Year: 2021

The state-backed Russian cyber spies behind the SolarWinds hacking campaign launched a targeted spear-phishing assault on U.S. and foreign government agencies and think tanks this week using an email marketing account of the U.S. Agency for International Development, Microsoft said. The effort targeted about 3,000 email accounts at more than 150 different organizations, at least a quarter of them involved in international development, humanitarian and human rights work, Microsoft Vice President Tom Burt said in a blog post late Thursday. It did not say what portion of the attempts may have led to successful intrusions. The cybersecurity firm Volexity, which also tracked the campaign but has less visibility into email systems than Microsoft , said in a post  that relatively low detection rates of the phishing emails suggest the attacker…

A new report suggests that Chinese telecommunication firm Huawei has successfully secured contracts to provide cloud infrastructure in emerging economies in Asia, