Russia Targets Election Software | The QAnon Candidates Are Here | America’s Slowing Innovation Engine, and more

TikTok Dumps QAnon Channels, Following Twitter’s Crackdown (Jeff Stone, Defense One)
The only thing social media companies can seemingly agree upon when it comes to moderating content on their platforms is that QAnon crosses the line. TikTok has removed a number of hashtags associated with the far-right conspiracy theory group is poised to limit the spread of the group that the FBI has described as a domestic terrorism threat. The company has made it more difficult for users to search for popular hashtags, reportedly including “QAnon” and “QAnonTruth,” among others, following a similar announcement from Twitter that it would remove 7,000 accounts and limit 150,000 more.
QAnon has pushed the unfounded conspiracy theory that President Donald Trump is fighting a “deep state” of government officials, celebrities and business leaders who secretly work as child sex traffickers and control global order.
Sixty-six current or former [Republican] congressional candidates for the 2020 elections have backed the theory in some form.

The QAnon Candidates Are Here. Trump Has Paved Their Way.(Matthew Rosenberg and Jennifer Steinhauer, New York Times)
The conspiracy theorists accuse Democrats and even fellow Republicans of being beholden to a cabal of bureaucrats, pedophiles and Satanists. President Trump has cheered them on.

There’s a Bigger Threat Than Big Tech. It’s Big China (Emily de La Bruyère, Defense One)
As lawmakers grill U.S. technology CEOs, they should ask not just about their near-monopoly power today, but also about staving off Chinese dominance tomorrow.

Twilio Breach Spotlights Struggle to Keep Corporate Software Kits out of the Wrong Hands (Sean Lyngaas, Cyberscoop)
The security team at Twilio, a cloud communications company that claimed over $1 billion in revenue last year, could breathe a sigh of relief on Sunday night. Earlier in the day, someone had manipulated the code in a software product that Twilio customers use to route calls and other communications. The breach resembled a Magecart-style attack that skims websites for users’ financial data. Twilio cleaned up the code hours later, and said there was no sign the attackers had accessed customer data. But the damage could have been worse if the attack had been targeted, multiple security experts told CyberScoop.

ISIS Exploiting Coronavirus Security Gaps to Relaunch Insurgency, UN Report Warns (Paul Cruickshank, CNN)
There has been a significant rise in ISIS attacks in Iraq and Syria, with the group exploiting security gaps in Iraq caused by the coronavirus pandemic to relaunch and invigorate its rural insurgency in the country, according to a report submitted to the UN Security Council that was made public on Thursday. The wide-ranging report, put together by the UN monitoring team that tracks the global jihadi terror threat, states that the group is consolidating in Iraq and Syria and “showing confidence in its ability to increasingly operate in a brazen manner in its former core area.” It states that the number of ISIS attacks in Iraq and Syria “increased significantly in early 2020 as compared with the same period in 2019.”

IS Prisoner Issue a Ticking Timebomb for the West (Frank Gardner, BBC)
The latent danger posed by thousands of defeated and captured fighters who joined the Islamic State (IS) group is festering and growing in the squalid, overcrowded prison camps of north-east Syria, where riots and attempted breakouts are becoming commonplace.