• Privacy Risks of Home Security Cameras

    Researchers have used data from a major home Internet Protocol (IP) security camera provider to evaluate potential privacy risks for users. The researchers found that the traffic generated by the cameras could be monitored by attackers and used to predict when a house is occupied or not.

  • U.K. Will Not Be Able to Prevent “Misuse of Data” by China if Huawei Deal Goes Ahead: U.S. Ambassador

    Robert Wood Johnson, the U.S. ambassador to the U.K., warned that if the U.K. allowed Huawei access to the U.K. 5G communication infrastructure, there would be no way for the U.K. to prevent Chinese intelligence agencies from misusing the data collected by Huawei in the course of the company’s operations. Experts say that even more worryingly, if Huawei is allowed access to the nascent U.K. 5G infrastructure, the company, with a flip of a switch, could take down the entire U.K. communication system when ordered to do so by the Chinese government.

  • Democracy under Threat from “Pandemic of Misinformation” Online: Lords Committee

    The U.K. government should act immediately to deal with a “pandemic of misinformation” that poses an existential threat to our democracy and way of life. The stark warning comes in a report published Monday by the House of Lords’ Committee on Democracy and Digital Technologies.

  • U.S. Facing Growing Terrorism Problem, with White Supremacists the “Most Significant Threat”: Report

    A new report by terrorism experts at the conservative-leaning CSIS thinktank says that the United States faces a growing terrorism problem which will likely worsen over the next year. The most significant threat likely comes from white supremacists, though anarchists and religious extremists inspired by the Islamic State and al-Qaeda could present a potential threat as well. Right-wing attacks and plots account for the majority of all terrorist incidents in the United States since 1994, and the total number of right-wing attacks and plots has grown significantly during the past six years. Right-wing extremists perpetrated two thirds of the attacks and plots in the United States in 2019 and over 90 percent between 1 January and 8 May 2020. Over the rest of 2020, the terrorist threat in the United States will likely rise based on several factors, including the November 2020 presidential election.

  • Chinese, Russian COVID-19 Disinformation More Influential than Domestic European News Sources

    Chinese, Russia, Turkish, and Iranian state-backed propaganda outlets disseminate COVID-19-related disinformation throughout Europe in French, German, and Spanish, and this professionally presented disinformation is generating greater engagement across Facebook and Twitter than prominent domestic news media such as Le Monde in France or El Pais in Spain. Russian outlets producing fake coronavirus content in French and German consistently emphasized weak democratic institutions and civil disorder in Europe.

  • COVID-19 Pandemic Has Unleashed Wave of Anti-Semitism

    The coronavirus epidemic has been accompanied by what the WHO described as “infodemic” – an avalanche of conspiracy theories and disinformation which has spread on social networks. As is often the case, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories are prominent in this infodemic, and a new report offers an analysis of the phenomenon.

  • Extremism Rising in Canada

    Acts of terrorism committed by the far-right have increased by 320 percent over the past five years, supported by an increasingly connected and internationalist community of right-wing extremism. Canada has not been isolated from this trend and in recent years the number of hate groups operating in the country has tripled.

  • Cascading Security Through the Internet of Things Supply Chain

    The “internet of things” (IoT) has been insecure since the first connected refrigerator woke up and asked for more milk. But while having your fridge hacked seems at best amusing and at worst inconvenient, the nightmare scenario is a matter of national security. Imagine hundreds of thousands of smart refrigerators, all with the same default password, hacked to direct a flood of web traffic against key internet servers, paralyzing them. “Swap smart fridges for security cameras and DVD players, and you have the Dyn cyberattack of 2016,” Trey Herr, Nathaniel Kim, Bruce Schneier write.

  • How the Boogaloo Movement Is Turning Memes into Violent Action

    The Boogaloo movement, an extremist, right-leaning and libertarian, anti-government militia with online roots which is increasingly organizing attacks in the real world. Alex Goldenberg, Joel Finkelstein, and John Farmer Jr. write that “Like an American version of the Islamic State, their mythology attempts to recapture a glorious revolutionary American past in a mythological confrontation. The Boogaloo movement seeks to co-opt grievances across the political and racial spectrum and funnel them into an anti-government mob with tactical and technological capacities that look a lot like an American version of the Islamic State or al Qaeda.” The authors add: “The hope of these militants is to incite violence sufficient for society to betray the American civic tradition by forcing immense violence to protect it.”

  • Preventing Cyberbiosecurity Threats and Protecting Vulnerable Countries

    AI can automate the manipulation of medical datasets, expanding a cyberattack’s impact through health and biotech industries. Cyber- and biosecurity threats can erode trust in technology. Eroded trust in technology is dangerous at any time but especially during a global pandemic such as COVID-19.

  • How Conspiracy Theories Emerge – and How Their Storylines Fall Apart

    New research offers a new way to understand how unfounded conspiracy theories emerge online. The research, which combines sophisticated artificial intelligence and a deep knowledge of how folklore is structured, explains how unrelated facts and false information can connect into a narrative framework that would quickly fall apart if some of those elements are taken out of the mix.

  • Who Shares the Most Fake News?

    Facebook is a more fertile breeding ground for fake news than Twitter, and those on the far ends of the liberal-conservative spectrum are most likely to share it, according to new research. “We found that certain types of people are disproportionally responsible for sharing the false, misleading, and hyper-partisan information on social media,” said the lead researcher. “If we can identify those types of users, maybe we can get a better grasp of why people do this and design interventions to stem the transfer of this harmful information.”

  • Idaho Team Impresses in Girls Go CyberStart Coding Competition

    It would have been a challenge even in normal times, but a four-girl team from Skyline High School in Idaho Falls overcame quarantine and equipment issues to finish 29th in Girls Go CyberStart, a national online problem solving competition held in late May.

  • UA Little Rock to Offer New Bachelor’s Degree in Cybersecurity

    The University of Arkansas at Little Rock is introducing a new four-year degree program in cybersecurity in the fall 2021 semester to help meet the rising demand for cybersecurity professionals. The university says the new degree program will attract more government and industry jobs to the region, while helping to fill a growing need for more trained cybersecurity professionals.

  • French High Court: Most of New Hate Speech Bill Would Undermine Free Expression

    In what free-speech advocates hail as aa victory for the free speech rights of French citizens, France’s highest court last week struck down core provisions of a bill meant to curb hate speech, holding they would unconstitutionally sweep up legal speech.