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Goodbye James Bond, hello big data
Just as the technological revolution has transformed how people live and do business, it has upended the often hidebound field of intelligence gathering. Where once the focus might have been on the savvy agent clandestinely dashing around the world, like James Bond, now it’s on something far less sexy but no less vital: big data. “That [Bond] model, if it was ever true, is completely over,” said Sir John Sawers, chief of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), known to fans of spy novels as MI6, from 2009 to 2014. “Now, the most important person in any intelligence service is the data analyst, because it’s the data analyst who will tell you where the threats are coming from and where the opportunities are emerging that you as an intelligence agency can exploit.”
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Combining old and new to create a novel power grid cybersecurity tool
An innovative R&D project that combines cybersecurity, machine learning algorithms and commercially available power system sensor technology to better protect the electric power grid has sparked interest from U.S. utilities, power companies and government officials. Creating innovative tools and technologies to reduce the risk that energy delivery might be disrupted by a cyber incident is vital to making the nation’s electric power grid resilient to cyber threats.
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Atomwaffen, extremist group whose members have been charged in five murders, loses some of its platforms
At least four technology companies have taken steps to bar Atomwaffen Division, a violent neo-Nazi organization, from using their online services and platforms to spread its message or fund its operations. The action comes after ProPublica reports detailing the organization’s terrorist ambitions and revealing that the California man charged with murdering Blaze Bernstein, a 19-year-old college student found buried in an Orange County park earlier this year, was an Atomwaffen member.
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“We can't let Putin and his allies succeed”: Sen. Mark Warner
In one of the more important speeches by a political leader in the last few years, Senator Mark Warner (D-Virginia), the vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, offered a sobering assessment of the challenge to U.S. interests and values posed by a resurgent Russia. “[W]hile our gaze shifted away from Russia, which we began to kind of write off and at a certain level dismiss as simply a regional power, Russia really never lost its focus on us,” Warner said. “Its geostrategic aim remains squarely targeted on the Western liberal order and, more specifically, on what its KGB-trained leadership views as the main enemy: The United States,” Warner said. “So Russia diligently honed and updated its toolkit for a different kind of Great Power rivalry. They couldn’t match us in the old Cold War paradigm, so Russia needed a strategy that would allow them to compete with us on a new, emerging battlefield,” Warner noted, adding that that the U.S. response is inadequate. “We need a president who will lead not just a whole-of-government effort, but in a sense a whole-of-society effort to try to take on these challenges. We need someone that will actually unify our nation against this growing asymmetric threat. We can’t let Putin and his allies succeed.”
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Russia used social media extensively to influence U.S. energy markets: Congressional panel
The U.S. House Science, Space, and Technology Committee last week released a staff report uncovering Russia’s extensive efforts to influence U.S. energy markets through divisive and inflammatory posts on social media platforms. The report details Russia’s motives in interfering with U.S. energy markets and influencing domestic energy policy and its manipulation of Americans via social media propaganda. The report includes examples of Russian-propagated social media posts.
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Kremlin hackers infiltrated the most secure German government communication network
The German government yesterday (Wednesday) confirmed that it had suffered a large cyberattack which infiltrated federal computer networks in search of sensitive information. Anonymous German law enforcement sources said that the Russia hacking group APT28, aka Fancy Bear, had placed malware in a government network and infiltrated both the Foreign Ministry and the Defense Ministry. Fancy Bear, which is one of the hacking groups operated by the GRU (Russia’s military intelligence branch), conducted the 2016 hacking campaign of the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign. The Russian government hackers managed to infiltrate the German government’s “Informationsverbund Berlin-Bonn” (IVBB) network, a communication network which was specially designed as a secure communications platform.
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Basic password guidance can dramatically improve account security
Technology users should be offered more detailed support and guidance when creating account passwords in order to make them more secure and harder to crack, a new study suggests. found those who receive basic guidance including password meters were up to 40 percent more likely to make their choices secure. However, those given feedback such as how likely it was that hackers could guess their passwords – and therefore access private information held in their accounts – were up to 10 times more likely to change their original choice to something more secure.
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Putin’s fear of democracy; Fancy Bear targets diplomats; Facebook weak filters, and more
· What scares Vladimir Putin the most? It’s still democracy.
