Author Archives: Jeff Stone

The worst part about finding Facebook disinformation is finding it again

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When Facebook said in August it had removed a network of fake accounts that had been trying to amplify criticism of President Donald Trump, it gave some external researchers a sense of déjà vu. After all, Facebook had taken intermittent action against accounts, pages and groups that were misrepresenting themselves to promote China’s Communist Party, including specific removals of a campaign known as Spamouflage Dragon. The Spamouflage campaign apparently began in the summer of 2019 as a scheme to denounce pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong, eventually shifting to demonize critics of Beijing and to praise China’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic. By August 2020, Facebook, like Twitter and YouTube, was still removing Spamouflage-affiliated accounts that bashed Trump’s inaction on the coronavirus and U.S. scrutiny of TikTok under its “coordinated inauthentic behavior” policy. Other networks of accounts also have managed to return to Facebook after they were detected and previously removed, […]

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Why social media disinformation represents such a security threat

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Disinformation works on you, too. Coordinated social media campaigns aimed at influencing public opinion, both in the U.S. and abroad, represent such a threat to democratic discourse because propagandists seize on emotional conversations with little accountability. By using Facebook and Twitter to plant misinformation, attackers implicitly nudge readers into the kind of tunnel vision that accelerates a cycle of mistrust, according to two researchers who have spent years examining the issue. Graham Brookie, the director and managing editor of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, and Nina Jankowicz, author of “How to Lose the Information War,” said during a panel Tuesday that stopping disinformation requires the kind of cooperation that increasingly is difficult to find in American society. “The tricky thing about disinformation is that everybody thinks of it as somebody else’s problem, right?” Brookie said Tuesday during CyberTalks, a virtual summit hosted by CyberScoop. “We’re all looking at social […]

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Alleged KickassTorrents founder Artem Vaulin jumped bail in Poland

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It looks like the alleged founder of a notorious piracy website is on the run. Artem Vaulin, the accused operator of KickassTorrents, has eluded custody in Poland, where he was arrested in 2016. The site — which is frequently blocked by internet browsers for linking to malicious software — has illegally distributed more than $1 billion worth of movies, video games, television shows and music downloads, U.S. prosecutors say. Polish authorities released Vaulin on bail in May 2017 for health reasons, pending his extradition to the U.S. Now, though, the 34-year-old Ukrainian defendant “has left Poland in violation of his release conditions, and his current whereabouts are unknown,” the U.S. Department of Justice said in a court filing dated Oct. 7. Extradition proceedings have ceased. A former attorney in Poland for Vaulin did not immediately respond to a request for comment. KickassTorrents, often abbreviated to KAT, functions as a directory for torrent […]

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Lawyer for alleged Methbot scammer refuses to visit jail over coronavirus concerns

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A defense attorney for the head of an alleged cybercriminal conspiracy that defrauded American companies out of tens of millions of dollars is refusing to visit the defendant in a Brooklyn jail because of the COVID-19 pandemic. A lawyer for Aleksandr Zhukov, the accused boss of the Methbot/3ve advertising fraud conspiracy, informed a U.S. judge that they would no longer visit Zhukov behind bars to prepare for trial, according to a court filing submitted Friday. The attorney, who goes unnamed, cited unsafe conditions at the Metropolitan Detention Center, where Zhukov has been incarcerated for more than a year. Zhukov pleaded not guilty in January 2019 to charges that he functioned as the ringleader of the so-called Methbot fraud operation, which the U.S. Department of Justice described as an international scheme that bilked marketing companies out of $29 million. Zhukov allegedly led a group of eight accused scammers who used malicious software […]

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Facebook, Twitter aim to slow spread of New York Post article amid disinformation concerns

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Social media companies are moving to limit the spread of an article that fits the description of the kind of political dirt that disinformation specialists have predicted would surface in the weeks before Election Day. An Oct. 14 New York Post story which purportedly shows evidence that Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden had engaged in some kind of political corruption during his time as vice president was immediately criticized by a range of academics and security practitioners who, for months, have advised the media to be cautious with any salacious materials that allegedly had been leaked prior to Nov. 3. The article from the right-leaning Post reports that Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, had sought to introduce his father to a Ukrainian businessman, citing emails that were allegedly left at a Delaware computer repair shop and provided to an attorney for Rudy Giuliani, a member of President Donald Trump’s legal team. Facebook said […]

