Searching for "security"

China hackers

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-hack-how-china-used-a-tiny-chip-to-infiltrate-america-s-top-companies

Nested on the servers’ motherboards, the testers found a tiny microchip, not much bigger than a grain of rice, that wasn’t part of the boards’ original design. Amazon reported the discovery to U.S. authorities, sending a shudder through the intelligence community. Elemental’s servers could be found in Department of Defense data centers, the CIA’s drone operations, and the onboard networks of Navy warships. And Elemental was just one of hundreds of Supermicro customers.

interdiction, consists of manipulating devices as they’re in transit from manufacturer to customer. This approach is favored by U.S. spy agencies, according to documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. The other method involves seeding changes from the very beginning.

In emailed statements, Amazon (which announced its acquisition of Elemental in September 2015), Apple, and Supermicro disputed summaries of Bloomberg Businessweek’s reporting.

The Chinese government didn’t directly address questions about manipulation of Supermicro servers, issuing a statement that read, in part, “Supply chain safety in cyberspace is an issue of common concern, and China is also a victim.” The FBI and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, representing the CIA and NSA, declined to comment.

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more on hackers in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=hacker

Oculus Quest and Education

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/oculus-quest-education-dave-dolan/

The Go had to be paired with a phone to enable it to work. How can that possibly be an option in a school with many dozens of headsets? Content had to either go through the Oculus Go Store, which is being shut down at this very moment, or side-loaded through an odd “Developer Mode” access, which is extremely difficult when dealing with large numbers of headsets. Even something as mundane as printing the serial number of that VR device on the headstrap, which can easily be mixed up with other headsets, is a troubling and odd choice to make. Those serial numbers are very important when bulk loading content onto a number of devices at a time, which is the only way they can be managed by school IT departments, and once again shows a lack of understanding of the needs from within schools.

Of course, there is also the elephant in the room… Facebook.

This mandatory attachment to a for-profit, social media behemoth, currently facing antitrust litigation [ Facebook Halts Sale of Rift & Quest in Germany Amid Regulatory Concerns ] should be reason enough to seriously question its inclusion into an academic institution.

Personal identifiability of user tracking data during observation of 360-degree VR video ]

Facebook is not content to use the contact information you willingly put into your Facebook profile for advertising. It is also using contact information you handed over for security purposes and contact information you didn’t hand over at all, but that was collected from other people’s contact books, a hidden layer of details Facebook has about you that some have come to call “shadow contact information.

 

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more on quest in this IMS blog
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China Trolls

Leaked Documents Show How China’s Army of Paid Internet Trolls Helped Censor the Coronavirus from r/worldnews

https://www.propublica.org/article/leaked-documents-show-how-chinas-army-of-paid-internet-trolls-helped-censor-the-coronavirus

At a time when digital media is deepening social divides in Western democracies, China is manipulating online discourse to enforce the Communist Party’s consensus. To stage-manage what appeared on the Chinese internet early this year, the authorities issued strict commands on the content and tone of news coverage, directed paid trolls to inundate social media with party-line blather and deployed security forces to muzzle unsanctioned voices.

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more on trolls in this IMS blog
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tech companies coalition sought

U.S. Policy on China May Move from ‘America First’ to America & Co.

A tech entrepreneur in the State Department is using network theory to counter Chinese pressure.

According to Krach, the Clean Network includes 180 telecom companies and 50 national governments that represent two-thirds of the world’s gross domestic product. Although that’s impressive, all countries aren’t equally committed.

The task of forming networks to counter China’s influence has been made easier by China itself, which has frightened and angered trading partners with its “wolf warrior” diplomacy, a newly belligerent pursuit of China’s national interests.

The Clean Network is to China what George Kennan’s “long telegram” [PDF] of 1946 was to the Soviet Union, wrote David Fidler, adjunct senior fellow for cybersecurity and global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, in a blog post in October.

But trade deals alone are not enough, says Martijn Rasser, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. For instance, they wouldn’t stop China from exporting its surveillance technology to countries such as Venezuela and Uganda, where it’s been used to target political activists, he says.

The Huawei war

https://mondediplo.com/2020/11/10huawei

Ren, a former engineer with the People’s Liberation Army who went into consumer electronics, played the patriotic card, cautioning Jiang that ‘switching equipment technology was related to national security, and that a nation that did not have its own switching equipment was like one that lacked its own military’ (1). A quarter of a century later, other countries, led by the US, have belatedly grasped the wisdom of Ren’s remarks; the technology in question today is 5G

The company operates networks in 170 countries and employs more than 194,000 people.

