Welcome to Cyber Security Today. This is the Week in Review edition for the week ending Friday, December 2nd, 2022. From Toronto, I’m Howard Solomon, contributing reporter on cybersecurity for ITWorldCanada.com.

In a few minutes David Shipley of Beauceron Security will join me to discuss recent cybersecurity news. But first a look back at some of what happened in the last seven days:

A member of the Alberta legislature was fined $7,200 for an unauthorized penetration test of a provincial vaccine portal. Did he do anything different from what security researchers and reporters do? David will have some thoughts.

Speaking of fines, Facebook’s parent company Meta Platforms was fined the equivalent of US$227 million by Ireland’s privacy commissioner for not adequately protecting personal information last year, allowing hackers to scrape the profile data of over 500 million people. And France’s data protection regulator fined an electricity provider the Canadian

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Today, the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario (FedDev Ontario) announced an investment of more than $10 million in three Kitchener-Waterloo tech companies.

Miovision Technologies is a Kitchener-based company that lets cities and towns reduce traffic congestion and vehicle emissions while improving public safety through intelligent transportation solutions. With the $7.4-million repayable investment through the Jobs and Growth Fund, Miovision will develop TrafficLink and Scout, its traffic monitoring hardware and software. It also plans to increase its network by up to 100,000 intersections in North America over the next four years, and will further its transition into “Smart City” technologies, expanding its presence globally and adding 58 jobs,

Advanced Electrophoresis Solutions Ltd. is a Cambridge medical technology manufacturer specializing in the development of testing instruments for pharmaceutical companies to analyze protein structures and interactions. The repayable investment of over $1.7 million, through the Business Scale-up and Productivity stream

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On the second day of Amazon Web Services (AWS) re:Invent, Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of AWS Data and Machine Learning (ML) revealed the latest innovations during his keynote.

To start, Sivasubramanian announced the launch of Amazon Athena for Apache Spark, which he said will provide organizations with a more intuitive way to run complex data analytics. He noted that Apache Spark will run three times faster on AWS.

The next product announcement was of the general availability of Amazon DocumentDB Elastic Clusters, a fully-managed solution to quickly scale document workloads of any size. Elastic Clusters integrates with other AWS services, similar to Amazon DocumentDB.

Amazon SageMaker now supports Geospatial ML, giving access to multiple new kinds of data. A demo of the updates showed how it could help save lives in natural disasters, predicting dangerous road conditions due to rising flood water levels, and demonstrated how this technology

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The signing of a long-term technology agreement is certainly common enough, but according to a group of lawyers with Norton Rose Fulbright Canada LLP, there is a myriad of legal implications that need to be considered once the physical outsourcing and procurement takes place.

Exactly what those are was outlined recently at the company’s inaugural virtual technology privacy and cybersecurity summit, during an opening panel that focused on risk management in technology contracts.

According to the firm, as “businesses continue to engage in digital transformation, they are relying more and more on outsourcing and technology procurement for additional resources and expertise.”

Moderated by Liana Di Giorgio, senior associate with Norton Rose Fulbright in Toronto, the panel consisted of Janet Grove, a partner from the firm’s Vancouver office who focuses on technology and life sciences, Fahad Siddiqui, a litigation partner based in Toronto, and Nikita Stepin, a business law

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