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Facebook’s war on fake news is gaining ground
In the two years since fake news on the Internet became a full-blown crisis, Facebook has taken numerous steps to curb the flow of misinformation on its site. Under intense political pressure, it’s had to put up a fight: At the peak in late 2016, Facebook users shared, liked, or commented on an estimated 200 million false stories in a single month. A new study is shedding light on a key question: Are Facebook’s countermeasures making a difference?
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S&T awards $11.6 million to defend against network, internet disruptions
Five research organizations were awarded separate contracts totaling $11,511,565 to develop new methods to identify and attribute Network/Internet-scale Disruptive Events (NIDEs), the DHS S&T announced last week.
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Cyber insurance market to double by 2020: Munich Re
Cyber risks are one of the biggest threats to the digital and networked economy. The most important thing for companies is to ensure they have the best possible technical prevention. Munich Re says it is developing insurance products and services that offer policyholders the greatest possible protection.
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Securing Americans’ votes
To protect the integrity and security of U.S. elections, all local, state, and federal elections should be conducted using human-readable paper ballots by the 2020 presidential election, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences. In addition, every effort should be made to use paper ballots in the 2018 federal election. Ballots that have been marked by voters should not be returned over the Internet or any network connected to it, because no current technology can guarantee their secrecy, security, and verifiability, the report says.
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Why and how people forget passwords
Do you frequently forget passwords to a baffling array of accounts and websites? Much depends on a password’s importance and how often you use it, according researchers. Their study could spur improved password technology and use.
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Dojo by BullGuard establishes lab at Cyber@BGU
Dojo by BullGuard, an Internet of Things (IoT) security specialist, and BGN Technologies, the technology transfer company of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU), have announced a partnership to develop advanced technologies for automated IoT threat detection, employing artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms.
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Twitter, Facebook face senators again
The Senate Intelligence Committee is set to hear from two top social media executives today (Wednesday) on what they have been doing to combat the spread of propaganda and disinformation online and how they are prepared to help secure the integrity of upcoming elections. The committee will hear from Twitter Co-Founder and CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg – but one chair, reserved for Google cofounder Larry Page, may remain empty. The committee extended the invitation to Google CEO Sundar Pichai as well as Larry Page, who is CEO of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, but the company wanted to send senior vice president Kent Walker instead. The committee made it clear it is not interested in hearing from Walker.
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Fax machines and coffee pots – the surprising ways you could be hacked
Hopefully you protect your computers from cyberattacks. You might have anti-virus software on your phone, tablet, laptop or desktop. You might avoid using them to visit suspicious websites and carefully protect your various login details. But it’s no longer just what we typically think of as computers that are connected to the internet and so at risk of cyberattacks. And if multiple devices are connected to the same network in your home or office, then if a hacker breaks into one machine they could gain access to all of them.
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Confused about who to believe when information clashes? Our research may help
“Just remember, what you are seeing and what you are reading is not what’s happening,” Donald Trump, the president of the United States, once said at a rally. There is no doubt that we have entered a new age of bewilderment in which it is harder than ever before to decide where the truth lies. The rise of social media has generated a cacophony of contradictory information, mixed in with fake news on an industrial scale. Despite this, many people actually consider social media to be more credible and honest than mainstream media.
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The FBI launches a Combating Foreign Influence webpage
The FBI on Thursday has launched a webpage dedicated to combating foreign influence. The webpage aims to educate the public about the threats faced from disinformation campaigns, cyberattacks, and the overall impact of foreign influence on society. The FBI is the lead federal agency responsible for investigating foreign influence operations.
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Russia is co-opting angry young men
It seems almost too strange to be true: fight clubs, neo-Nazi soccer hooligans, motorcycle gangs, and other violent fringe elements are serving as conduits for the Kremlin’s influence operations in Western countries. “It sounds more like an episode of The Americans with a dash of Mad Max and Fight Club mixed in,” Michael Carpenter writes, “[y]et this is exactly what is happening across Europe and North America as Russia’s intelligence services co-opt fringe radicals and angry young men to try to undermine Western democracies from within. And not just in the virtual world, but in real life.”
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Unsecured, obsolete medical record systems and medical devices risk patient lives
A team of physicians and computer scientists has shown that it is easy to modify medical test results remotely by attacking the connection between hospital laboratory devices and medical record systems. These types of attacks might be more likely used against high-profile targets, such as heads of state and celebrities, than against the general public. But they could also be used by a nation-state to cripple the United States’ medical infrastructure.
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Control system simulator helps operators to fight hackers
A simulator that comes complete with a virtual explosion could help the operators of chemical processing plants – and other industrial facilities – learn to detect attacks by hackers bent on causing mayhem. The simulator will also help students and researchers understand better the security issues of industrial control systems.
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Fortnite is setting a dangerous security trend
Cybercriminals have just been given yet another route to get malicious software (malware) onto your personal mobile devices. The hugely popular video game Fortnite has become one of the first major apps to bypass official app stores and encourage users to download its software directly.
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Germany creates cybersecurity R&D agency
The German government today (Wednesday) announced the creation of a new federal agency to develop cutting-edge cyber defense technology. The agency would resemble the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is credited with developing the early internet and GPS. The German agency, unlike DARPA, will focus on cyber defense ad cyber protection. DARPA’s range of defense-related research and development is much broader.
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More headlines
The long view
States Rush to Combat AI Threat to Elections
This year’s presidential election will be the first since generative AI became widely available. That’s raising fears that millions of voters could be deceived by a barrage of political deepfakes. Congress has done little to address the issue, but states are moving aggressively to respond — though questions remain about how effective any new measures to combat AI-created disinformation will be.
Ransomware Attacks: Death Threats, Endangered Patients and Millions of Dollars in Damages
A ransomware attack on Change Healthcare, a company that processes 15 billion health care transactions annually and deals with 1 in 3 patient records in the United States, is continuing to cause massive disruptions nearly three weeks later. The incident, which started on February 21, has been called the “most significant cyberattack on the U.S. health care system” by the American Hospital Association. It is just the latest example of an increasing trend.
Chinese Government Hackers Targeted Critics of China, U.S. Businesses and Politicians
An indictment was unsealed Monday charging seven nationals of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) with conspiracy to commit computer intrusions and conspiracy to commit wire fraud for their involvement in a PRC-based hacking group that spent approximately 14 years targeting U.S. and foreign critics, businesses, and political officials in furtherance of the PRC’s economic espionage and foreign intelligence objectives.
Autonomous Vehicle Technology Vulnerable to Road Object Spoofing and Vanishing Attacks
Researchers have demonstrated the potentially hazardous vulnerabilities associated with the technology called LiDAR, or Light Detection and Ranging, many autonomous vehicles use to navigate streets, roads and highways. The researchers have shown how to use lasers to fool LiDAR into “seeing” objects that are not present and missing those that are – deficiencies that can cause unwarranted and unsafe braking or collisions.
Tantalizing Method to Study Cyberdeterrence
Tantalus is unlike most war games because it is experimental instead of experiential — the immersive game differs by overlapping scientific rigor and quantitative assessment methods with the experimental sciences, and experimental war gaming provides insightful data for real-world cyberattacks.