Category Archives: Atlantic Council

Atlantic Council holding worldwide events to combat the rise of disinformation

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You don’t need to look far to find an example of where disinformation had a profound effect on international politics. Consider Ireland’s abortion referendum, where foreign anti-abortion organizations targeted Irish social media users with specific ads. Or, last month, when Facebook announced it detected Russian propagandists masquerading as a Georgian fashion site. Or, of course, the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Incidents like this are why the Atlantic Council is organizing a series of events and listening sessions next month in Brussels, Madrid and Athens where security experts can advise international lawmakers on how to stifle influence efforts. The goal is to help world leaders recognize and act more quickly to stop campaigns to magnify false narratives like ones used in debates over the Catalonia policy, Brexit, Ireland’s abortion referendum and the 2016 election. “Western Europe and European Union countries once thought this is just a problem affecting the U.S. and Balkan […]

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Why did Maria Butina want info on a phished civil rights group?

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Maria Butina, the Russian national accused of spying on the U.S., took a keen interest in a D.C.-based organization’s cybersecurity vulnerabilities soon after the group was hit by phishing attempts and its website was defaced with fake Islamic State messaging, according to a consultant who helped the group recover from the incident. The organization, which works on civil rights issues, was targeted through a “social engineering campaign,” said Jon Steinman, the co-founder of HillCyber, a cybersecurity consultancy. Soon afterward, Butina sent an email to the organization “asking to come meet with folks and interview them about their vulnerabilities,” said Steinman, who declined to name the group. Although the indictment against Butina centers on how she ingratiated herself with U.S. conservatives, her interest in left-leaning organizations also has been documented — the Washington Post reported that in the summer of 2017, “Butina began probing groups on the left … trying unsuccessfully to interview a D.C.-based civil rights group about […]

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U.S. voting machines are easily hackable, DEF CON report says

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A number of voting machines used in U.S. elections are easily hackable, a report from DEF CON, one of the world’s largest hacker conventions, found. The report is based on the Voting Village experiment at July’s DEF CON conference in Las Vegas. Over the course of four days, hackers were invited to explore and tinker with voting machines to expose their vulnerabilities. Hackers with physical access to the systems were able to compromise some of the machines within minutes. Over the course of the experiment, each of the two dozen machines was breached in some way, the report notes. The findings were presented by a panel of hackers and cybersecurity experts on an Atlantic Council panel on Tuesday, which included DEF CON founder Jeff Moss. “These machines were pretty easy to hack,” Moss said. “This flies in the face of the narrative that’s been spun by the manufacturers, which is […]

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Why Twitter’s bot problem is a looming security challenge

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The persons or groups behind Twitter’s thousands of bot accounts have realized they can attack people without triggering Twitter’s protective security policies, presenting a rapidly evolving information security challenge for the social media network. Late last month, bot researchers at ProPublica and the Atlantic Council were attacked by a campaign of Twitter bots, which spammed the victim accounts with thousands of retweets and likes, causing Twitter to temporarily suspend certain accounts for unusually high activity. Ben Nimmo, Information Defense Fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, was personally targeted by the bot campaign and live-tweeted his analysis of the attacks, which included impersonations of Atlantic Council user accounts that tweeted fake content, like a message alleging that Nimmo had died. “They certainly wanted to intimidate me by faking those accounts. That was about scaring me, rather than me getting blocked,” Nimmo told Cyberscoop. Nimmo noted that he was easily […]

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Healthcare Sector Suffers From Lack Of Security Professionals

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At Source Boston, Josh Corman of the Atlantic Council said that healthcare is suffering from a lack of security talent, devices rife with vulnerabilities, and government incentivizing bad behavior. Continue reading Healthcare Sector Suffers From Lack Of Security Professionals→