Pence used personal email for state business /— and was hacked

Vice President Mike Pence reportedly used a private email account to conduct public business, including homeland security matters, while he was governor of Indiana. Records of the emails were obtained by IndyStar through a public records request. Dwight Adams/IndyStar

Vice President Mike Pence routinely used a private email account to conduct public business as governor of Indiana, at times discussing sensitive matters and homeland security issues.

Emails released to IndyStar in response to a public records request show Pence communicated via his personal AOL account with top advisers on topics ranging from security gates at the governor’s residence to the state’s response to terror attacks across the globe. In one email, Pence’s top state homeland security adviser relayed an update from the FBI regarding the arrests of several men on federal terror-related charges.

Cyber-security experts say the emails raise concerns about whether such sensitive information was adequately protected from hackers, given that personal accounts like Pence's are typically less secure than government email accounts. In fact, Pence's personal account was hacked last summer.

Vice President-elect Mike Pence speaks to members of the media while meeting with House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wis., on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Nov. 30, 2016.(Photo: Andrew Harnik/AP)

Furthermore, advocates for open government expressed concerns about transparency because personal emails aren't immediately captured on state servers that are searched in response to public records requests.

Pence's office in Washington said in a written statement Thursday: "Similar to previous governors, during his time as Governor of Indiana, Mike Pence maintained a state email account and a personal email account. As Governor, Mr. Pence fully complied with Indiana law regarding email use and retention. Government emails involving his state and personal accounts are being archived by the state consistent with Indiana law, and are being managed according to Indiana’s Access to Public Records Act.”

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DWS to acquire SMS Management and Technology, valued at $124 million

Danny Wallis (DWS) and
Rick Rostolis (SMS Management and Technology)

SMS Management and Technology has entered into a scheme to be 100 percent acquired by Melbourne IT provider DWS.

If successful, shareholders will receive $1 in cash and 0.39 DWS shares for each SMS share, representing a total consideration of $1.66 per share. This gives SMS a valuation of $124 million.

The companies are among two of Australia’s biggest IT services and body shopping firms, and the parallels do not end there.

Along with the three-letter acronyms, both ASX-listed companies have reported mixed business performancein recent years. They both brought in fresh blood to replace long-term leaders, only to then bid farewell to these new CEOs after short stints.

SMS hired Infosys heavy-hitter, Jacqueline Korhonen, to replace Tom Stianos after 26 years with the company. Korhonen resigned just over 12 months after SMS’s "national sales and delivery restructure" led to a "serious deterioration" of the sales pipeline.

Seven Alien 'Earths' Found Orbiting Nearby Star

The Earth-size worlds orbit a star just 39 light-years away, and most may have the right conditions to host liquid water on their surfaces.

ILLUSTRATION BY M. KORNMESSER, SPACEENGINE.ORG/ESO

Seven rocky planets orbiting a nearby star may be roughly the size of Earth and could even be right for water—and maybe life—to adorn their surfaces, researchers announced Wednesday.

The planets, which circle a star called TRAPPIST-1 just 39 light-years away, are tucked together so tightly that they routinely spangle each others’ skies, sometimes appearing as shimmering crescents and at other times as orbs nearly twice as large as the full moon.

“The spectacle would be beautiful,” says the University of Cambridge’s Amaury Triaud, coauthor of a study describing the otherworldly heptad that appears in the journal Nature.

The TRAPPIST-1 system is now tied with several others that have seven planets for the greatest number of planets in a stellar system other than our own (which has eight, not counting dwarf planets like Pluto). The system’s existence suggests that Earth-size planets are much more plentiful than previously imagined.

And now, it’s among the best neighborhoods to study for signs of life beyond Earth: The relative sizes of the planets and star, plus the system’s proximity, mean that plucking the signatures of living, breathing organisms from the planet’s atmospheres could be within reach.

Security News This Week: The Latest Netflix Release Is a Personal Security Check-Up

GETTY IMAGES

IT WOULDN’T BE 2017 without regular internet-shaking security bugs fueling our nightmares. The crisis >du jour? a flaw in the internet infrastructure company Cloudflare that caused random data leakage from some of the company’s six million customer sites. Brush your teeth and change your passwords, folks. Meanwhile, researchers have figured out how to steal data by watching a hard drive’s blinking LED indicator. And it’s finally possible to attack an old cryptographic hash function that’s still used for encryption more than it should be.

There was good news this week, too, though. Google offshoot Jigsaw and Google’s Counter Abuse Technology Team publicly released code for anti-harassment toolsthey’ve been honing for more than a year so they can hopefully be implemented around the web. Military bases could use smart city technology to improve their safety and security. And former Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter gave WIRED a glimpse of the future of warfare.

Then again, an arms dealer who sells military tech like tanks, missiles, and weapons told WIRED that doing business in the age of President Trump is a “win-win.” So, there’s that.

If you’re sick of all of this and want to crawl under a digital rock, prominent hacker Kevin Mitnick details how to be invisible online.

But wait, there’s plenty more. Each Saturday we round up the news stories that we didn’t break or cover in depth but that still deserve your attention. As always, click on the headlines to read the full story in each link posted. And stay safe out there.