Visiting the NSA

Yesterday, I visited the NSA. It was Cyber Command's birthday, but that's not why I was there. I visited as part of the Berklett Cybersecurity Project, run out of the Berkman Klein Center and funded by the Hewlett Foundation. BERKman hewLETT -- get it? We have a web page, but it's badly out of...

How Tech Helped the NSC Change the US Way of War

The National Security Council has gained enormous influence over the last few decades—thanks in no small part to better tech...

Defending Democracies Against Information Attacks

To better understand influence attacks, we proposed an approach that models democracy itself as an information system and explains how democracies are vulnerable to certain forms of information attacks that autocracies naturally resist. Our model combines ideas from both international security an...

SAS 2019: Fake News Peddlers Adopt Clever New Trick to Fool Facebook, Twitter

Fake news peddlers have devised a cunning new way to stump Facebook, Twitter and others cracking down on lies and half-truths spreading on social media. Instead of linking to fake news, bad actors are now linking to posts promoting older news articles that may no longer be accurate – but won’t be...

William Barr Sends Troubling Signals Ahead of Mueller Report Release

Attorney general William Barr will have tremendous sway over how much of the Mueller report the public can see. Right now, it doesn't look promising...

Design/Logic Flaw

The monitor barrier of the affected products insufficiently blocks data from being forwarded over the mirror port into the mirrored network. An attacker could use this behavior to transmit malicious packets to systems in the mirrored network, possibly influencing their configuration and runtime...

Breaking the Bank: Weakness in Financial AI Applications

Currently, threat actors possess limited access to the technology required to conduct disruptive operations against financial artificial intelligence AI systems and the risk of this targeting type remains low. However, there is a high risk of threat actors leveraging AI as part of disinformation...

CVE-2019-6223

A logic issue existed in the handling of Group FaceTime calls. The issue was addressed with improved state management. This issue is fixed in iOS 12.1.4, macOS Mojave 10.14.3 Supplemental Update. The initiator of a Group FaceTime call may be able to cause the recipient to answer. Recent...

Gen. Nakasone on US Cyber Command

Really interesting article by and interview with Paul M. Nakasone Commander of US Cyber Command, Director of the National Security Agency, and Chief of the Central Security Service in the current issue of Joint Forces Quarterly. He talks about the evolving role of US Cyber Command, and its new...

Google Search Results Spoofed to Create Fake News

UPDATE A spoofing technique that creates fake Google search results has been uncovered, which could be used in political influence campaigns or for other nefarious purposes. In this age of fake news, people are more wary than ever of efforts to sway public opinion using disinformation – this has...

How Russian Trolls Used Meme Warfare to Divide America

A new report for the Senate exposes how the IRA used every major social media platform to target voters before and after the 2016 election...

Information Attacks against Democracies

Democracy is an information system. That's the starting place of our new paper: "Common-Knowledge Attacks on Democracy." In it, we look at democracy through the lens of information security, trying to understand the current waves of Internet disinformation attacks. Specifically, we wanted to...

Compromising vital infrastructure: how voting machines and elections are vulnerable

In our first post in a series about vital infrastructure, we aim to explore how secure our voting machines—and our votes in general—are ahead of the upcoming midterm elections. Here, we ask ourselves: How can our infrastructure be compromised? What are the consequences, and how can we prevent...

SUSE-SU-2018:1161-2 Security update for apache2

This update for apache2 fixes the following issues: CVE-2018-1283: when modsession is configured to forward its session data to CGI applications SessionEnv on, not the default, a remote user may influence their content by using a 'Session' header leading to unexpected behavior bsc1086814...

The US National Cyber Strategy

Last month, the White House released the "National Cyber Strategy of the United States of America. I generally don't have much to say about these sorts of documents. They're filled with broad generalities. Who can argue with: Defend the homeland by protecting networks, systems, functions, and dat...

Virus Bulletin 2018: Exposing the Social Media Fraud Ecosystem

MONTREAL — While troll farms, influence campaigns and Twitter bots that spread disinformation have all become high-profile and negative aspects of the social-media universe, new research shows that there is actually a rich and complex supply chain behind these efforts. “Social-media fraud is...

This Week in Security News: Air Canada and Cryptojacking

Welcome to our weekly roundup, where we share what you need to know about the cybersecurity news and events that happened over the past few days. This week, Air Canada reported a data breach that exposed passport details for more than 20,000 customers on their mobile app. Also, Trend Micro’s...

Following Facebook and Twitter, Google Targets Iranian Influence Operation

In the wake of influence-campaign takedowns by Facebook and Twitter, Google has issued a report detailing its own efforts to root out foreign influence operatives allegedly tied to an Iranian state-run media broadcaster. The news comes as President Donald Trump appeared to tweet in opposition to...

Facebook Removes 17 Profiles Involved in Political Meddling

Facebook Tuesday said that it has removed 32 pages from its platform involved in “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” The action comes months before the November midterm elections – and at a time when all eyes are on Facebook to see how it protects against potential campaigns attempting to sway...

Security Bulletin: Open Source Apache HTTP vulnerabilities (CVE-2014-0098) for RAF

Summary Previous releases of IBM Rational Automation Framework RAF are affected by the vulnerabilitie in Apache HTTP Server that may allow remote attackers to influence the availability of the Framework Server. Vulnerability Details | Subscribe to My Notifications to be notified of important...