Facebook Disrupts Russian Disinformation Campaign Targeting Neighbors
Today Facebook removed 364 pages, groups and accounts on its platform because it suspected they were linked to the Russian state-run news agency, Sputnik. The social media company said that some were being operated out of Moscow but hid their link to Sputnik in a bid to blend in as local-run Facebook pages, groups and accounts. Countries targeted by the misinformation campaign According to this article, the pages pretended to be publishing news in Romania, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Moldova, and Kyrgyzstan, while they were being operated out of Russia. Despite this, Facebook was able to link these pages and accounts to employees of Sputnik. While it is unclear whether these employees acted on their own, it is likely that they had the backing of Sputnik, as well as other elements within the Russian government. This is especially true because of the large sums of money that they had spent on online advertisement. Some of these pages regularly posted content promoting anti-NATO sentiment, protest movements and corruption amongst their followers. All in all, most of the posts were anti-Western and sought to bring about discord and chaos in the political systems of those nations that were targeted by this information warfare campaign. Examples of the Facebook posts made by Facebook ads and Russian reach One page is said to have had 790,000 followers, with other pages having similar number of followers. Facebook revealed that the operation had begun on October 2013 and had spent approximately $135,000 (using various currencies including US dollars, Russian rubles and the Euro) in ads on the social media platform. The most recent ad ran in January 2019. Facebook is yet to complete its assessment of the organic content spread from these accounts. These pages hosted approximately 190 events. The first of which is do have had happened in August 2015, and the most recent taking place in January 2019. Up to 1,200 Facebook users are said to have had expressed interest in participating or learning more about these events. However, the social media platform cannot confirm whether these events took place. Facebook has said that they used open source reporting to help investigate this incident. They have also shared information about their enquiry with the US law enforcement, the US Congress, other technology companies, and lawmakers in the countries targeted by the Russian information warfare campaign. Another operation targeting Ukraine uncovered The social media company has also removed 107 Facebook pages, groups and accounts, as well as 41 Instagram accounts, in a separate Russian misinformation campaign not linked to the Sputnik operation. They were tipped off by US law enforcement agencies. Russia is believed to have had carried out the misinformation campaign while targeting the Ukraine. Facebook was able to identify some technical overlaps between this campaign as well as the one that targeted the United States during the Midterms late last year.
The Internet of Things and Security Risks
The Internet of Things and Security Risks The Internet of Things is the concept of gadgets and smart devices becoming connected together through a digital network, allowing easy and remote access to these said devices. These devices would also interact with one another to a large extent, allowing, for example, the wall-mounted clock to send in a request to the coffee-maker to start mixing you up a cup of café au lait, all the while your microwave starts preparing your breakfast and your thermostat turning the air-conditioner off as you leave the comfort of your duvet. The problem with the Internet of Things is, primarily speaking, the fact that the vulnerabilities that devices connected to the network share. In most cases, if one device were to be hacked — which is relatively easy, seeing as how some devices can be hacked by simply knowing the residence’s IP address — then all the other devices can easily be hacked. The biggest concerns are hacking televisions’ microphones and security cameras. The BBC put up an experiment recently to see how vulnerable the Internet of Things truly is. Eight experts were assembled. The conclusion of the experiment? All devices were hacked by these experts rather easily. With most of them, if you can connect to it you can own it,” said head of security research at Sophos, James Lyne. If anything, these concerns and flaws should be resolved first and foremost, if there is any hopes of a safe transition to using these devices and the Internet of Things in the future.
Google promotes high security websites in web searches
Google Ranks Secure Websites Google has begun bumping up websites that are secure and facilitate encrypted data transfer, in a bid to reduce vulnerabilities that may put users’ private information at risk. Google hopes that this will be enough of an incentive to encourage webmasters to rethink security strategies and implement more protection systems that would keep data secure. Google wrote the following in a blog post: “We’ve seen more and more webmasters adopting HTTPS, on their website, which is encouraging. Over the past few months we’ve been running tests taking into account whether sites use secure, encrypted connections as a signal in our search ranking algorithms. We’ve seen positive results, so we’re starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal.” The move comes after Project Zero was launched, where a team of white hat hackers were invited by Google to find vulnerabilities and security shortsights across the web. Google does not at this time give too much weight over the new ranking system. “But over time, we may decide to strengthen it, because we’d like to encourage all website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS to keep everyone safe on the web,” Google said.