• Optimal Social Networks of No More Than 150 People

    “It takes a network to defeat a network,” wrote retired Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, in his book Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World. U.S. Army researchers agree, and in a new research they argue that new rules of engagement on the battlefield will require a deep understanding of networks and how they operate according to new Army research. Researchers confirmed a theory that find that networks of no more than 150 are optimal for efficient information exchange.

  • QAnon’s Growing Threat to the November Election and to Democratic Processes Worldwide

    Russian government-affiliated organizations are playing an increasing role amplifying and disseminating conspiracy theories promoted by QAnon, raising concerns not only of interference in the coming November U.S. election. There were no signs Russia had a hand in the early days of the QAnon movement, but the growth of the movement’s following have persuaded Russia’s disinformation and propaganda specialists that spreading QAnon’s conspiracies further would help Russia achieve its goal of weakening America by sowing division and acrimony; deepening polarization; discrediting democracy; and undermining trust in the government; judiciary; courts; and the media.

  • New Technique to Prevent Medical Imaging Cyberthreats

    Complex medical devices such as CT (computed tomography), MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) and ultrasound machines are controlled by instructions sent from a host PC. Abnormal or anomalous instructions introduce many potentially harmful threats to patients, such as radiation overexposure, manipulation of device components or functional manipulation of medical images. Researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev have developed a new artificial intelligence technique that will protect medical devices from malicious operating instructions in a cyberattack as well as other human and system errors.

  • Thwarting Illicit Cryptocurrency Mining with Artificial Intelligence

    Cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, are forms of digital money. Instead of minting it like coins or paper bills, cryptocurrency miners digitally dig for the currency by performing computationally intense calculations. A new artificial intelligence algorithm is designed to detect cryptocurrency miners in the act of stealing computing power from research supercomputers.

  • “A Small Group of Manipulators, Operating in the Shadows, Pull the Planet’s Strings”

    “You know that a clash between good and evil cannot be avoided, and you yearn for the Great Awakening that is coming. And so you must be on guard at all times. You must shield your ears from the scorn of the ignorant. You must find those who are like you. And you must be prepared to fight. You know all this because you believe in Q”: Adrienne LaFrance,“The Prophecies of Q.”

  • QAnon Conspiracies on Facebook Could Prompt Real-World Violence

    As Facebook continues to grapple with hate speech and violent extremism across the platform, QAnon conspiracy theorists are using public and private Facebook pages and groups to spread disinformation, racism, and thinly veiled incitement to violence. This conspiracy is estimated to have a Facebook audience of millions of users.

  • QAnon Believers Will Likely Outlast and Outsmart Twitter’s Ban

    Twitter has announced it’s taking sweeping action to limit the reach of content associated with QAnon. Believers of this fringe far-right conspiracy theory claim there is a “deep state” plot against U.S. president Donald Trump led by Satan-worshipping, child-sex trafficking elites from within government, business, and media. The platform also said it would stop circulating QAnon-related content, including material appearing in trending topics, recommendation lists and the search feature. It will also reportedly block web links associated with QAnon activity. History suggests the threat of online conspiracists is a difficult one to tackle.

  • New Detection Method to Protect Army Networks

    U.S. Army researchers developed a novel algorithm to protect networks by allowing for the detection of adversarial actions that can be missed by current analytical methods. The main idea of this research is to build a higher-order network to look for subtle changes in a stream of data that could point to suspicious activity.

  • Vulnerability of Solar Inverters

    Cyber-physical systems security researchers can disrupt the functioning of a power grid using about $50 worth of equipment tucked inside a disposable coffee cup. In a presentation delivered at the recent Usenix Security 2020 conference, the researchers revealed that the spoofing mechanism can generate a 32 percent change in output voltage, a 200 percent increase in low-frequency harmonics power and a 250 percent boost in real power from a solar inverter.

  • “We Must Do Better in 2020”: Bipartisan Senate Panel Releases Final Report on Russian 2016 Election Interference

    “The Russian government engaged in an aggressive, multi-faceted effort to influence” the “outcome of the 2016 presidential election.” This is the key, bipartisan finding of the fifth and final report of the Senate Intelligence Committee. The committee’s investigation into the massive intervention campaign waged by Russian government agencies and operatives on behalf of then-candidate Donald Trump was thorough, totaling more than three years of investigative activity, more than 200 witness interviews, and more than a million pages of reviewed documents. All five volumes total more than 1300 pages. “We must do better in 2020,” said Senator Marco Rubio (R-Florida) the committee’s chairman. “This cannot happen again,” said Senator Marc Warner (D-Virginia), the committee’s ranking member.

  • Insider Threat at Twitter Is a Risk to Everyone

    Elected officials currently announce policies and spar with one another on Twitter. An unauthorized individual appearing to tweet from a world leader’s account could crash markets, spark conflicts, or create other catastrophic global consequences. Hacking the accounts of media companies could create similarly far-reaching effects. A well-respected news outlet tweeting out “breaking news” of impending war, or a local journalist warning of an active shooter on the loose could generate chaos.

  • Hack-and-Leak Operations and U.S. Cyber Policy

    The On 27 November 2019, Jeremy Corbyn, then-leader of the U.K. Labour Party, held a press conference in which he held up a hefty, official-looking, heavily redacted document – it was a heavy tome of about 400 pages. the documents Crobyn held in his hand were purported to show the details of discussions between the U.K. and U.S. governments on a post-Brexit trade deal, including demands by U.S. representatives to open access to the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS) for American companies — an inflammatory issue for many voters. James Shires writes that “This is one example of a hack-and-leak operation where malicious actors use cyber tools to gain access to sensitive or secret material and then release it in the public domain.” He argues that “hack-and-leak operations should be seen as the ‘simulation of scandal’: strategic attempts to direct public moral judgement against the operation’s target.”

  • COVID-19–Related Infodemic Has Consequences for Public Health

    Infodemic is “an overabundance of information—some accurate and some not—that makes it hard for people to find trustworthy sources and reliable guidance when they need it.” A new study of COVID-19-related infodemic on social media analyzed thousands of COVID-19-related postings, finding that 82 percent of them were false.  

  • China Embraces Bigger Internet with Virtually Unlimited IP Addresses

    China is pushing for the adoption of a new worldwide Internet Protocol that could make the internet bigger and faster, but also potentially less anonymous. The technology, called IPv6, is an upgrade of the internet’s architecture that would allow trillions more electronic devices to have unique addresses online.

  • A Bible Burning, a Russian News Agency and a Story Too Good to Check Out

    With Election Day drawing closer, the Russian efforts to influence the vote appear to be well underway. One example: A video cooked by a Kremlin-backed video news agency, purportedly showing dozens of BLM protesters in Portland , Oregon, burning a stack of bibles, was seized upon by Trump supporters as evidence, in Donald Trump Jr’s words, that antifa had moved to “the book burning phase.” Matthew Rosenberg and Julian E. Barnes write that “the truth was far more mundane. A few protesters among the many thousands appear to have burned a single Bible — and possibly a second — for kindling to start a bigger fire. None of the other protesters seemed to notice or care.” They add: “The Portland video represents the Russian disinformation strategy at its most successful. Take a small but potentially inflammatory incident, blow it out of proportion and let others on the political fringes in the United States or Canada or Europe spread it.”