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Domain: axios.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to axios.com.
Stories · 205
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Anthem's Historic Data Breach: What We Still Don't Know 2 Years Later (axios.com)
In February 2015, health insurer Anthem said its database had been compromised, exposing personal information for 78.8 million people, including 60 million to 70 million of its current and former customers and employees. Two years later, much of how it happened, who did it, and what consequences Anthem will face remain unanswered. From a report: Anthem has not disclosed the value of its cyber insurance policy, which defrays some of the costs. The hackers were most likely working on behalf of a foreign government. Many security experts believe it was China, but that has not been proven yet. The FBI would not comment on the pending investigation. It's unclear if Anthem will face a federal penalty. It's by far the largest health care data breach, and the Department of Health and Human Services has imposed fines in the past. We don't know for sure that Anthem was fully protected from this type of attack, and a separate federal agency that had a contract with Anthem previously said the insurer did not have controls in place "to prevent rogue devices...from connecting to its networks." Class-action lawsuits are still pending, and fact-finding discovery ended in December. Anthem could escape big damages if people can't show concrete harm. -
Boeing and Airbus Can't Make Enough Airplanes To Keep Up With Demand (axios.com)
From a report on Axios: Aerospace manufacturers like Boeing and Airbus cannot produce airplanes fast enough to meet demand despite what the Wall Street Journal calls "one of the industry's steepest production increases since World War II." The run up in demand is partially the result of fast-growing airline industries in the Middle East and China. Manufacturers will need to increase production by 30% to meet current orders, and such booming demand is one sign of a healthier global economy. -
The Death of the Click (axios.com)
Sara Fischer, writing for Axios: For the past 10 years, we've operated on the premise that the most important digital metric is the click that refers a person to a website. That click usually comes from a social distribution channel, like Facebook or Twitter, or a search engine, like Google or Bing. But according to industry experts, the click referral is becoming an idea of the past, soon to be replaced by content exposure. [...] Most publishers have designed their websites to measure user interaction through clicks, not scroll rates or time spent on stories. As the industry moves away from click-through rates (CTR's) as the most meaningful marketing metric, those publishers will have a difficult time justifying the effectiveness of their platforms for marketers. -
How Tech Ate the Media and Our Minds (axios.com)
From a report: On average, we check our phones 50 times each day -- with some studies suggesting it could three times that amount. We spend around 6 hours per day consuming digital media. As a result, the human attention span has fallen from 12 seconds to eight seconds since 2000, while the goldfish attention span is nine seconds. And we just mindlessly pass along information without reading or checking it. Columbia University found that nearly 60 percent of all social media posts are shared without being clicked on. -
Republicans Are Reportedly Using a Self-Destructing Message App To Avoid Leaks (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Trump administration members and other Republicans are using the encrypted, self-destructing messaging app Confide to keep conversations private in the wake of hacks and leaks, according to Jonathan Swan and David McCabe at Axios. Axios writes that "numerous senior GOP operatives and several members of the Trump administration" have downloaded Confide, which automatically wipes messages after they're read. One operative told Axios that the app "provides some cover" for people in the party. He ties it to last year's hack of the Democratic National Committee, which led to huge and damaging information dumps of DNC emails leading up to the 2016 election. But besides outright hacks, the source also said he liked the fact that Confide makes it difficult to screenshot messages, because only a few words are shown at a time. That suggests that it's useful not just for reducing paper trails, but for stopping insiders from preserving individual messages -- especially given the steady flow of leaks that have come out since Trump took office. As Axios notes, official White House business is subject to preservation rules, although we don't know much about who's allegedly using Confide and what they're doing with it, so it's not clear whether this might run afoul of those laws. It's also difficult to say how much this is a specifically Republican phenomenon, and how much is a general move toward encryption.