Feb 9, 2018 By Harry Funk staff Writer hfunk@thealmanac.Net 5 min read

So, you’re not on social media. No Facebook or Twitter for you, or at most you’ve just dabbled for the sake of keeping track of what your kids might be doing.

You’re safe, then, from those pesky criminals who poke around the Internet for your personal information. Right?

Not so fast, according to Theresa Payton.

Town Hall South 2018-19 lineup

For its 50th season, the Town Hall South lecture series features:

• Jon Meacham, Oct. 2. The Pulitzer Prize winner for his biography of Andrew Jackson and author of a best-selling bio of George H.W. Bush will share his depth of knowledge about politics, religion and current affairs.
• Adam Steltzner, Nov. 6. For nearly a decade, Steltzner has led the team NASA that invented the “sky crane” system that landed the Mars rover Curiosity on the planet’s surface in 2012. He also leads NASA’s Mars 2020 Project to gather core samples for research.
• Francine Segan, Dec. 4. One of the nation’s foremost experts on Italian cuisine, Segan is a food historian and a James Beard-nominated author of six books, including “Dolci: Italy’s Sweets and Pasta Modern.” She hosts the weekly New York City TV series “Americans who Love Italy.”
• Lara Logan, Feb. 5. The “60 Minutes” correspondent’s assignments have taken her from the front lines of the Ebola crisis to the forests of central Africa, where she did a story on veterinarians treating endangered mountain gorillas in the wild.
• David Eagleman, March 5. In his PBS series “The Brain,” Eagleman provides viewers with a deeper understanding of themselves, the unseen world of decisions and of modern neuroscience. His books include the bestseller “Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain.”

For more information, www.townhallsouth.org.

The White House chief information officer under George W. Bush and head of intelligence on the CBS-TV reality series “Hunted” spoke Feb. 6 at the Town Hall South lecture series, offering a comprehensive and somewhat dizzying journey through the world of cybersecurity, a concept that didn’t exist until the vast majority of the audience was well into adulthood.

A video clip she showed from “Hunted” demonstrates the relative ease by which cybersecurity experts – and by extension, cybercriminals – can track down what they need to make educated guesses about, say, what your passwords might be.

The series, which aired in early 2017, offered a $250,000 prize to a pair of fugitives who could elude capture. The network kept its money in all but two of the cases, as the show’s experts were able to piece together what they needed to know, drawing at times on the social media presence of the subjects’ friends and family members.

Payton’s talk addressed various other threats that computer users around the world face, how criminals change their tactics as technology evolves, and how security professionals must adapt constantly, as well.

“This is not a career for people who like the same,” she said.

As chief executive officer of Fortalice Solutions, a security consulting firm, and co-founder of Dark Cubed, a cybersecurity product company, Payton must stay on top of developments that at first glance may seem like science fiction. And so she enlightened audience members in the Upper St. Clair High School Theater about perplexing-to-most-of-us concepts such as:

• Quantum computing: Historically, computers have processed instructions through binary code, the somewhat familiar series of 0’s and 1’s. Quantum computers can incorporate both digits simultaneously, Payton explained, “to solve mathematical problems at a speed we’ve never seen before.”
• Artificial intelligence: Although the term has been bandied about since the 1950s, often as the basis for fanciful stories about computers taking over the world – “The Terminator” is Exhibit A – today’s research aims to equip a computer with the ability to learn from its environment “to serve us better,” Payton said.
• Machine learning

• , which also has etymological roots dating back to the ’50s and closely related to AI, is intended to give computers the ability to learn without being specifically programmed.

And of course, there’s ransomware, the type of malicious software by which attackers are able to stop computers from operating – they also have the ability to delete data – until victims pay a ransom, usually in Bitcoin or another type of cryptocurrency.

Payton provided a primer on the digital decentralized medium of exchange, even demonstrating how to open a Bitcoin account in the safest possible manner. She cautioned, though, to conduct plenty of research before doing so.

Cybercriminals, after all, always are doing research, too.

For more information, visit fortalicesolutions.com.