Tonya Riley – Page 30 – WindowsTechs.com

Facebook says it will step up efforts to stop coordinated campaigns that cause harm

Posted on September 16, 2021 by Tonya Riley

Facebook will ramp up efforts to curb coordinated activities from real users who are connected to dangerous activities in the real world, such as promotion of vaccine misinformation and organizing violence, the company said Thursday. The new policy is an attempt to address a gap in the platform’s enforcement against real individuals who band together to repeatedly violate the platform’s standards. The plan is based on Facebook’s existing efforts to scrub its platform of fake accounts. “From a security perspective, our goal is to borrow from the cybersecurity world and build an in-depth approach here, where we have multiple layers to catch violating activity that can cause harm to people on our platform,” Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of security policy, said Thursday in a call with reporters. Facebook will take a range of actions against violating accounts, including reducing content reach and disabling violating accounts. The new policies build on […]

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UN calls for human rights safeguards on artificial intelligence

Posted on September 15, 2021 by Tonya Riley

The United Nations’ top human rights official Wednesday called for a global moratorium on the sale and use of artificial intelligence systems that pose human rights concerns until safeguards are put in place. “We cannot afford to continue playing catch-up regarding AI – allowing its use with limited or no boundaries or oversight, and dealing with the almost inevitable human rights consequences after the fact,” U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet said alongside the release of a report on the emerging technology. “The power of AI to serve people is undeniable, but so is AI’s ability to feed human rights violations at an enormous scale with virtually no visibility.” The U.N. did not list specific AI tools that governments should ban. Instead, the report points to a number of ways the technology is used in decision-making that can have life-altering consequences, including the rise in the use of […]

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Former U.S. intelligence operatives charged with helping UAE hack rivals, U.S. citizens

Posted on September 14, 2021 by Tonya Riley

The Justice Department charged three former U.S. intelligence operatives on Tuesday with hacking and conspiracy charges in connection with their work helping United Arab Emirates spy on activists and political rivals. The charges allege that defendants Marc Baier, Ryan Adams and Daniel Gericke “knowingly and willfully” provided the UAE with spy technology without approval from the U.S. government. The charges back up a 2019 Reuters investigation that found a secret hacking unit of UAE-based cybersecurity firm DarkMatter was hiring former U.S. intelligence officers to help the UAE to spy on the phones of activists, diplomats and other nation’s leaders. Former employees told Reuters that their work with the hacking unit, “Project Raven,” also involved spying on U.S. citizens and companies. The Intercept first reported the existence of DarkMatter in 2016. According to court documents, after leaving government employment, Baier, Adams and Gericker joined a firm prosecutors referred to as “Company […]

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Apple patches against alleged NSO Group zero-click exploit used on activists

Posted on September 13, 2021 by Tonya Riley

Apple released a patch Monday against two security vulnerabilities, one of which the Israeli surveillance company NSO Group has exploited, according to researchers. The updated iOS software patches against a zero-click exploit that uses iMessage to launch malicious code, which in turn allows NSO Group clients to infiltrate targets — including the phone of a Saudi activist in March, researchers at Citizen Lab said. The exploit uses a manipulated gif to crash Apple’s image rendering library. It then launches spyware that researchers say shares distinct features with NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware. Researchers have named the exploit “FORCEDENTRY.” Zero-click exploits prove especially dangerous because they don’t require users to open the malicious message or link for hackers to gain access to your phone. Researchers are urging Apple Mac, iPhone and Apple Watch users to immediately update their iOS software. The NSO Group exploit was a zero-day, or previously unknown, vulnerability. It’s […]

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WhatsApp adds end-to-end encryption to chat backups, locking up data in the cloud

