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Election Security: When to Worry, When to Not
Everyone wants an election that is secure and reliable and that will ensure that the voters’ actual choices are reflected in the results. At the same time, not every problem in voting technology or systems is worth pulling the fire alarm —we have to look at the bigger story and context. And we have to stand down when our worst fears turn out to be unfounded.
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U.S. Warns Voters of Disinformation Deluge
American voters are likely about to be swamped by a flood of misinformation and influence campaigns engineered by U.S. adversaries aiming, according to senior U.S. intelligence officials, to sway the results of the upcoming presidential election and cast doubt on the process itself.
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How Foreign Operations Are Manipulating Social Media to Influence Your Views
Foreign influence campaigns, or information operations, have been widespread in the run-up to the 2024 U.S. presidential election. Influence campaigns aim to shift public opinion, push false narratives or change behaviors among a target population. Russia, China, Iran, Israel and other nations have run these campaigns by exploiting social bots, influencers, media companies and generative AI.
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Subsea Communications Cables: Vital but Vulnerable
Ensuring the resilience of the submarine cable network against disruptions is crucial. Lying deep on the ocean floor, these fiber-optic cables can transmit massive amounts of data at high speeds with low latency, making them far more efficient than satellites, which handle only a fraction of global data transmission.
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Governments Respond to Multiple Claims on Helene
Bad actors coming in behind hurricanes in North Carolina to spread false claims is nothing new. This time, the White House felt the need to respond.
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Fact-Checking the Viral Conspiracies in the Wake of Hurricane Helene
Buoyed by firebrands like Alex Jones and Marjorie Taylor Greene, Helene stirred up a toxic stew of conspiracy theories and culture war politics.
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Some Online Conspiracy-Spreaders Don’t Even Believe the Lies They’re Spewing
There has been a lot of research on the types of people who believe conspiracy theories, and their reasons for doing so. But there’s a wrinkle: My colleagues and I have found that there are a number of people sharing conspiracies online who don’t believe their own content.
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Online Misinformation Most Likely to Be Believed by Ideological Extremists: Study
There has been a dramatic rise of online misinformation, but the influence of misinformation is not universal. Rather, users with extreme political views are more likely than are others to both encounter and believe false news.
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You’d Never Fall for an Online Scam, Right?
Wrong, says cybersecurity expert. Con artists use time-tested tricks that can work on anyone regardless of age, IQ — what’s changed is scale.
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Online Signals of Extremist Mobilization
Olivia Brown’s study analyses the online behaviors of individuals who mobilized to right-wing extremist action, revealing that discussions about violent actions and logistical planning, rather than ideological content, are key indicators of mobilization.
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New Security Protocol Shields Data from Attackers During Cloud-Based Computation
The technique leverages quantum properties of light to guarantee security while preserving the accuracy of a deep-learning model.
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Research Showing Facebook's News-Feed Algorithm Curbs Election Misinformation Debunked
Though Facebook can limit untrustworthy content, new research suggests it often chooses not to. A flawed Meta-funded research helped to create the misperception, widely reported by the media, that Facebook and Instagram’s news feeds are largely reliable sources of trustworthy news.
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Neo-Nazi Telegram Users Panic Amid Crackdown and Arrest of Alleged Leaders of Online Extremist Group
An analysis by ProPublica and FRONTLINE shows a surge in activity on Telegram channels aligned with the Terrorgram Collective, as allies tried to rally support for their comrades in custody and sought to oust users they believed to be federal agents.
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DHS Awards $279.9 million in Grant Funding for State and Local Cybersecurity Grant Program
DHS announced the availability of $279.9 million in grant funding for the Fiscal Year (FY) 2024 State and Local Cybersecurity Grant Program (SLCGP). Now in its third year, this program provides funding to state, local, and territorial (SLT) governments to help reduce cyber risk and build resilience against evolving cybersecurity threats.
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What We've Learned About the Hungarian, Bulgarian, and Norwegian Links To Hezbollah's Pagers
A Bulgarian company with Norwegian links has surfaced in the supply chain of the pagers that detonated in Lebanon this week, killing 37 people and injuring several thousand others. The pagers, which were being used by members of Hezbollah, Iran’s most powerful proxy in the Middle East and designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, exploded simultaneously across Lebanon on September 17.
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The long view
The American TikTok Deal Doesn’t Address the Platform’s Potential for Manipulation, Only Who Profits
If we want to protect democratic information systems, we need to focus on reducing the vulnerabilities in our relationship with media platforms – platforms with surveillance power to know what we will like, the algorithmic power to curate our information diet and control of platform incentives, and rules and features that affect who gains influence. The biggest challenge is to make platforms less riggable, and thus less weaponizable, if only for the reason that motivated the TikTok ban: we don’t want our adversaries, foreign or domestic, to have power over us.
Hashtags and Humor Are Used to Spread Extreme Content on Social Media
Conspiracy theories and incitement to harassment and violence abound on mainstream social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. But the extreme content is often mixed with ironic play, memes and hashtags, which makes it difficult for authorities and media to know how to respond.
Breakthrough Development Could Significantly Boost 5G Network Security
With its greater network capacity and ability to rapidly transmit huge amounts of information from one device to another, 5G is a critical component of intelligent systems and services - including those for healthcare and financial services.
Computer Scientists Boost U.S. Cybersecurity
As cyber threats grow more sophisticated by the day, researchers are making computing safer thanks to federally funded research that targets some of the internet’s most pressing security challenges.