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British Army to Engage in Social Media Warfare as New Cyber Division Unveiled
The British Army is to engage in social media warfare, its most senior soldier has announced as he launched a new division of the military dedicated to fighting cyber threats. The new formation, titled 6 Division (6 Div), will seek to influence the behavior of the public and adversaries by specializing in “information warfare.” It is expected to react to social media “attacks” on Britain, and proactively launch similar offensives.
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Facebook Isn’t Responsible as Terrorist Platform, Court Says
Facebook Inc. doesn’t have to face a lawsuit by victims of Hamas attacks and their relatives who claimed that the social network unlawfully assisted the terror group, a federal appeals court ruled. the lawsuit was among several around the U.S. testing whether victims of terrorist attacks and their families can hold social-media companies to account for allowing violent extremists to use their platforms to recruit followers. The terrorism victims attempted for the first time to argue that social-media companies could be held liable under the U.S. Anti-Terrorism Act.
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Tech Companies Not Doing Enough to Fight Phishing Scams
Technology companies could be doing much more to protect individuals and organizations from the threats posed by phishing, according to new research. However, users also need to make themselves more aware of the dangers to ensure potential scammers do not obtain access to personal or sensitive information.
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State Election Offices Made for an Easy Target for Russian Hackers
In the months before the 2016 presidential election, one U.S. state received a notification from a federally backed cybersecurity group, warning about suspicious cyber activity directed at its networks. The state IT officials did not share the alert with other state government leaders and as late at January 2018, the same officials reported nothing “irregular, inconsistent, or suspicious” took place before the vote. In fact, GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency, had scanned one of the state’s “election-related” domains, according to a new Senate report.
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The Kremlin Weaponized News: RT and Sputnik
Russian government media outlets RT and Sputnik perform three functions on behalf of the Kremlin, its policies, and its preferences. The first is “damage control” function for the Russian state during incidents such as the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in the United Kingdom. The second is to project Russian strength and construct news agendas favorable to the Kremlin and its outlook. The third function is weakening Western democracies by discrediting democratic, free-market, liberal, and pluralist values.
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Hacking Connected Cars to Gridlock Whole Cities
In the year 2026, at rush hour, your self-driving car abruptly shuts down right where it blocks traffic. You climb out to see gridlock down every street in view, then a news alert on your watch tells you that hackers have paralyzed all Manhattan traffic by randomly stranding internet-connected cars. Researchers warn that even with increasingly tighter cyber defenses, the amount of data breached has soared in the past four years, but objects becoming hackable can convert the rising cyber threat into a potential physical menace.
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2020 Election Security Can’t Wait Till 2020
In the wake of last week’s testimony by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the detailed report released by the Senate Intelligence Committee, the press coverage has emphasized—understandably—the need to harden U.S. defenses against various forms of cyber interference that Russia—and now Iran, too—appear intent on carrying out in the 2020 election. While it’s true that 2020 election security is critical, it’s important to emphasize that protecting our elections can’t wait until 2020 is upon us. That’s because, if our foreign adversaries’ goal is (as the Senate Intelligence Committee report confirmed) to undermine American confidence in our own democracy, the opportunities to do so are already unfolding.
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Sounding the Alarm about Another Kind of 9/11
Richard Clarke knows some things about clear and present dangers. As the first U.S. counterterrorism czar, he tried to alert important White House decision-makers before September 11 about the threat of a terrorist attack on U.S. soil, but those warnings were largely ignored; afterwards, he famously apologized publicly for the government’s failures. These days, Clarke is trying to get people to think hard about the next big attack—the cyber version—and all the ones that have already happened.
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Hackers’ Latest Target: School Districts
Some hackers demand ransom; others sweep up personal data for sale to identity thieves. But whatever hackers’ motives, school systems around the country have been the targets of their cyberattacks. Nearly two-thirds of school districts in the United States serve fewer than 2,500 students, and many do not have a staff member dedicated solely to cybersecurity.
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U.S. Election Infrastructure: Troubling Bipartisan Conclusions
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) released its first of several bipartisan reports about its own investigation into Russia’s 2016 election interference on Thursday. This one focused on Russian efforts against U.S. election infrastructure. The finding that dominated headlines was that Russia targeted election systems in all 50 states in 2016. This meant the Russian effort reached far deeper into the U.S. than previously understood by officials. What also caught people’s attention about the report was how heavily redacted it was. The report, with its worrying conclusions, provokes one overwhelming question: What can be done to stop this from happening again?
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What the Mueller Investigation Was Always About
In the partisan warfare that dominated last Wednesday’s hearings, we’ve forgotten the point: Our elections are under threat, and the president doesn’t much care. Robert Mueller was originally charged with investigating Russian efforts to influence the outcome of the 2016 election and that only secondarily was he tasked with figuring out whether the president had obstructed justice by impeding that investigation. The whole point of the Mueller investigation and report is that Russia hacked an election, that it is right now hacking the next election, and that this is a threat to national security and the long-standing American experiment in representative democracy.
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Russian Twitter Trolls Stoke Anti-immigrant Lies Ahead of Canadian Election
Russian troll activity on Twitter aimed at influencing public opinion has attracted a lot of attention in the United States and other western democracies. Canadians may feel it’s not an issue here. But a recent examination of Twitter data suggests there are reasons to be concerned as the country heads into a federal election.
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Russia Targeted Election Infrastructure in All 50 States in 2016: Senate Intel Report
On Thursday the Senate Intelligence Committee releases the first volume in the Committee’s bipartisan investigation into Russia’s attempts to interfere with the 2016 U.S. elections, dealing with Russia’s attacks on the U.S. election infrastructure. The Committee found that Russia targeted election systems in all 50 states in 2016. In the majority of cases, Russia’s attacks went undetected by the states and federal officials at the time. The report suggested that the Russian efforts in 2016 might have been cataloging options “for use at a later date” — a possibility that officials of the National Security Agency, DHS, and the FBI said was their biggest worry.
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Russian Government-linked Hacker Group Releases Powerful Adroid Malware
The St. Petersburg-based Special Technology Center (STC), a Russian technology group linked to the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence branch, was sanctioned by the U.S. government for its role in the 2016 Kremlin-directed cyberattacks on the U.S. election infrastructure. STC is back in the news. This time, for developing n especially powerful and persistent malware, dubbed Monokle.
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Using Social Media to Analyze, Thwart Terrorist Activity
It is known that much terrorist activity utilizes the power and immediacy of online social media and social networking tools to coordinate its attacks, rally support and spread the various agendas of the different groups and networks. Researchers explains how we might turn the tables on the terrorists and use those tools to analyze terrorist activity and make predictions about future scenarios, and so have the tools to thwart them in their deadly endeavors.
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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.