• How “Truth Decay” Is Harming America’s Coronavirus Recovery

    How is it possible that Americans are polarized along party lines even on something as seemingly apolitical as a virus? Alex Ward writes in Vox that one big reason is what Jennifer Kavanagh, a senior political scientist at the Rand Corporation, calls “truth decay.” Simply put, Americans no longer rely on facts and data as much as they should. That’s a problem at any time, but it’s especially troubling during a pandemic, when people need the best, most reliable information to stay safe.

  • Facebook Studies Reveal Science Mistrust Winning on Vaccine Messaging

    Lisa Schnirring writes in CIDRAP that Facebook groups which fuel mistrust of health guidance, such as those that air anti-vaccine views, have gained the upper hand over groups with reliable information from health agencies, a team led by George Washington University reported yesterday in Nature.

  • Battling the “Pandemic of Misinformation”

    When a disease outbreak grabs the public’s attention, formal recommendations from medical experts are often muffled by a barrage of half-baked advice, sketchy remedies, and misguided theories that circulate as anxious people rush to understand a new health risk. The current crisis is no exception. Ubiquity of social media has made it easier to spread or even create COVID-19 falsehoods, making the work of public health officials harder.

  • Germany Has “Hard Evidence” of Russian Cyberattack on Parliament

    German Chancellor Angela Merkel says there is “hard evidence” of the involvement of “Russian forces” in a 2015 cyberattack on the German parliament in which documents from her own parliamentary office were reportedly stolen. Last week that federal prosecutors in Germany had issued an arrest warrant for a suspected officer with Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency.

  • Foreign countries’ Efforts to Influence U.S. Public's Understanding of COVID-19

    The ongoing worldwide coronavirus pandemic hasn’t been immune to the problem of rampant disinformation—intentionally misleading information or propaganda. The European External Action Service of the European Union recently stated that “despite their potentially grave impact on public health, official and state-backed sources from various governments, including Russia and—to a lesser extent—China, have continued to widely target conspiracy narratives and disinformation both at public audiences in the EU and the wider neighborhood.” Thomas Rid, author of Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare, discuss how disinformation has impacted the COVID-19 pandemic.

  • Anti-Semitic Incidents in U.S. Hit All-Time High in 2019

    The American Jewish community experienced the highest level of anti-Semitic incidents last year since tracking began in 1979, with more than 2,100 acts of assault, vandalism and harassment reported across the United States. The record number of incidents came as the Jewish community grappled with violent and lethal anti-Semitic attacks against communities in Poway, Jersey City and Monsey, and a spree of violent assaults in Brooklyn.

  • Students Take Witness Stand in Virtual Courtroom

    USC students took the stand as part of the capstone project in their advanced digital forensics class at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. In years past, students in the class traveled to a real courtroom, but this year the COVID-19 pandemic pushed them to a digital venue: a videoconference on Zoom.

  • Virus Conspiracists Elevate a New Champion

    A discredited scientist who blames her professional downfall on Dr. Anthony Fauci, is the new hero of the anti-vaccinators, the conspiracy group QAnon, activists from the Reopen America movement, and some right-wing media. They support her claims that Dr. Fauci, Bill Gates, and other “establishment” figures inflated the danger of the coronavirus in order to make money by selling more vaccines.

  • U.S. to Accuse China of Hacking COVID-19 Vaccine Research

    For months, U.S. officials have been warning about a spike in cyberattacks during the coronavirus pandemic, but they’ve stopped short of pointing fingers at any one country. Now, as the all-out global race for a coronavirus vaccine accelerates and hackers home in on related scientific research, U.S. officials are preparing to single out a long-standing cyber adversary: China.

  • Enhancing Privacy Protections for Android Applications

    From navigation to remote banking, mobile device users rely on a variety of applications to streamline daily tasks, communicate, and dramatically increase productivity. While exceedingly useful, the ecosystem of third-party applications utilizes a number of sensors – microphones, GPS, pedometers, cameras – and user interactions to collect data used to enable functionality. Troves of sensitive personal data about users are accessible to these applications and as defense and commercial mobile device users become increasingly reliant on the technology, there are growing concerns around the challenge this creates for preserving user privacy.

  • Assessing Cyber Risk from External Information

    There is a vision for the future of assessing cybersecurity: The goal is a system of cyber metrics that are transparent, auditable, practical, scalable and widely agreed upon. To that end, it is useful—indeed, imperative—to evaluate various approaches to cyber risk quantification with the aim of informing the development of a public standard for measuring cybersecurity.

  • All’s Clear for Deep Fakes: Think Again

    A few analysts are claiming that the bark of deepfakes is worse than their bite. Robert Chesney, Danielle Citron, and Hany Farid disagree, writing that “Now is not the time to sit back and claim victory over deep fakes or to suggest that concern about them is overblown. The coronavirus has underscored the deadly impact of believable falsehoods, and the election of a lifetime looms ahead. More than ever we need to trust what our eyes and ears are telling us.”

  • Wobbly” Tracing App “Failed” Clinical Safety and Cybersecurity Tests

    The government’s coronavirus contact tracing app has so far failed the tests needed to be included in the NHS app library, HSJ understands. Jasmine Rapson writes in HJS that the app is being trialed on the Isle of Wight this week, ahead of a national rollout later this month. Senior NHS sources told HSJ it had thus far failed all of the tests required for inclusion in the app library, including cyber security, performance and clinical safety. There are also concerns at high levels about how users’ privacy will be protected once they log that they have coronavirus symptoms, and become “traceable,” and how this information will be used. Senior figures told HSJ that it had been hard to assess the app because the government was “going about it in a kind of a ham-fisted way. They haven’t got clear versions, so it’s been impossible to get fixed code base from them for NHS Digital to test. They keep changing it all over the place.” HSJ’s source described the app as “a bit wobbly.”

  • Software Flaws Often Reported First on Social Media Networks

    Software vulnerabilities are more likely to be discussed on social media before they’re revealed on a government reporting site, a practice that could pose a national security threat. At the same time, those vulnerabilities present a cybersecurity opportunity for governments to more closely monitor social media discussions about software gaps.

  • Predicting and Countering Cyberttacks

    The U.K Defense and Security Accelerator (DASA) announce nearly £1m to further develop technology that predicts and counters cyber-attacks. “This work will develop, adapt and merge the novel approaches explored in Phase 1 of the competition, to proactively defend deployed U.K. military systems and networks from the rapidly growing threat of offensive cyber action from aggressive adversaries,” DASA said.