196 matches found
Twitter Disrupts Wide-Ranging Political Disinformation Campaigns
Twitter has taken down three separate nation-sponsored influence operations, attributed to the People’s Republic of China PRC, Russia and Turkey. Collectively the operations consisted of 32,242 bogus or bot accounts generating the content and various amplifier accounts that retweeted it. “Every...
Minneapolis Police Department Hack Likely Fake, Says Researcher
As protests continue to proliferate across the globe in the wake of George Floyd’s death, the Minneapolis Police Department is making news for something else: A supposed hack, perpetrated at the hands of the Anonymous hacktivist group. According to Troy Hunt at Have I Been Pwned HIBP, the group o...
Chinese COVID-19 Disinformation Campaign
The New York Times is reporting on state-sponsored disinformation campaigns coming out of China: Since that wave of panic, United States intelligence agencies have assessed that Chinese operatives helped push the messages across platforms, according to six American officials, who spoke on the...
7 Ways Hackers and Scammers Are Exploiting Coronavirus Panic
In our previous stories, you might have already read about various campaigns warning how threat actors are capitalizing on the ongoing coronavirus pandemic in an attempt to infect your computers and mobile devices with malware or scam you out of your money. Unfortunately, to some extent, it's...
Threat Update: COVID-19
Executive Summary The COVID-19 pandemic is changing everyday life for workers across the globe. Cisco Talos continues to see attackers take advantage of the coronavirus situation to lure unsuspecting users into various pitfalls such as phishing, fraud, and disinformation campaigns. Talos has not...
Story of Gus Weiss
This is a long and fascinating article about Gus Weiss, who masterminded a long campaign to feed technical disinformation to the Soviet Union, which may or may not have caused a massive pipeline explosion somewhere in Siberia in the 1980s, if in fact there even was a massive pipeline explosion...
A week in security (March 16 – 22)
Last week on Malwarebytes Labs, we concluded our series on child identity theft. We also looked into threat actors and campaigns that ride the COVID-19 train, namely the criminal group APT36 and threat actors purporting to be the World Health Organization WHO but instead spreading malware. Lastly...
Russia Is Learning How to Bypass Facebook's Disinfo Defenses
Social media platforms have stepped up the fight against Russia's Internet Research Agency—but the IRA is evolving too...
Security of Health Information
The world is racing to contain the new COVID-19 virus that is spreading around the globe with alarming speed. Right now, pandemic disease experts at the World Health Organization WHO, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention CDC, and other public-health agencies are gathering information...
After the Iowa Caucus Meltdown, New Hampshire Says It’s Ready
The nation’s first primary is proudly low-tech, but it'll take more than paper ballots to defuse the disinformation threat...
Warren Pledges to Fight Disinformation, but Her Arsenal Is Limited
When it comes to stopping the spread of false information in the 2020 election, everyone is at the mercy of Big Tech...
Trolls-For-Hire Pave Way For Sophisticated Social Media Hacks
NEW ORLEANS – Researchers have observed the blossoming of a new type of social media nuisance they are calling Trolling-as-a-Service. They say these rabble-rousing efforts have emerged as a clever new way for hackers to launch coordinated and dangerous attacks via Facebook and Twitter. Speaking a...
Deepfakes laws and proposals flood US
In a rare example of legislative haste, roughly one dozen state and federal bills were introduced in the past 12 months to regulate deepfakes, the relatively modern technology that some fear could upend democracy. Though the federal proposals have yet to move forward, the state bills have found...
Rules on deepfakes take hold in the US
For years, an annual, must-pass federal spending bill has served as a vehicle for minor or contentious provisions that might otherwise falter in standalone legislation, such as the prohibition of new service member uniforms, or the indefinite detainment of individuals without trial. In 2019, that...
Facebook Cracks Down on Deepfake Videos
Facebook is banning deepfake videos, which stem from a technique of human-image synthesis based on artificial intelligence AI to create fake content. Over the past year, security experts and lawmakers have voiced concerns about malicious deepfake applications, particularly as a vessel for...
Why the iPhone 11 Tracks Your Location Even When You Tell It Not To
Russian disinformation, a VC hack, vulnerable VPNs, and more are in the week’s top security news...
APT review: what the world’s threat actors got up to in 2019
What were the most interesting developments in terms of APT activity during the year and what can we learn from them? This is not an easy question to answer, because researchers have only partial visibility and it´s impossible to fully understand the motivation for some attacks or the development...
Fancy Bear Targets Sporting, Anti-Doping Orgs As 2020 Olympics Loom
At least 16 anti-doping authorities and sporting organizations around the world have been hit by cyberattacks as the world begins to gear up for the Tokyo Summer Olympic Games, which kick off July 2020. The attacks, which began Sept. 16, have been linked to infamous Russian threat group Fancy Bea...
Microsoft Tackles Election Security with Bug Bounties
As the 2020 presidential election draws closer and primary season looms around the corner, Microsoft has launched a bug-bounty program specifically aimed at its ElectionGuard product, which the software giant has positioned as performing “end-to-end verification of elections.” ElectionGuard is a...