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Foreign spies use front companies to disguise their hacking, borrowing an old camouflage tactic

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Professional hackers who already try to hide their activity through an array of technical means now seem to be trying on more corporate disguises, by creating front companies or working as government contractors to boost their legitimacy. U.S. law enforcement in September accused hackers based in Iran and China of conducting global espionage operations while appearing to exist as otherwise innocuous technology firms. While the public nature of the charges are proof the efforts weren’t entirely successful, the tactic marks an evolution of the use of dummy corporations since a group of financial scammers stole a reported $1 billion by posing as a cybersecurity testing firm. “It just makes it harder to figure out who’s doing what, and what are their motivations,” John Demers, the U.S. assistant attorney general for national security, said of the apparent motivation in a recent interview. “For a company that’s suffered a breach, it may […]

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LinkedIn hacker Nikulin sentenced to 7 years in prison after years of legal battles

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One of the most-watched cybercrime cases in recent memory has come to a close. A U.S. judge on Tuesday sentenced Yevgeniy Nikulin to 88 months in prison, or more than seven years, in prison, capping an international legal drama that’s involved three countries over a span of eight years. Prosecutors had requested nearly 12 years in prison. A jury in California found Nikulin, now 33, guilty in July of hacking LinkedIn and Formspring in a pair of 2012 data breaches in which he stole credentials belonging to 117 million Americans. He was charged in 2016 with felony counts including computer intrusion and aggravated identity theft for stealing Americans’ usernames and passwords, then trying to sell them to other members of a Russian-speaking cybercriminal forum. “This is a hard one because when he returns [to Russia] I think he will return to being a hacker again,” Judge William Alsup said during. […]

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‘Dark Overlord’ hacker pleads guilty, sentenced to 5 years for extortion threats

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Years after he threatened to publicly release information from hacking victims unless they agreed to his digital extortion demands, Nathan Wyatt is headed to a U.S. prison. A judge in the Eastern District of Missouri on Monday sentenced Wyatt, 39, to five years in prison after he pleaded guilty to assisting a hacking crew known as The Dark Overlord. Wyatt, who had previously entered a plea of not guilty, participated in a court hearing by phone from a jail in St. Charles County, Missouri. “I’d like to apologize for the role that I played in this,” Wyatt said, through tears, adding that he struggles with a mental illness that affects his decision-making ability. “I can promise you that I just want to go home to my family. I’m out of that world, and I don’t want to see another computer for the rest of my life.” Wyatt also is subject to […]

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US charges, sanctions Russians accused of stealing $17 million from crypto exchanges

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A U.S. federal grand jury has indicted two Russian men in connection with an email scam that defrauded American cryptocurrency exchanges out of nearly $17 million. The Department of Justice on Wednesday unsealed charges against the Russian nationals, Danil Potekhin and Dmitrii Karasavidi, accusing them of using a combination of phishing messages and spoofed websites to steal virtual currency from users at three cryptocurrency exchanges. The fraud effort netted attackers $16.8 million from 2017 to 2018, according to the Justice Department. A grand jury returned the charges in February. By directing victims to visit financial websites that seemed legitimate, the attackers duped traders into entering their usernames and passwords into sites under their control. After gathering the credentials from their malicious site, Potekhin and Karasavidi directed funds from those accounts into their own, prosecutors said. The U.S. Treasury Department also announced Wednesday it has enacted sanctions against the two men, forbidding […]

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Ransomware to blame for nearly half the cyber-insurance claims filed in early 2020

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Nearly half of the cyber-insurance claims filed in the first half of this year were the result of ransomware attacks, further proof that digital extortion attempts are having a ripple effect throughout the private sector. Ransomware attacks were the cause of 41% of the cyber-insurance claims filed over the first six months of 2020, according to a report published by Coalition, a cyber-insurance vendor that compiled the data based on findings from 25,000 small and medium-sized companies in the U.S. and Canada. Coalition reported a 47% increase in the number of ransomware attacks, with the average size of the demand jumping by 46% over the time period in question. While cyber-insurance vendors have financial interest in emphasizing the frequency and severity of ransomware attacks, the latest figures come after a series of similar numbers hinted at the size of the ransomware problem. Beazley Breach Response, a unit of the London-based […]

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