• Online campaigning poses a risk to democracy: Experts

    A working group set up by the London School of Economics said that there is a need for an in-depth, independent, research driven, evidence-based review of the role of social media in political campaigning. “There is a real danger that public trust in the democratic process will be lost. There is real potential for foreign influence. We have now the ability to manipulate public opinion on a level we have never seen before. And the current framework is weak and helpless,” said the lead author of an LSE policy brief.

  • Repeat performance: Russia’s French connection

    After interfering in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections, the FSB and GRU, Russia’s two intelligence agencies, have turned their attention to Europe: The two rounds of France’s presidential election will be held in late April and early-May, and Germany’s parliamentary election will be held in September. In France, Russia’s preferred candidate is Marine Le Pen, the leader of the populist, far-right, National Front. But polls show that while Le Pen may just win the first round of the election (to be held 23 April), she will be easily defeated in the second round (7 May) by either the centrist Emmanuel Macron or the conservative Francois Fillon. Putin did not want Hillary Clinton in the White House, and he does not want Emmanuel Macron in the Élysée Palace. Yes, Le Pen is Putin’s preferred candidate, but since she cannot win, then Francois Fillon will do.

  • Android apps can conspire to mine information from your smartphone

    Mobile phones have increasingly become the repository for the details that drive our everyday lives. But researchers have recently discovered that the same apps we regularly use on our phones to organize lunch dates, make convenient online purchases, and communicate the most intimate details of our existence have secretly been colluding to mine our information.

  • Google’s AI tool for video searching can be easily deceived

    Researchers have shown that Google’s new tool that uses machine learning to automatically analyze and label video content can be deceived by inserting a photograph periodically and at a very low rate into videos. After they inserted an image of a car into a video about animals, for instance, the system returned results suggesting the video was about an Audi.

  • U.K. airports, nuclear power stations on terror alert following “credible” threat

    Airports and nuclear power stations in the United Kingdom have been instructed to bolster their defenses against terrorist attacks in the face of intensified threats to electronic security systems. Security services have issued a series of alerts over the weekend, warning that terrorists may have developed ways of bypassing safety checks. U.S. and British security services are concerned that terrorists will use the techniques they developed to bypass screening devices at European and U.S. airports, against other critical infrastructure facilities such as nuclear power stations.

  • Russia’s used “active measures” in 2016 U.S. election, and will do more in future, experts tell lawmakers

    The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on Wednesday launched its investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election. Expert witnesses told the senators that decades of Russian covert attempts to undermine confidence in Western institutions will only accelerate in the future unless the United States confronts Russia’s “active measures.” Since 2009, Russia has built a vast information warfare infrastructure, which now involves at least 15,000 operatives worldwide writing and spreading false news stories and conspiracy theories online. Russia created fake social media accounts by mimicking profiles of voters in key election states and precincts in the 2016 election, and used a mix of bots and real people to push propaganda from state-controlled media outlets like Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik. The FSB and the GRU, the two Russian intelligence agencies, created nearly 1,200 websites (“trolls”) which disseminated the fake news to help the Trump campaign. One experts told the senators that the material published by Wikileaks and Guccifer 2.0 “is probably under 1 percent of what we’d attribute to the Russian government stealing,” and that Russia will use the rest of the material to try and blackmail American politicians in the future.

  • Hackers can hijack scanners to perpetrate cyberattacks

    A typical office scanner can be infiltrated and a company’s network compromised using different light sources, according to researchers. The researchers conducted several demonstrations to transmit a message into computers connected to a flatbed scanner. Using direct laser light sources up to a half-mile (900 meters) away, as well as on a drone outside their office building, the researchers successfully sent a message to trigger malware through the scanner.

  • House kills web privacy protections; ISPs free to collect, sell customers’ information

    The House of Representative on Tuesday voted 215 to 205 kill the privacy rules, formulated by the FCC, which were aimed at preventing internet service providers (ISPs) from selling their customers’ web browsing histories and app usage to advertisers. Without these protections, Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, and other ISPs will have complete freedom to collect information about their customers’ browsing and app-usage behavior, then sell this information to advertisers.