· Trump has done nothing to stop Russia from meddling in the 2018 midterms
· Report: Russia probed at least 7 states’ voter systems before the 2016 election
· Follow the Russian natural gas
· State Department targeting Russia with anti-propaganda program
· Mueller asking if Trump knew about hacked Democratic emails before release
· Fancy Bear targeting North American, European diplomats
· Facebook’s ad confirmation process won’t stop the Russians
· Facebook’s ad confirmation process won’t stop the Russians
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Trump has not ordered disruption of Russia election meddling: NSA chief Adm. Rogers
President Donald Trump has not ordered, authorized, or given the U.S. intelligence agencies additional powers to retaliate against Russian meddling and disinformation campaigns, and prevent Russia’s plans to meddle in the 2018 midterm election. Adm. Mike Rogers, director of the NSA and head of the U.S. Cyber Command, said that U.S. weak response to Russian meddling in the 2016 election, and to Russia’s on-going hacking and disinformation campaign, has persuaded Vladimir Putin that there was “little price to pay” for continuing interference in the U.S. political system. “Clearly, what we’ve done hasn’t been enough,” Rogers told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “They have not paid a price that is sufficient to change their behavior.”
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Exploring solutions for the problem of "fake news"
A new report, titled “Dead Reckoning: Navigating Content Moderation after ‘Fake News’,” analyzes nascent solutions recently proposed by platform corporations, governments, news media industry coalitions, and civil society organizations to the problem of identifying, handling, and mitigating fake news. The report then explores potential approaches to containing fake news including trust and verification, disrupting economic incentives, de-prioritizing content and banning accounts, as well as limited regulatory approaches.
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New challenge for first responders: Fake News
First responders must find ways to address a new challenge: Not only do they have to deal with floods, storms, fires, earthquakes, active shooter events, and other natural and manmade crises – now they also have to find ways to deal with fake news. Social media may disseminate valuable and helpful information during disasters and extreme events – but it may also be used to spread fake news: disinformation and misinformation about the scope, nature, and sources, and location of a disaster or extreme incident. Such misinformation may not only confuse victims and potential victims, but also confuse and mislead first responders who rush to their rescue.
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Hacker-resistant power plant software in a successful Hawaii tryout
Johns Hopkins computer security experts recently traveled to Hawaii to see how well their hacker-resistant software would operate within a working but currently offline Honolulu power plant. The successful resilience testing, funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, was triggered in part by growing concerns about the vulnerability of electric power grids after two high-profile cyber-attacks by Russian government hackers turned out the lights in parts of Ukraine during the past two years. Neither outage in Kiev was long or extensive enough to cause serious harm or panic. Yet the attacks served as a wake-up call, putting a spotlight on power grid security in the United States and elsewhere.
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Global AI experts warn of malicious use of AI in the coming decade
Twenty-six experts on the security implications of emerging technologies have jointly authored an important new report, sounding the alarm about the potential malicious use of artificial intelligence (AI) by rogue states, criminals, and terrorists. Forecasting rapid growth in cyber-crime and the misuse of drones during the next decade – as well as an unprecedented rise in the use of “bots” to manipulate everything from elections to the news agenda and social media. the report calls for governments and corporations worldwide to address the clear and present danger inherent in the myriad applications of AI.
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Deep Fakes: A looming crisis for national security, democracy and privacy?
Events in the last few years, such as Russia’s broad disinformation campaign to undermine Western democracies, including the American democratic system, have offered a compelling demonstration of truth decay: how false claims — even preposterous ones — can be disseminated with unprecedented effectiveness today thanks to a combination of social media ubiquitous presence and virality, cognitive biases, filter bubbles, and group polarization. Robert Chesney and Danielle Citron write in Lawfare that the resulting harms are significant for individuals, businesses, and democracy – but that the problem may soon take a significant turn for the worse thanks to deep fakes. They urge us to get used to hearing that phrase. “It refers to digital manipulation of sound, images, or video to impersonate someone or make it appear that a person did something—and to do so in a manner that is increasingly realistic, to the point that the unaided observer cannot detect the fake. Think of it as a destructive variation of the Turing test: imitation designed to mislead and deceive rather than to emulate and iterate.”
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Financier of Russian troll farm supporting Trump funds anti-U.S. paramilitaries in Syria
Yevgeniy Prigozhin is a close ally of Vladimir Putin and the financial backer of the St. Petersburg-based troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency (IRA). The IRA has been at the center of the Kremlin’s disinformation campaign which was launched in 2014 to sow discord and deepen polarization and conflict in the United States (and other Western democracies) – and which, in 2016, changed focus to help Donald Trump win the Republican nomination and then the White House. According to U.S. intelligence, a Prigozhin-financed paramilitary group of Russian mercenaries attacked U.S. troops and their allies in Syria earlier this month. Prigozhin was in close touch with Putin and senior aides to Assad in the days and weeks before and after the assault.
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More headlines
The long view
States Rush to Combat AI Threat to Elections
By Zachary Roth
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
By Dino Jahic
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
By Trina West
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.