• Network-Enabled Anarchy: Excerpts from the Report

    The Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), a non-partisan organization, developed a tool to analyze extremist discourse on social media, and earlier this year used it to analyze the growing threat posed by the far-right, anti-government Boogaloo Bois movement. NCRI has now released a study of the increasingly more extreme social media discourse by leftist extremists.

  • Portland and Kenosha Violence Was Predictable – and Preventable

    The U.S. reached a deadly moment in protests over racial injustice, as back-to-back shootings in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and Portland, Oregon, on 25 August and 29 took the lives of three people and seriously injured another. It was tragic – but not surprising. The shooters and victims in Kenosha and Portland reflect an escalating risk of spontaneous violence as heavily armed citizen vigilantes and individuals mobilize at demonstrations and protests.

  • Words and Deeds: Increasingly Militant Social Media Discourse by Far-Left Extremists

    The increasingly militant social media discourse by anarcho-socialist extremists is worrisome, even if far-left extremists are not viewed by security experts inside and outside government as posing as much of a domestic terrorism threat as do far-right extremists and Islamist jihadists — at least not yet. A new report by the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) – a sequel to an earlier report on Boogaloo Bois — analyzes the increasingly militant languages of social media postings by anarcho-socialists, noting that on the far-right violent words preceded violent actions. It may be the case on the far-left as well.

  • The Phish Scale: NIST’s New Tool Lets IT Staff See Why Users Click on Fraudulent Emails

    Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed a new tool called the Phish Scale that could help organizations better train their employees to avoid a particularly dangerous form of cyberattack known as phishing.

  • TikTok and WeChat: Curating and Controlling Global Information Flows

    “The Chinese state has demonstrated a propensity for controlling and shaping the information environment of the Chinese diaspora—including via WeChat,” three researchers at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) in a new report. “The meteoric growth of TikTok has now put the CCP in a position from which it can shape the information environment on a largely non-Chinese-speaking platform—with the help of the highest valued start-up in the world and its opaque advanced AI-powered algorithm”: Excerpts from the report.

  • Russia Is Back, Wilier Than Ever — and It’s Not Alone

    Moscow’s hacking and disinformation tactics have evolved since 2016, while Americans help spread doubts about the November election. Russian operatives are using a sneakier, more sophisticated version of their 2016 playbook to undermine the November election — and this time, Mark Scott writes, groups inside and outside the U.S. are furthering their goal of sowing chaos.

  • Defending the 2020 Election against Hacking: 5 Questions Answered

    Journalist Bob Woodward reports in his new book, Rage, that the NSA and CIA have classified evidence that the Russian intelligence services placed malware in the election registration systems of at least two Florida counties in 2016, and that the malware was sophisticated and could erase voters. This appears to confirm earlier reports. Meanwhile, Russian intelligence agents and other foreign players are already at work interfering in the 2020 presidential election. Douglas W. Jones, a computer science professor and author of Broken Ballots: Will Your Vote Count?, writes that the list of things keeping him awake at night about the November election is long – violence; refusal to accept results if the in-person and mail-in votes differ; machine malfunction; human error, and more – but when you “add in the possibility of hacked central tabulating software in key counties, and there’s plenty to lose sleep over.”

  • Security Solution Traps Cybercriminals in a Virtual Network

    Researchers are developing a new cyber-security deception solution that uses artificial intelligence to lure hackers away and prevent breaches of network systems. The “Lupovis” solution under development by the team at the University of Strathclyde’s Center for Intelligent and Dynamic Communications makes the hunter become the hunted.

  • How China Ramped Up Disinformation Efforts During the Pandemic

    China once shied away from the aggressive, conspiratorial type of disinformation favored by Russia, but Beijing has increased its manipulation of information as well as disinformation efforts around COVID-19. The goal of manipulating factual information and spreading disinformation—or willfully false information— is to distract from the origins of the virus, highlight the failures of the United States, damage democracies, and promote China as a global leader. But its strategies have had mixed results.

  • Russian Government Hackers Targeted Political Consulting Firm Working for Biden

    Russia’s broad effort to help Donald Trump win reelection in November now extends to hacking political consulting firms. Reuters reports. Microsoft recently alerted Washington, D.C.-based SKDKnickerbocker, a campaign strategy and communications firm working with the Biden campaign, that Russian government hackers tried to hack the company. The hackers failed to gain access to the company’s networks, according to a source familiar with its response, Reuters said.

  • Russia’s Disinformation and Propaganda Ecosystem

    Last month, the U.S. Department of State’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) issued an important report – Pillars of Russia’s Disinformation and Propaganda Ecosystem – describing in detail the multifaceted, systemic, sustained, and effective disinformation and propaganda campaign which Russia has been conducting against the West for nearly a decade. The many different elements of this campaign are well coordinated and synchronized for maximum effect – so much so, that the GEC rightly calls it an “ecosystem” of disinformation and propaganda.

  • Pillars of Russia’s Disinformation and Propaganda Ecosystem: Excerpts

    From the report: “The ecosystem consists of five main pillars: official government communications, state-funded global messaging, cultivation of proxy sources, weaponization of social media, and cyber-enabled disinformation. The Kremlin bears direct responsibility for cultivating these tactics and platforms as part of its approach to using information as a weapon. It invests massively in its propaganda channels, its intelligence services and its proxies to conduct malicious cyber activity to support their disinformation efforts, and it leverages outlets that masquerade as news sites or research institutions to spread these false and misleading narratives.”

  • DHS: Russia “Amplifying” Claims of Mail-In Voter Fraud

    New analysis by DHS’s intelligence unit, released Thursday to federal and state law enforcement agencies, warned that “Russian malign influence actors” have targeted the absentee voting process “by spreading disinformation” since at least March. ABC News has obtained the document, which says that Russia has sought to “amplify” concerns over the integrity of U.S. elections by promoting allegations that mail-in voting will lead to widespread fraud. This Russian campaign of disinformation replicates and reinforces President Donald Trump’s own campaign of unfounded claims about the integrity of mail-in voting.

  • DHS Blocked Circulation of a July Intelligence Bulletin Detailing Russian Disinformation Attacks on Biden

    DHS, in early July, blocked publication of a departmental intelligence bulletin which warned intelligence and law enforcement agencies of a broad Russian effort to promote “allegations about the poor mental health” of former Vice President Joe Biden, according to internal emails and a draft of the document obtained by ABC News. Critics of DHS’s decision say that the perplexing decision would fuel fears that U.S. intelligence is being politicized. “By blocking information from being released that describes threats facing the nation,” said John Cohen, the former undersecretary for intelligence at DHS under President Barack Obama, “it undermines the ability of the public and state and local authorities to work with the federal government to counteract the threat.”

  • Why the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” Is Still Pushed by Anti-Semites More Than a Century after Hoax First Circulated

    Surely no outright forgery in modern history has ever proved itself more durable than the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, concocted by Tsarist police in the early twentieth century. Why is it that this demonstrably false document continues to hold sway today? Perhaps the simplest explanation is human irrationality, which neither education nor enlightenment has ever managed to defeat.