• Russia Report: Intelligence Expert Explains How U.K. Ignored Growing Threat

    The new report on Russia from parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) is damning. The document certainly isn’t a page-turner, and nor does it provide all the answers some had expected. But contrary to most ISC reports, it’s striking and blunt, and the message couldn’t be clearer: Russia’s intelligence agencies pose a direct threat to the U.K., but successive governments and the U.K. agencies have taken their eye off the ball.

  • DHS, NSA Name Binghamton a Cyber Research Center

    In June, the National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security named Binghamton a National Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Research (CAE-R) through 2025. “The main goals,” said Professor Ping Yang, who is the director of the Center for Information Assurance and Cybersecurity (CIAC), “are to reduce the vulnerability in the information infrastructure of the United States by promoting higher education and research in cyber-defense and producing professionals with cyber-defense expertise.”

  • Personal Data Can Easily Be Extracted from Zoom, Other Video Conference Screenshots

    Video conference users should not post screen images of Zoom and other video conference sessions on social media, according to BGU researchers, who easily identified people from public screenshots of video meetings on Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet.

  • Russian Government Hackers Trying to Steal COVID-19 Research Information from Western Labs

    Russian government hackers are targeting organizations involved in coronavirus vaccine development, U.K. security officials have revealed. The APT29 hacking group, also named “the Dukes” or “Cozy Bear,” is staffed by GRU (Russian military intelligence branch) hackers, and the GRU subcontracts Kremlin-ordered cyber operations to APT29. In 2016, the APT29 hackers stole emails from the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC. 

  • From Russia with Love? U.K. Government Sits on Explosive Report

    At the core of a 50-page, as yet unreleased, report compiled by the U.K’s Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) over a year ago is the question of to what extent Russian influence held sway over U.K political events, such as the 2016 Brexit referendum, and whether senior Conservatives were open to such advances. The results of the investigation, dubbed the “Russia Report,” were supposed to be released at the end of last year. So far, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has refused to have the report released.

  • The Secret Lab Conspiracy: A Converging Narrative

    Some observers have recently argued about a convergence of narratives between pro-Kremlin and Chinese disinformation networks. One example of the convergence of false Russian and Chinese narrative, both aiming to undermine relations among Western and pro-Western countries, is the  “clandestine U.S. biolabs” conspiracy theory.

  • EFF Launches Searchable Database of Police Use of Surveillance Technologies

    The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), in partnership with the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno, the other day launched what the EFF describes as “the largest-ever collection of searchable data on police use of surveillance technologies,” created as a tool for the public to learn about facial recognition, drones, license plate readers, and other devices law enforcement agencies are acquiring to spy on our communities.

  • U.K. Bans Huawei Components from 5G, Earlier Networks

    The British government, in a reversal of a January decision, will not allow Huawei access to the U.K. nascent 5G network. The government has also imposed a “rip and replace” requirement, giving British companies until 2027 to remove all Huawei gear from their networks and replace it with components from “trusted vendors.”

  • Germany Urges EU to Impose Cyber Sanctions on Russia for Bundestag Hacking

    The German government has made an official proposal to the European Union to impose sanctions on Russian individuals behind a broad hacking of the Bundestag five years ago. If the EU accepts the German proposal, it would be the first use of an EU cyber sanctions regime which was adopted by the organization in 2017, but which is yet to be used.

  • China Could Be Using TikTok to Spy on Australians, but Banning It Isn’t a Simple Fix

    In an age of isolation, video sharing platform TikTok has emerged as a bonding force for many. But recent headlines allege the service, owned by Beijing-based company ByteDance, is feeding users’ data to the Chinese Communist Party. In Australia, for example, politicians from both the governing party and the opposition are calling for banning the app. Could the app be a tool used by the Chinese government to spy on us? And could it be effectively banned?

  • FBI Director: China Uses Anti-Corruption Campaign to Target Dissidents in U.S.

    China is targeting hundreds of Chinese dissidents in the United States under the cover of an international anti-corruption campaign, using coercive tactics to force critics to return to China, FBI Director Christopher Wray said on Tuesday. 

  • China and AI: What the World Can Learn and What It Should Be Wary of

    China announced in 2017 its ambition to become the world leader in artificial intelligence (AI) by 2030. While the US still leads in absolute terms, China appears to be making more rapid progress than either the US or the EU, and central and local government spending on AI in China is estimated to be in the tens of billions of dollars. The move has led – at least in the West – to warnings of a global AI arms race and concerns about the growing reach of China’s authoritarian surveillance state.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Congress Calls for Probe into Reported Russian Bounties on U.S. Troops

    As members of Congress called for an investigation, President Donald Trump said Sunday he was not briefed on reports that a Russian military intelligence unit offered bounties to Taliban militants in Afghanistan to kill U.S. soldiers because U.S. intelligence officials did not deem them credible. But U.S. intelligence officials had concluded months ago that a Russian covert operations unit, which has been linked to assassination attempts and covert operations in Europe aimed at destabilizing the West, had carried out the mission in Afghanistan last year and that Trump had been briefed about it in late March.