• 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.”

  • A Ban on WeChat and TikTok, a Disconnected World and Two Internets

    President Trump’s new executive orders banning Chinese social media apps TikTok and WeChat marked a significant escalation in the ongoing technology tensions between the U.S. and China. Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, predicted in 2018 that within the next decade, there would be two distinct Internets: one led by the U.S. and the other one led by China. Only two years after his comments, that prediction seems to have become a reality.

  • Cyberspace Is Critical Infrastructure – It Will Take Effective Government Oversight to Make It Safe

    A famous 1990s New Yorker cartoon showed two dogs at a computer and a caption that read “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” The New Yorker cartoon doesn’t apply today. Not only do your browser, service provider and apps know you’re a dog, they know what breed you are, what kind of dog food you eat, who your owner is and where your doghouse is. Cyberspace can function as critical infrastructure only when it’s safe for everyone, but legal and regulatory protections in cyberspace have not kept up with the times.

  • $26 million NSF initiative to establish new Center for Quantum Networks

    The National Science Foundation (NSF) has launched a major new initiative to establish and lead the Center for Quantum Networks, or CQN. The new center is funded through an initial $26 million, 5-year grant awarded to the University of Arizona, with an additional five-year $24.6 million renewal option.

  • Official: U.S. Adversaries Taking Sides, Wielding Influence Ahead of Election

    Russia, China and Iran are all actively meddling in U.S. presidential politics hoping to persuade American voters to put their preferred candidate in the White House, according to an extraordinary warning from Washington’s top counterintelligence official. As was the case in 2016, Russia is actively working to help Trump. Russia has also recruited Ukrainian “actors” to manufacture dirt on Joe Biden and his son, to be fed into the investigation of the Bidens by Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin). China and Iran would prefer to see Biden in the White House, but their interference efforts are not at the level of Russia’s broad campaign to help Trump. Trump rejected that part of the intelligence community’s assessment which details Russia’s broad effort on his behalf. “The last person Russia wants to see in office is Donald Trump,” he said. “I don’t care what anybody says.”

  • ‘Deepfakes’ Ranked as Most Serious AI Crime Threat

    Fake audio or video content has been ranked by experts as the most worrying use of artificial intelligence in terms of its potential applications for crime or terrorism. : “As the capabilities of AI-based technologies expand, so too has their potential for criminal exploitation. To adequately prepare for possible AI threats, we need to identify what these threats might be, and how they may impact our lives,” says one expert.

  • U.S. Accuses Russia of Complex Online Disinformation, Propaganda Operation

    The United States has accused Russia of developing a sophisticated “ecosystem” to spread disinformation and propaganda about the coronavirus and other issues. In a new report published on August 5, the State Department said Russia’s online operations use “five main pillars” to amplify false narratives and conspiracy theories in a bid to sow confusion and fear.