  • Repealing FCC’s privacy rules: A serious blow to privacy, cybersecurity

    In the end, the cybersecurity implications of repealing the FCC’s privacy rules come from simple logic. If the privacy rules are repealed, Internet providers will resume and accelerate these dangerous practices with the aim of monetizing their customers’ browsing history and app usage. But in order to do that, Internet providers will need to record and store even more sensitive data on their customers, which will become a target for hackers. Internet providers will also be incentivized to break their customers’ security, so they can see all the valuable encrypted data their customers send. And when Internet providers break their customers’ security, you can be sure malicious hackers will be right on their heels. The net result is simple: repealing the FCC’s privacy rules won’t just be a disaster for Americans’ privacy. It will be a disaster for America’s cybersecurity, too.

  • Russia's interference in U.S. presidential election “an act of war”: Dick Cheney

    Former Vice President Dick Cheney said Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election could be considered “an act of war.” Cheney said there was “no question” that Vladimir Putin had attempted to influence the election outcome. “There’s no question there was a very serious effort made by Putin and his government, his organization, to interfere in major ways with our basic fundamental democratic processes,” Cheney said during a speech at a business conference in New Delhi, India.

  • Connected dolls, tell-tale teddy bears: Managing the Internet of Toys

    Large numbers of connected toys have been put on the market over the past few years, and the turnover is expected to reach €10 billion by 2020 – up from just €2.6 billion in 2015. Connected toys come in many different forms, from smart watches to teddy bears that interact with their users. They are connected to the internet and together with other connected appliances they form the Internet of Things, which is bringing technology into our daily lives more than ever. However, the toys’ ability to record, store and share information about their young users raises concerns about children’s safety, privacy and social development. Action is thus needed to monitor and control the emerging Internet of Toys.

  • Encryption requirements to change P25 CAP approved equipment list

    On Monday announced a change in the Project 25 Compliance Assessment Program (P25 CAP) listing of grant-eligible radio equipment for first responders. In order to be fully compliant with all P25 CAP requirements, radio equipment that requires encryption must use Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 256. Equipment that uses proprietary or other non-standard encryption capabilities without also providing the standard encryption (AES 256) capability does not meet the requirement specified in the Project 25 Compliance Assessment Program Encryption Requirements Compliance Assessment Bulletin (CAB).

  • How WhatsApp encryption works – and why there shouldn’t be a backdoor

    A battle between national security and privacy is brewing. Governments and secret services are asking encrypted messaging services such as WhatsApp to allow them access to users’ data, arguing that access to messages will allow authorities to thwart future terror attacks. Ultimately, though, if someone thinks that removing WhatsApp encryption would be the solution to the problem of terrorism or crime, then they don’t understand the actual problem. Even if you were to remove the end-to-end encryption from WhatsApp, criminals could create their own, similar, software that would allow them to communicate securely, while ordinary users would lose the ability to send genuinely private messages.

  • Protecting web users’ privacy

    Most website visits these days entail a database query — to look up airline flights, for example, or to find the fastest driving route between two addresses. But online database queries can reveal a surprising amount of information about the people making them. And some travel sites have been known to jack up the prices on flights whose routes are drawing an unusually high volume of queries. MIT researchers next week will present a new encryption system that disguises users’ database queries so that they reveal no private information.

  • Israeli police arrest teen over wave of bomb threats against Jewish targets in U.S.

    The Israeli police, acting on a request by the FBI, has arrested a 19-year-old Israeli Jewish man on suspicion of making dozens of threats against Jewish organizations in the United States, and against airlines in the United States and other countries. The unnamed teen, who has a dual Israeli and U.S. citizenship, lives in the southern sea-side city of Ashkelon. The arrest was made after several waves of threats in the past two months against Jewish community centers (JCCs) and other Jewish organizations. The teen used advanced technology in an effort to mask the source of his calls and communications to synagogues, community centers, and public venues.