Security: SEC Cracked, Back Doors in Manchester Police, NBN Scans, and Securing Wi-Fi

• SEC reveals it was hacked, information may have been used for illegal stock trades

• Manchester Police still runs Windows XP on 20 per cent of PCs

  The Met has recently signed a deal with storage company Box which will, amongst other things, reduce the amount of data held locally.

• Manchester police still relies on Windows XP [Ed: update below]

  The BBC has appealed against its refusal to provide an update.

• NBN leverages open source software to analyse faults

  A new NBN initiative will use a range of open source projects including Apache SPARK, Kafka, Flume, Cassandra and JanusGraph to help analyse and improve the end user experience on the National Broadband Network. The government-owned company today announced it was launching a new ‘Tech Lab’, which it hopes will provide insights into pain points for customers on its network and help resolve faults sooner.

• 5 Ways to Secure Wi-Fi Networks

  Wi-Fi is one entry-point hackers can use to get into your network without setting foot inside your building because wireless is much more open to eavesdroppers than wired networks, which means you have to be more diligent about security. But there’s a lot more to Wi-Fi security than just setting a simple password. Investing time in learning about and applying enhanced security measures can go a long way toward better protecting your network. Here are six tips to betters secure your Wi-Fi network.

You lost your ballpoint pen, Slack? Why's your Linux version unsigned?

Slack is distributing open Linux-based versions of its technology that are not digitally signed, contrary to industry best practice. The absence of a digital signature creates a means for miscreants to sling around doctored versions of the software that users wouldn't easily be able to distinguish from the real thing. El Reg learned of the issue from reader Trevor Hemsley, who reported the problem to Slack back in August and only notified the media after a promised fix failed to appear.

This Week in Techrights

• East Asia’s Patent Peril and the Curse of Patent Trolls
• USPTO Starts Discriminating Against Poor People, and Does So Even When They Rightly Point Out Errors
• Ambrose Chan Enters Document Security Systems (DSS), a Partly Patent Troll Entity
• UPC Threatens to Weaponise Software Patents in Countries That Forbade These
• The Latest Lies About the Unitary Patent (UPC) and CIPO’s Participation in Those
• The Patents Policy of Facebook is Causing an Exodus
• When Google Used Alex Converse to Raid the Public Domain With Software Patents
• Mark Kokes, the Man Behind BlackBerry’s Patent Aggression, Leaves the Company
• WordPress Demonstrates That Facebook’s Patent Strategy is Deterring/Alienating Developers
• Links 20/9/2017: Wine Staging 2.17, Randa 2017, Redox OS 0.3.3
• Links 19/9/2017: Pipewire, Mir Support for Wayland, DRM in W3C
• Links 18/9/2017: Linux 4.14 RC1, Mesa 17.2.1, and GNOME 3.26 on Ubuntu Artful

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