-
Militia Extremists, Kicked Off Facebook Again, Are Regaining Comfort in Public View
When journalists sounded alarm bells in early May 2024 that more than 100 extremist militia groups had been organizing and communicating on Facebook, it wasn’t the first time militias had garnered attention for their online activities. As a scholar of militias, I’ve seen extremists get kicked off Facebook before.
-
-
Extremist Communities Continue to Rely on YouTube for Hosting, but Most Videos Are Viewed Off-Site, Research Finds
After the 2016 U.S. presidential election, YouTube was so criticized for radicalizing users by recommending increasingly extremist and fringe content that it changed its recommendation algorithm. Research four years later found that while extremist content remained on YouTube, subscriptions and external referrals drove disaffected users to extremist content rather than the recommendation algorithm.
-
-
University Students Tackle Adventure in CyberForce — Conquer the Hill Competition
University of Central Florida’s Cameron Whitehead wins CyberForce Conquer the Hill: Adventure Competition 2024. Whitehead was one of 112 students from 71 accredited U.S. colleges and universities who competed virtually to complete work-based cybersecurity tasks and challenges during a full day of energy sector-related adventure.
-
-
Chinese Nationalist Groups Are Launching Cyber-Attacks – Often Against the Wishes of the Government
China is often presented as a monolithic entity, entirely at the whim of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). However, the reality is more complex. Many Chinese cyber-attacks and other kinds of digital interference are conducted by Chinese nationalist groups.
-
-
The Future of Cybersecurity
An expert in cybersecurity surveys a rapidly evolving world where technology is racing ahead of our ability to manage it, posing risks to our national security. With TikTok in the hands of 170 million Americans, cybersecurity expert Amy Zegart says it’s time to talk about consequences. Foreign access to all that data on so many Americans is a national security threat, she asserts.
-
-
Can Wikipedia-like Citations on YouTube Curb Misinformation?
Videos can be dense with information: text, audio, and image after image. Yet each of these layers presents a potential source of error or deceit. And when people search for videos directly on a site like YouTube, sussing out which videos are credible sources can be tricky.
-
-
Users Seek Out Echo Chambers on Social Media
Users are inclined to favor popular opinion; lack of exposure to dissent contributes to polarization.
-
-
Cybersecurity Education Varies Widely in U.S.
Cybersecurity programs vary dramatically across the country, a review has found. The authors argue that program leaders should work with professional societies to make sure graduates are well trained to meet industry needs in a fast-changing field.
-
-
Truth and Reality with Chinese Characteristics
The Chinese Communist Party seeks to maintain total control over the information environment within China, while simultaneously working to extend its influence abroad to reshape the global information ecosystem. That includes not only controlling media and communications platforms outside China, but also ensuring that Chinese technologies and companies become the foundational layer for the future of information and data exchange worldwide.
-
-
Knocking Cloud Security Off Its Game
Public cloud services employ special security technologies. Computer scientists at ETH Zurich have now discovered a gap in the latest security mechanisms used by AMD and Intel chips. This affects major cloud providers.
-
-
U.S. Sanctions on Iranian Hackers Highlight Growing Concern About the Islamic Republic’s Cyberwarriors
A feature of the simmering tensions between the US, Israel and Iran has been not just the tit-for-tat missile and drone strikes and assassinations, but accusations of cyberwarfare waged by Iran.
-
-
Computer Scientists Unveil Novel Attacks on Cybersecurity
Researchers have found two novel types of attacks that target the conditional branch predictor found in high-end Intel processors, which could be exploited to compromise billions of processors currently in use. Intel and AMD issued security alerts based on the findings.
-
-
New Cybersecurity Center to Protect Grids Integrated with Renewables, Microgrids
Bringing renewable energy to the power grid raises all kinds of “internet-of-things” issues because “everything is connected,” says an expert. Solar inverters are connected to the internet. Wind farm controllers are connected to the internet. And with each internet connection, energy resources distributed across the countryside are potentially vulnerable to cyberattacks.
-
-
First Regional Cybersecurity Center to Protect the Nation’s Electricity Grid
U.S. Department of Energy awards $10 million grant to develop innovative solutions to mitigating cyber threats across the U.S. A new center will bring together experts from the private sector, academia and government to share information and generate innovative real-world solutions to protect the nation’s power grid and other key sectors.
-
-
Cybersecurity Researchers Spotlight a New Ransomware Threat – Be Careful Where You Upload Files
Today’s web browsers are much more powerful than earlier generations of browsers. Unfortunately, these capabilities also mean that hackers can find clever ways to abuse the browsers to trick you into letting ransomware lock up your files when you think that you’re simply doing your usual tasks online.
-
The long view
The Long Afterlife of QAnon Conspiracy Theories Haunting American Politics
Started on the online forum website 4chan in 2017, QAnon spread false, far-right theories on social media about a shadowy cabal of satanic pedophiles among the political elite, which Donald Trump was purportedly fighting alongside a mysterious ally named “Q.” While Q stopped posting in 2022, the movement did not disappear. Its conspiracy theories seeped from the margins into mainstream American politics, and the movement’s vocabulary quickly began to appear in official government circles at the start of Trump’s second term. Official uses of Q language have invigorated conspiracy theorists to advance new theories, undermining public health, governance, and civil society.