• Cyber Workforce Protecting U.S. National Security

    The Defense Department’s cyber workforce is tasked with defending virtually every system that the department relies on to protect national security.

  • Biden Orders Review to Bolster Supply Chain Resiliency

    President Joe Biden signed an executive order on Wednesday to formally order a 100-day government review of global supply chains and potential U.S. vulnerabilities in key industries including computer chips, electric vehicle batteries, pharmaceuticals and critical minerals used in electronics. On top of the 100-day review of these four key industries, Biden’s order also directs yearlong reviews for six sectors: defense, public health, information technology, transportation, energy and food production.

  • The Infrastructure of Hate: Epik Hosts Extremist Groups

    Social media platforms have received the lion’s share of attention for enabling users to spread hate and disinformation and plan and incite violence and terrorist acts. Flying under the radar are infrastructure providers like Epik, a domain registrar and web hosting company that works with nearly 750,000 websites and is ranked among the 50 largest web hosts. While some companies at the infrastructure level have acknowledged a level of responsibility for addressing abuse of their services—for example, this framework by domain registrars signed by leading companies such as GoDaddy, Tucows and Amazon—Epik is not among them.

  • How Shared Partisanship Leads to Social Media Connections

    It is no secret that U.S. politics is polarized. An experiment conducted by MIT researchers now shows just how deeply political partisanship directly influences people’s behavior within online social networks. The Twitter experiment shows clear self-selection into social media “echo chambers” due to political preferences.

  • Facebook Restores News to Australian Users

    Facebook is restoring news content to its users in Australia after resolving a dispute with the government. Last week, Facebook blocked Australians from sharing and reading news stories on its platform in a dispute with the government in Canberra.   

  • Inoculating against the Spread of Radical-Islamist and Islamophobic Disinformation

    Misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda are core components of radicalization and extremism and apply equally to Islamist radicalization and the generation of Islamophobia. One method of countering disinformation is to inoculate the information consumer.

  • 46,218 News Transcripts Show Ideologically Extreme Politicians Get More Airtime

    We research how changes in the media have shifted the incentives of elected officials and the considerations of voters, and what that means for American democracy. In recent work, we showed that extremely conservative and extremely liberal legislators receive far more airtime on cable and broadcast news than their moderate counterparts. Robust local news outlets once held legislators to account by covering whether they delivered for their districts. But as local news has declined, voters are turning to national media outlets for their political news. There, ideological outliers now set the tone of the debate, distorting perceptions of the important issues and warping Americans’ views of their political options.

  • French Companies Targeted by Russian Cyberattack between 2017 and 2020

    A broad Russian cyberattacks in France was carried out via French software Centreon, which serves large companies and government agencies. The cyberattack resembles Russia’s exploitation of vulnerabilities in SolarWinds to attacks American companies and government agencies. The scope of Russia’s cyberattack in France is still uncertain.

  • Preventing Cybersecurity Disruptions by Training Workforce

    Two cybersecurity researchers have published a new book to help train employees at public utilities to recognize cybersecurity vulnerabilities and develop measures to defend their networks from increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks.

  • Helping Industry Develop Secure Grid Technologies

    Rapid development and deployment of new technologies in the energy delivery systems marketplace make the power grid a hotbed for innovation—and an attractive target for cybercriminals. Cybersecurity researchers are working to change that by building next-generation tools for hardening the power grid—and other critical infrastructure—against attack.

  • Germany: Hate Speech, Threats against Politicians Rise

    Three weeks after a neo-Nazi was convicted of murdering regional governor Walter Lübcke. In answer to a parliamentary information request from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, the Interior Ministry reported that 1,534 crimes against politicians, party members or party property had been reported in 2020, a 9 percent increase on the year before.

  • Deepfake Detectors Can Be Defeated, Researchers Show for the First Time

    Systems designed to detect deepfakes —videos that manipulate real-life footage via artificial intelligence—can be deceived, computer scientists showed. Researchers showed detectors can be defeated by inserting inputs called adversarial examples into every video frame. The adversarial examples are slightly manipulated inputs which cause artificial intelligence systems such as machine learning models to make a mistake.

  • Austin Orders Military Stand Down to Address Challenge of Extremism in the Ranks

    Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin has ordered a DOD-wide stand down to discuss the problem of extremism in the ranks. The stand down will occur over the next sixty days, Kirby said. This is so “each service, each command and each unit can take the time out to have these needed discussions with the men and women of the force,” Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby said. Austin said in the meeting with military leaders that while the numbers may be small, they are not as small as anyone would like.

  • How Telegram Disruption Impacts Jihadist Platform Migration

    In October 2018 and November 2019, Europol conducted two Action Days geared toward meaningfully disrupting jihadist networks on Telegram – a social media platform favored by groups like Islamic State (IS) and al-Qaeda. A new report aims to understand the impact of the 2018 and 2019 Europol Action Days – first, what they meant for the health and size of the jihadist networks on Telegram and second, how they impacted on the phenomenon of migration to other platforms.

  • A Key Step in Preventing a Future SolarWinds

    In the weeks since news of the SolarWinds incident became public, commentators have offered no shortage of prescriptions for responding to the incident. Natalie Thompson writes that as information continues to emerge about the scope and scale of the incident and policymakers struggle with thorny questions regarding appropriate responses, urgent attention also is needed to actions that could prevent such large-scale catastrophes in the future.