailable to law enforcement.

There would be some form of crypto/hash/signing that enables tracking the recordings back to a specific camera and assures that the recordings have not been altered by law enforcement.

The key concepts are:

1. the system defaults to automatically destroying all recordings automatically.
2. a sworn officer of the law must observe an event before triggering non-volatile storage.
3. specific actions are required to store the recordings
4. those actions are logged, documented and discoverable.
5. a court action of some sort is required for storage of any recording beyond a short period of time.
6. the system would be tamper-proof. The act of law enforcement tampering with the systems to defeat the privacy controls would be a felony.
7. the system would maintain the integrity of the recordings for as long as the video exists.

And most importantly, the software would be open source.