ByJeff Goldman, Posted August 2, 2017

1.5 TB of data, including unreleased episodes of upcoming shows, was stolen and leaked online.

Hackers recently claimed to have breached HBO's systems and stolen 1.5 TB of data including upcoming episodes of Ballers and Room 104, Entertainment Weekly reports.

In response, HBO stated that an incident had "resulted in the compromise of proprietary information," adding, "We immediately began investigating the incident and are working with law enforcement and outside cyber security firms."

In an email to employees, HBO chairman and CEO Richard Plepler wrote, "I can assure you that senior leadership and our extraordinary technology team, along with outside experts, are working round the clock to protect our collective interests. The efforts across multiple departments have been nothing short of herculean."

Protecting Key Data

AlertSec CEO Ebba Blitz told eSecurity Planet by email that the breach should serve as a clear reminder that hacking isn't limited to financial, health and personal information.

"All information is vulnerable because some hackers are motivated by the thrill of it," Blitz said. "They steal because they can, not because the information always has any real long-term value. All data needs to be protected with encryption."

Gemalto CTO of data protection Jason Hart said by email that broadcasters in particular face a unique threat. "Due to the nature of the industry, hackers have the opportunity to access data as it is transmitted between multiple data centers, and so they require solutions to help encrypt their high value TV transmissions -- without interfering with the audience's viewing experience," he said.

"HBO now joins a list of other Hollywood victims of crime such as Netflix and Sony," Hart added. "This incident is another reminder that broadcasters must invest in fundamental security controls and practices -- encryption, key management and two-factor authentication -- to control access to highly sought-after content and protect it in the event that a breach takes place."

Data Governance

Richard Stiennon, chief strategy officer at Blancco Technology Group, said the HBO breach is a great example of the importance of data governance. "Content producers and all the parties involved in shooting, editing and post-production processing and distribution should be on high alert," he said. "They should immediately review their data governance policies and discover the weak links in protecting their content and shore up their defenses. An information governance policy should take into account where critical content resides at all times."

Still, a recent Thycotic survey of over 400 global business and security executives found that four out of five companies don't know where their sensitive data is located or how to secure it.

And while 80 percent of data breaches involve stolen or weak credentials, 60 percent of companies still don't adequately protect privileged accounts. Two out of three companies don't fully measure whether their disaster recovery will work as planned, and four out of five never measure the success of security training investments.

"It's really astonishing to ... see just how many people are failing at measuring the effectiveness of their cyber security and performance against best practices," Thycotic chief security scientist Joseph Carson said in a statement.

Link:
HBO Hack Highlights Importance of Encryption, Data Governance - eSecurity Planet

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On UpVote this week we discuss Turkey's deepening crackdown against critics of the Erdogan regime, which recently imprisoned IT trainers who were teaching citizens how to secure their digital communications.

We're joined by Amnesty Internationals tech adviser, Tanya O'Carroll, to work out why the net has widened to include tech experts who help human rights' advocates stay safe in a country that is increasingly and chillingly hostile to freedom of speech, following a failed coup to topple president Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2016.

End-to-end encryption isn't only perceived as a threat to oppressive regimes, however. This week, the UK's home secretary Amber Rudd once again pushed tech firms such as Facebook and Google to do more to prevent terrorists from using their services. Rudd claimed "real people" dont care about an app's security. Is she sure about that?

UpVote is a Wired and Ars Technica UK co-production hosted by Rowland Manthorpe and Kelly Fiveash.

This episode was recorded on Wednesday, August 2.

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UpVote: Turkish regime jails IT trainers in encryption clampdown - Ars Technica UK

Quantum entanglement remains one of the most challenging fields of study for modern physicists. Described by Einstein as spooky action at a distance, scientists have long sought to reconcile how this aspect of quantum mechanics can coexist with classical mechanics. Essentially, the fact that two particles can be connected over great distances violates the rules of locality and realism.

Formally, this is a violation of Bells Ineqaulity, a theory which has been used for decades to show that locality and realism are valid despite being inconsistent with quantum mechanics. However, in a recent study, a team of researchers from the Ludwig-Maximilian University (LMU) and the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Munich conducted tests which once again violate Bells Inequality and proves the existence of entanglement.

Their study, titled Event-Ready Bell Test Using Entangled Atoms Simultaneously Closing Detection and Locality Loopholes, was recently published in the Physical Review Letters. Led by Wenjamin Rosenfeld, a physicist at LMU and the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics, the team sought to test Bells Inequality by entangling two particles at a distance.

John Bell, the Irish physicist who devised a test to show that nature does not hide variables as Einstein had proposed. Credit: CERN

Bells Inequality (named after Irish physicist John Bell, who proposed it in 1964) essentially states that properties of objects exist independent of being observed (realism), and no information or physical influence can propagate faster than the speed of light (locality). These rules perfectly described the reality we human beings experience on a daily basis, where things are rooted in a particular space and time and exist independent of an observer.

However, at the quantum level, things do not appear to follow these rules. Not only can particles be connected in non-local ways over large distances (i.e. entanglement), but the properties of these particles cannot be defined until they are measured. And while all experiments have confirmed that the predictions of quantum mechanics are correct, some scientists have continued to argue that there are loopholes that allow for local realism.

To address this, the Munich team conducted an experiment using two laboratories at LMU. While the first lab was located in the basement of the physics department, the second was located in the basement of the economics department roughly 400 meters away. In both labs, teams captured a single rubidium atom in an topical trap and then began exciting them until they released a single photon.