This summer it overtook Samsung as the world’s biggest seller of smartphones… boast some of the most advanced artificial intelligence capabilities on the market.

spending more than 10% of its annual profits on research and development. In 2019 it spent over $15bn — more than Apple and Microsoft — and the budget for 2020 is $20bn. (For comparison, the R&D spend of the entire German car industry in 2018 was roughly $30bn.)

Huawei and 5G are only a small part of a much larger geoeconomic and geopolitical struggle in which China is trying to gain the upper hand over the US.

Washington’s campaign against Chinese tech includes firms such as the state-owned ZTE, another important player in the 5G field, WeChat and TikTok and many other lesser-known companies. But Huawei is its main target.

Washington sees Huawei as an arch-example of China’s rogue behaviour (widely mistaken for meritocratic market success) — stealing intellectual property, bullying partners and undercutting competitors

The EU has failed to agree a common policy on 5G.

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more on Huawei in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=huawei

Chief Disinformation Officer

“Trying to debunk misinformation after it has spread is like shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted. By pre-bunking, we aim to stop the spread of fake news in the first place,” said Dr Sander van der Linden, Director of the Cambridge Social Decision-Making lab and senior author of the new study.Game combats political misinformation by letting players undermine democracy: A short online game in which players are recruited as a “Chief Disinformation Officer” and use tactics like trolling to sabotage elections in a peaceful town has shown to reduce susceptibility to political misinformation from r/science

https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/game-combats-political-misinformation-by-letting-players-undermine-democracy

Game combats political misinformation by letting players undermine democracy

The free-to-play Harmony Square is released to the public today, along with a study on its effectiveness published in the Harvard Misinformation Review

It has been created by University of Cambridge psychologists with support from the US Department of State’s Global Engagement Center and Department of Homeland Security Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

 

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more on disinformation in this IMS blog
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Vatican bots hackers

Vatican enlists bots to protect library from onslaught of hackers from r/technology

Vatican enlists bots to protect library from onslaught of hackers

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/08/vatican-enlists-bots-to-protect-library-from-onslaught-of-hackers

The library has partnered with Darktrace, a company founded by Cambridge University mathematicians, which claims to be the first to develop an AI system for cybersecurity.

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more on bots in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=bots

Spain tackles fake news

https://english.elpais.com/politics/2020-11-09/spain-to-monitor-online-fake-news-and-give-a-political-response-to-disinformation-campaigns.html

While the text does not mention specific cases, Russian interference has been proven in the 2016 election campaign in the United States, which saw Donald Trump victorious, as well as the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom the same year, which saw voters narrowly decide they wanted their country to leave the European Union.

the text relies on the classification of the European Commission: “Verifiably false or misleading information created, presented and disseminated for economic gain or to intentionally deceive the public.” This includes electoral processes, but also sectors such as health, environment or security. The text underlines that the current coronavirus pandemic has been accompanied by an “unprecedented infodemic,” i.e. a proliferation of fake news.

The document recognizes that the “news media, digital platforms, academic world, technology sector, NGOs and society in general play an essential role in the fight against disinformation, with actions such as its identification and not contributing to its spread, the promotion of activities that raise awareness and training or the development of tools to avoid its propagation.”

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more on fake news in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=fake+news

Twitter hacked

Twitter Continues to Face Scrutiny Amidst Political Backlash Due to High-Profile Hack

By IGI Global on Oct 22, 2020
https://www.igi-global.com/newsroom/archive/year-old-hack-twitter-could/4668/
the New York Department of Financial Services (DFS) has released an investigation report on Twitter. This report outlines the high profile attack that overtook popular celebrity accounts (including former U.S. president Barack Obama, celebrity and businesswoman Kim Kardashian West, Amazon mogul Jeff Bezos, and other notable celebrities) and led to the theft of US$ 118,000 in bitcoin.
DFS has called on the U.S. government to regulate social media platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook, on cybersecurity, along with antitrust and content moderation.
Prof. Sachin Tiwari, from Jawaharlal Nehru University, India, analyzes the meaning and nature of cybercrime legislation as well as the scope of policy formation in the global narrative of cybersecurity in his article, “Cyber Crime Regulation, Challenges, and Response,” sourced from the  Encyclopedia of Criminal Activities and the Deep Web (IGI Global).
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more on Twitter in this IMS blog
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