$445 Billion

Cybercrime expert: Why wait for Apple? The FBI can use its own intelligence:

A report out by the World Economic Forum’s 2016 Global Risks Report states crimes in cyberspace will cost the global economy $445 billion this year.

Internet Insecurity

Under Clinton, State's Cybersecurity Suffered:

In late 2014, cyber intruders linked to Russia were able to break into the State Department's email system, infecting it so thoroughly that it had to be cut off from the Internet in March while experts worked to eliminate the infestation.

Senior State Department officials disagree. They say the Russian hack was the result of a "well-crafted intelligence operation" designed to look normal to the employee who clicked on the attachment, and it was unrelated to other cybersecurity deficiencies.

No technology can completely thwart the most sophisticated of such hacks, but one official familiar with State's cyber deficiencies argues that the department's sloppy security means officials can't be sure other breaches haven't gone undetected.

Do we rely on the internet too much?

The most secure database is one that is not connected to the internet. I wonder if there are any? I wonder if there should be more?

There are ways of inputting and outputting data to a database without the internet. Should we go back to some of the "old" ways of doing things? I don't know. I do know that hackers would have a harder time of hacking these systems.

Sometimes I think that I would happily give up speed for safety, but I live in a world where 4 to 5 seconds is an eternity.

Millennials turned off by the new chip credit cards:

Since customers will eventually no longer pay with a swipe of a card, the “process can take as long as 4, 5 seconds so it’s really slowing the transaction down,” said Chris Britt, the co-founder and CEO of Chime, a mobile bank account and rewards app. Britt maintains the slowdown will turnoff millennials from using cards as a form of payment altogether.

“We actually think that this is going to result in changing the way people pay and probably shift it even faster to mobile payments,” he said.

It's Almost Always About Money

Ever wonder about those security questions that password protected web sites ask you about? Well Josh Levin at Slate has:

Why are secret questions so popular? For one thing, they're cheap. Gaffan says that the lost souls who call in to get their passwords reset cost a company between $10 and $15 a pop; if that customer can reset the password himself using a secret question, the company pays nothing. The IT research firm Gartner claims that a large U.S. beverage producer saved $600,000 in one year by dumping help-desk calls in favor of an "automated password reset" system.

Follow the money, and it all goes to the CEO.