As Dr. Wenjamin Rosenfeld explained in an Max Planck Institute press release:

Our two observer stations are independently operated and are equipped with their own laser and control systems. Because of the 400 meters distance between the laboratories, communication from one to the other would take 1328 nanoseconds, which is much more than the duration of the measurement process. So, no information on the measurement in one lab can be used in the other lab. Thats how we close the locality loophole.

The experiment was performed in two locations 398 meters apart at the Ludwig Maximilian University campus in Munich, Germany. Credit: Rosenfeld et al/American Physical Society

Once the two rubidium atoms were excited to the point of releasing a photon, the spin-states of the rubidium atoms and the polarization states of the photons were effectively entangled. The photons were then coupled into optical fibers and guided to a set-up where they were brought to interference. After conducting a measurement run for eight days, the scientists were able to collected around 10,000 events to check for signs entanglement.

This would have been indicated by the spins of the two trapped rubidium atoms, which would be pointing in the same direction (or in the opposite direction, depending on the kind of entanglement). What the Munich team found was that for the vast majority of the events, the atoms were in the same state (or in the opposite state), and that there were only six deviations consistent with Bells Inequality.

These results were also statistically more significant than those obtained by a team of Dutch physicists in 2015. For the sake of that study, the Dutch team conducted experiments using electrons in diamonds at labs that were 1.3 km apart. In the end, their results (and other recent tests of Bells Inequality) demonstrated that quantum entanglement is real, effectively closing the local realism loophole.

As Wenjamin Rosenfeld explained, the tests conducted by his team also went beyond these other experiments by addressing another major issue. We were able to determine the spin-state of the atoms very fast and very efficiently, he said. Thereby we closed a second potential loophole: the assumption, that the observed violation is caused by an incomplete sample of detected atom pairs.

By obtaining proof of the violation of Bells Inequality, scientists are not only helping to resolve an enduring incongruity between classical and quantum physics. They are also opening the door to some exciting possibilities. For instance, for years, scientist have anticipated the development of quantum processors, which rely on entanglements to simulate the zeros and ones of binary code.

Computers that rely on quantum mechanics would be exponentially faster than conventional microprocessors, and would ushering in a new age of research and development. The same principles have been proposed for cybersecurity, where quantum encryption would be used to cypher information, making it invulnerable to hackers who rely on conventional computers.

Last, but certainly not least, there is the concept of Quantum Entanglement Communications, a method that would allow us to transmit information faster than the speed of light. Imagine the possibilities for space travel and exploration if we are no longer bound by the limits of relativistic communication!

Einstein wasnt wrong when he characterized quantum entanglements as spooky action. Indeed, much of the implications of this phenomena are still as frightening as they are fascinating to physicists. But the closer we come to understanding it, the closer we will be towards developing an understanding of how all the known physical forces of the Universe fit together aka. a Theory of Everything!

Further Reading: LMU, Physical Review Letters

By Matt Williams - Matt Williams is the Curator of Universe Today's Guide to Space. He is also a freelance writer, a science fiction author and a Taekwon-Do instructor. He lives with his family on Vancouver Island in beautiful British Columbia.

Bell's Inequality, classical physics, Featured, Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics, quantum entanglement, quantum mechanics

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Physicists Take Big Step Towards Quantum Computing and Encryption with new Experiment - Universe Today

JAKARTA, Indonesia The Indonesian government lifted its threat to ban the encrypted messaging app Telegram because its taking steps to block negative content that includes forums for Islamic State group supporters. But it warned other sites could now face scrutiny.

Rudiantara, the Minister of Communications and Information Technology, who met Tuesday with Telegram co-founder Pavel Durov announced that we have agreed to keep Telegram accessible.

Many other social media sites, messaging apps and file and video sharing systems are used Indonesia, he said, specifically mentioning Facebook and Google as platforms that could be scrutinized in the near future.

Earlier this month, the ministry said it was preparing to shut down Telegram in Indonesia, where it has several million users, if it didnt develop procedures to block unlawful content including pro-Islamic State group discussion groups.

As a partial measure, it asked internet companies in the worlds most populous Muslim nation to block access to 11 addresses offering the web version of Telegram. Durov apologized for failing to quickly respond to the Indonesian governments requests for apparent terror content to be blocked, blaming a miscommunication.

Rudiantara, who uses one name, said the ministry and Telegram will put in place standard operating procedures that improve the ability to address the negative content in Telegram. The blocking measures against web Telegram could be lifted next week, he said.

Suspected militants arrested by Indonesian police have told authorities that they communicated with each other via Telegram and received orders and directions to carry out attacks through the app, including from Bahrun Naim, an Indonesian with the Islamic State group in Syria accused of orchestrating several attacks in the past 18 months.

Critics of the governments threat said it would make more sense to monitor the IS discussion groups for possible intelligence than banning the app.

Durov told reporters there would a line of direct communication between the ministry and top people in Telegram but also said he wouldnt have come to Indonesia if the government had made any requests that would require Telegrams encryption to be compromised.

The basis of Telegram is a 100 percent promise of encryption. This is why our company exists, he said.

Weve discussed ways to block the public channels available for the propaganda of terrorism, which is something that we are committed to do globally, and particularly Indonesia, Durov said.

The free messaging service can be used as a smartphone app and on computers through a web interface or desktop messenger. Its strong encryption has contributed to its popularity with those concerned about privacy and secure communications in the digital era but also attracted militant groups and other criminal elements.

Durov said about 20,000 people sign up to use Telegram in Indonesia daily. It has at least 100 million users worldwide, a figure released by Telegram in February 2016. (AP)

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Indonesia lifts threat to ban encrypted app Telegram - The Philadelphia Tribune