Posted on September 10, 2021 by Tonya Riley

WhatsApp will add a feature that allows users to turn on end-t0-end encryption for messages they back up to cloud providers, the Facebook-owned company announced Friday. Since 2016, WhatsApp has offered end-to-end encryption, meaning messages are only accessible for the sender and the recipient. End-to-end encryption does not mean those messages can’t be revealed by the sender or recipient to other parties once the message is received, as a recent article by ProPublica on WhatsApp’s content moderation process underscored. The same was true for messages backed up to third-party cloud providers. Until now, WhatsApp did not offer users a way to protect those messages upon backing them up to a third party like Google Drive or iCloud. For instance, FBI agents in 2018 proved capable of accessing WhatsApp messages from former Donald Trump presidential campaign manager Paul Manafort by obtaining a court order to search his iCloud. Now users can […]

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Civil liberties groups pressure White House to fill surveillance oversight board

Posted on September 10, 2021 by Tonya Riley

Privacy advocates are urging President Joe Biden to fill an independent watchdog board that could have an enormous impact on the future of the U.S. surveillance programs raised in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Filling the empty seats on the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board is “necessary to continue to hold the government accountable for safeguarding our privacy and civil liberties in surveillance programs that are often shrouded in secrecy,” a group of nearly two dozen organizations led by the American Civil Liberties Union wrote to the White House Wednesday. While the failure to maintain a quorum of members and chairperson for the independent oversight agency predates the Biden administration, advocates say that by failing to act the White House is missing a key opportunity to examine federal surveillance programs. Numerous legal and civil rights experts have underscored over the years how these programs disproportionately […]

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Pro-Beijing operatives used social media to try promoting NYC protest

Posted on September 8, 2021 by Tonya Riley

Pro-China operatives behind an effort to cast a negative light on the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic tried using social media to promote a street demonstration earlier this year, according to findings released Wednesday by the intelligence firm Mandiant. As a part of ongoing research into suspected Chinese influence operations, investigators discovered a network of fake accounts spamming Twitter and other platforms in April with posts calling for Asian Americans to protest racial discrimination in New York City. The effort was an “early warning” that China is getting bolder in how it attempts to influence politics outside of its borders, says John Hultquist, vice president of threat intelligence at Mandiant, a division of FireEye. “The intent is what worries me here because they’re already trying to cross the serious line of getting people on the street,” said Hultquist. Mandiant did not definitively attribute the effort to the Chinese government. […]

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FTC proposes first stalkerware ban, promises to toughen stance on abusive apps

Posted on September 1, 2021 by Tonya Riley

The Federal Trade Commission is seeking its first ban of a “stalkerware” company, signaling an intent to crack down on surveillance technologies that expose individuals’ real-time activities to snoops, hackers and dangerous people. A complaint released by the agency Wednesday alleges that SpyFone, an app that markets itself as a tool to monitor loved ones’ internet activity, and its CEO Scott Zuckerman sold real-time access to illegally harvested phone data including location and email, enabling surveillance by stalkers and domestic abusers. The FTC also accused SpyFone of failing to enact basic security measures to safeguard the data it collects, leading to a 2018 data breach that exposed the personal data of roughly 2,200 customers. The FTC alleges that the company failed to follow through on promises to customers that it would upgrade its security after the incident. In addition to a ban on any future sales or marketing of surveillance […]

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Cryptocurrency payments to scams outpace ransomware jackpots in Eastern Europe, Chainalysis finds

Posted on September 1, 2021 by Tonya Riley

Eastern Europe remains a hotbed for illicit cryptocurrency activity, new research shows. Between June 2020 and July 2021, Eastern Europe-based cryptocurrency addresses sent $815 million to investment ponzi scams that lure users with false promises of high returns, according to Chainalysis data published Wednesday. Ukraine, in particular, drove a significant amount of the region’s traffic to the fraud websites, trouncing second-place United States by roughly 20 million visits. Half the money sent in the region went to just one apparent fraud effort. Between December 2019 and August 2021, users sent over $1.5 billion worth of bitcoin to Finiko, a Russia-based ponzi-scheme whose founders are under arrest or have fled Russia. The company marketed itself as a referral network that would reward investors with high returns, only to come under scrutiny from authorities in Moscow for allegedly defrauding users. The report highlights that while Eastern Europe is largely seen as the recipient […]

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