• Facebook, antivirus providers in Internet security campaign

    Facebook, Microsoft, McAfee, Symantec, Trend Micro, and Sophos have joined in a campaign to make it easier for Facebook users to stay safer and more secure online

  • The Red Cross, emergency response, and Twitter

    Social media has become such an integral part of our lives that emergency responders are now turning to Twitter and Facebook to gain valuable information during natural disasters or crises

  • NATO commander target of persistent Facebook cyberattacks

    The senior commander of NATO has been the target of repeated Facebook-based cyberattacks that are believed to have originated from China; Admiral James Stavridis is the subject of a campaign to gain information about him and his colleagues, friends, and family

  • DARPA holds $40,000 competition to test social media in disasters

    To better understand how emergency responders can leverage social media tools, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is holding the$40,000 CLIQR Quest Challenge

  • House grills DHS for monitoring Twitter, Facebook

    Earlier this year reports surfaced that DHS had awarded General Dynamic an $11 million contract to engage in monitoring of social networks; members of both parties including blasted DHS officials for potentially violating the First Amendment and collecting information on citizens engaged in protected political speech

  • Al Qaeda wants to be your “friend” and “follower”

    Hackers attacking databases is just one facet of online terrorist activity; international terrorist organizations have shifted their Internet activity focus to social networks and today a number of Facebook groups are asking users to join and support Hezbollah, Hamas, and other armed groups that have been included in the West’s list of declared terror organizations

  • DHS social media monitoring policy under fire

    DHS’ tactics of gathering intelligence via social media has drawn sharp criticism from privacy advocates with one group filing a lawsuit against the department

  • Lieberman asks Twitter to shut down Taliban accounts

    Senator Joe Lieberman (I-Connecticut), the chair of the Homeland Security Committee, has requested that the popular social media site Twitter shut down the accounts of the Taliban

  • Social media, a double-edged sword in epidemics

    Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter have proven useful in quickly disseminating information, and raising awareness during disasters or disease outbreaks, but these tools can also be a double-edged sword

  • DHS developing social media monitoring guidelines

    Given the critical role that social media tools like Facebook and Twitter played in the Arab Spring, DHS officials say they are now developing guidelines for gathering intelligence from these sources; “We’re still trying to figure out how you use things like Twitter as a source,” said DHS undersecretary Caryn Wagner; “How do you establish trends and how do you then capture that in an intelligence product?”

  • Facebook helps foil arms-smuggling deal

    With the help of Facebook, federal investigators were able to arrest a man on charges of illegally shipping weapons parts internationally after he “friended” his weapons buyer

  • Collaborative social media site for ID and biometric professionals

    Cost overruns, project delays, and poor performance results have long been the bane of government projects, at times resulting in expensive high-profile failures; to help reduce costs and ensure that government projects meet targeted needs, a new collaborative Web-based information-sharing community aimed at bringing together identity and biometric industry professionals, academics, researchers, and government and commercial procurement officers is slated to open

  • Tweeting may help in disasters

    Social networks like Twitter cannot help prevent disasters, but can quickly correct misinformation resulting from false rumors, thus preventing possible further loss of lives

  • London police use smartphones, social network to identify rioters

    The rioters in London — and now, in other British cities — have been using Blackberries to outmaneuver the police; communicating via BlackBerry instant-message technology, as well as by social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, the rioters repeatedly signaled fresh target areas to those caught up in the mayhem; RIM has now agreed to cooperate with Scotland Yard to turn over protestors using the service to coordinate their assaults; the police is also releasing CCTV images of the rioters to a group using face recognition technology to identify and condemn rioters; the police is also using Flickr, Tublr, and Twitter to spot and identify participants in the riots

  • Russian bloggers fall victim to cyber attacks

    Earlier this month LiveJournal, a major Russian blogging site, was the victim of a large cyber attack; bloggers believe that it was a move meant to silence political dissent in advance of the country’s elections; the site was brought down by a distributed denial of service (DDos) attack; SUP, the owners of LiveJournal, said that the recent attacks were the worst in its company’s history and unprecedented in that it targeted the entire website rather than individual blogs; the majority of Russia’s opposition leaders and political activists maintain blogs on LiveJournal that they use as platforms to gain support and spread their message