Group items tagged

"The business, political and geopolitical mischief possible with manipulated data, audio or video is almost limitless; think manufactured video of Jeff Bezos-whose personal life has already apparently been the target of sophisticated adversaries and extortion plots-using a racial slur; grainy fake video or audio of Joe Biden admitting to assaulting Tara Reade; grainy video of Trump saying he plans to nuke Iran in one hour; or even Anthony Fauci saying that he's doctoring the Covid death tolls. "

"The answer is simple: nobody, including opinion pollsters, knew about the Trump campaign's astonishing mastery of social media, especially Facebook. Trump may not have known much about that at the time - he really only understood Twitter - but Brad Parscale and his team sure knew how to make use of Facebook's micro-targeting machine. And they did."

"The new malware, called Anubis, seems to use code forked from Loki. It steals crypto wallet credentials, credit card details and other valuable information from these Windows users. According to MSI, it first discovered the malware in June in the cybercriminal underground. It has the same name with another potent banking Trojan that has been targeting Android smartphones for months."

"Criminals often hide illicit data on the XBox in the hope that a gaming console will not be seen as a likely evidence target especially when conventional personal computers are present in the same premises, for instance"

"Facebook knows its systems lead teenagers to anorexia-related content. The company had to "break the glass" and turn back on safety settings after the 6 January Washington riots. Facebook intentionally targets teenagers and children under 13. Monday's outage that brought down Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp meant that for more than five hours Facebook could not "destabilise democracies"."

"This is called a supply-chain attack, because it targets a supplier to an organization rather than an organization itself - and can affect all of a supplier's customers. It's an increasingly common way to attack networks. Other examples of this sort of attack include fake apps in the Google Play store, and hacked replacement screens for your smartphone."

""Their position is that because Mr Musk is famous and might be more of a target for deep fakes, his public statements are immune," Pennypacker wrote, adding that such arguments would allow Musk and other famous people "to avoid taking ownership of what they did actually say and do"."

"In the 20 years since the birth of social media, child sexual exploitation has become one of the biggest challenges facing tech companies. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the internet is used by human traffickers as "digital hunting fields", allowing them access to both customers and potential victims, with children being targeted by traffickers on social media platforms. The biggest of these, Facebook, is owned by Meta, the tech giant whose platforms, which also include Instagram, are used by more than 3 billion people worldwide. In 2020, according to a report by US-based not-for-profit the Human Trafficking Institute, Facebook was the platform most used to groom and recruit children by sex traffickers (65%), based on an analysis of 105 federal child sex trafficking cases that year. The HTI analysis ranked Instagram second most prevalent, with Snapchat third."

"A new botnet is actively targeting IoT devices using payloads compiled for a dozen CPU architectures and uses them to launch several types of DDoS and to spread various types of malware. The Dark Nexus botnet as it was named by the Bitdefender researchers who discovered it has gone through a very fast development process since it was initially spotted."

"Late last year, IBM took the record for the largest quantum computing system with a processor that contained 433 quantum bits, or qubits, the fundamental building blocks of quantum information processing. Now, the company has set its sights on a much bigger target: a 100,000-qubit machine that it aims to build within 10 years."

"The campaign's most organized form involves a database set up by anonymous activists that lists targets in the military, their photos, their locations, and how they have offended. Offenders are ranked by "traitor level," from "elite" to "low." Individuals have also taken social punishment into their own hands by creating Facebook groups and viral posts that share the identities of military family members or supporters. For the anti-coup population living abroad, the main objective is to get generals' family members living outside the country deported and their assets frozen. Within Myanmar, the goal is social and economic pressure, with boycotts on businesses and brands, and hopes that social shaming will convince military affiliates to work against their families and support the Civil Disobedience Movement."

"Astonishingly, even as the UK government praises end-to-end encryption abroad, it is undermining it at home. The Online Safety Bill, which continues to proceed through parliament after being mentioned in the Queen's Speech, will target platforms that use end-to-end encryption by "placing a duty of care on service providers within the scope of the draft bill to moderate illegal and harmful content on their platforms, with fines and penalties for those that fail to uphold this duty". "

"Campaigners fear the face-scanning technology could be used against protesters, and that police have done so before. The Met insisted the technology would not be used to quell lawful protest or target activists. But campaign groups do not believe them. Britain's biggest force said: "It is not used to identify people who are linked to, or have been convicted of, being involved in protest activity." A leading academic expert said the number of people whose faces would be scanned would make it the largest deployment yet of live facial recognition (LFR) in the UK."

"After "social engineering" efforts using personal details to target staff were uncovered, badges no longer carry last names, clean-desk policies are far more strictly enforced and the processing and communication of sensitive information is now subject to higher bars of regular mandatory training."

"A sleepy town in southern Spain is in shock after it emerged that AI-generated naked images of young local girls had been circulating on social media without their knowledge. The pictures were created using photos of the targeted girls fully clothed, many of them taken from their own social media accounts. These were then processed by an application that generates an imagined image of the person without clothes on."

"The January snow lay thick on the Moscow ground, as masked officers of the FSB - Russia's fearsome security agency - prepared to smash down the doors at one of 25 addresses they would raid that day. Their target was REvil, a shadowy conclave of hackers that claimed to have stolen more than $100m (£74m) a year through "ransomware" attacks, before suddenly disappearing. As group members were led away in cuffs, FSB officers gathered crypto-wallets containing untold volumes of digital currency such as bitcoin. Others used money-counting machines to tot up dozens of stacks of hundred dollar bills."

"And Israeli company Optimove is helping. It normally gathers customer data to create targeted online ads, but as a service to gambling companies it has trained its AI to flag the online players who are most at risk.  It analyzes the behavior patterns characteristic of gambling addicts, which include the hours of the day and night when they place bets, the time they spend on the betting site, and how much they keep on playing to 'chase their losses'."

""Bots view, 'like,' subscribe and repost content and manipulate view counts to move content up in search results and recommendation lists," the analysis said. In some cases, Fabrika targets users with disinformation directly after gleaning their emails and phone numbers from databases. The campaign's goals include demoralising Ukrainians and exploiting divisions among western states, the document added. Experts have downplayed the 1% claim. Alan Woodward, a professor of cybersecurity at Surrey University, said the figure sounded implausible and that sock puppet accounts - a term for accounts with fake identities - need their content to be reposted by plausible accounts such as those operated by influencers."

"W hat What do I mean when I say the internet is reading my mind? I don't mean simply that it collects my data and observes patterns and interacts with me by reconfiguring that data in ways designed to engage me. I'm not talking only about targeted ads; as they have become increasingly sophisticated, my sense of failure when I succumb to them has morphed into something more like begrudging respect. You got me, internet. I bought those Instagram jogging pants. I am no different from every other playable bundle of synapses holding a phone."

"The personal details of millions of voters are believed to have been accessed in an attack by China on Britain's democratic process, ministers will say. MPs and peers are thought to be among 43 people who the government looks set to confirm have been targeted by cyber-attacks backed by the Chinese state. The UK could impose sanctions on individuals believed to be involved in these acts of state-backed interference, one of which was a separate attack on the Electoral Commission in which Beijing accessed the personal details of about 40 million voters."