Contrarian View - "Data Scientist" - Hot title but not according to Miko Matsumura

 

According to him:

Not only is Data Science not a science, it’s not even a good job prospect.

You will be subjected to the data equivalent of dumpster diving. But surfacing insight from a rotting pile of enterprise data is a ghastly process—at best. Sure, you might find the data equivalent of a flat-screen television, but you’ll need to clean off the rotting banana peels. If you’re lucky you can take it home, and oh man, it works! Despite that unappetizing prospect, companies continue to burn millions of dollars to collect and gamely pick through the data under respective roofs. What’s the time-to-value of the average “Big Data” project? How about “Never”?

Here is what someone in  is Slashdot said:

All this means is that you will spend countless hours trying to connect to the client legacy stuff and then countless hours trying to get the data out (without impacting production systems!), so you can then spend countless hours formatting this data around to be able to spend countless hours trying to get this data into your Big Data(tm) solution so you can finally run some algorithms and create results. Now multiply all that by the number of different kinds of databases the client has and you get the idea.

As an IT professional you really do not want to work in this field. No organization keep its data in a clean uniform way, data scientist is like an IT janitor.

The links below has more details:

http://slashdot.org/topic/bi/data-science-is-dead/

Fake version of Netflix (Malware) on phones and tablets (Supposedly pre-installed) from at least four different manufacturers.

With the fake Netflix application, the organization told Marble Security the app was pre-installed when it bought the device. Marble Security then looked at devices from its other customers and found the problem was widespread. They found a fake version of Netflix on phones and tablets from at least four different manufacturers, Jevans said.

The links below has more details:

http://www.cio.com/article/749199/Pre_installed_Malware_Turns_Up_on_New_Phones

Major Linux Security Flaw but, fix is available

The flaw  enables an attacker to spoof GnuTLS' system for verifying certificates, exposing supposedly secure connections to stealthy eavesdropping.

By creating a specific type of fake certificate, an attacker could trick GnuTLS into accepting it as genuine, granting access to an otherwise-secure connection. This done, the intruder could monitor traffic flowing through the connection in plain text, and even interject code of his own, potentially opening further avenues of attack.

Nikos Mavrogiannopolous, the developer of GnuTLS, announced Monday in a mailing list message that he had implemented a fix to the source code that closes the loophole

The links below has more details:

http://www.cio.com/article/749202/Major_Security_Flaw_Threatens_Linux_Users

Still on XP? - Here is one more (I know it is boring) warning

The F-Secure threat report points out that Windows XP security is a serious issue because once the OS is compromised, it's significantly more difficult to clean and repair than other versions of Windows. The final piece of advice F-Secure provides is really the best: Consider upgrading your operating system.  

Hypponen cautions that over sharing on social networks today may come back to haunt you later--especially if you plan to run for public office in a decade or two.    

"Government surveillance is not about governments collecting the information you're sharing publicly and willingly," warns Hypponen. "It's about collecting the information you don't think you're sharing at all."

The links below has more details:

http://www.cio.com/article/749203/F_Secure_Report_Warns_XP_Zero_day_Attack_is_Imminent

Non-Microsoft security flaws cause biggest headache - Most security folks already know this.

The average PC has around 75 programs installed on it, about 39 percent of which are from Microsoft.

This means that the bulk of the patching work is spread across a multitude of small vendors rather than Microsoft alone. In Secunia's view, this represents a major structural issue with patching.

The links below has more details:

http://www.csoonline.com/article/749172/non-microsoft-security-flaws-cause-biggest-headache-says-secunia

DNS basics in a 8 Minutes Video

All you need to know if you have no idea what DNS is.

A picture is worth a thousand words,

A video?
Priceless


The links below has the video:


https://blogs.akamai.com/2014/03/dns-101---from-a-web-browsing-perspective.html

Ever heard of Transaction Malleability Attack?

    ;
This attack seems to have  caused the Bitcoin meltdown.

If this attack is successful then, the attacker can cash in the on bitcoins they never owned.

Bottomline -  About $500 million in bitcoins stored by the exchange have been stolen, comprising 750,000 bitcoins deposited by users of the site, and 100,000 owned by Mt. Gox.

Here is the sad news

In the bankruptcy filing, the exchange (Mt. Gox) reported that it doesn't know what technique -- or techniques -- attackers used to steal the bitcoins, exactly how many were stolen, or when the thefts occurred.

The links below has more details:

http://www.informationweek.com/security/attacks-and-breaches/bitcoin-exchanges-buckle-under-ddos-attacks/d/d-id/1113809


http://www.informationweek.com/security/attacks-and-breaches/mt-gox-bitcoin-meltdown-what-went-wrong/d/d-id/1114091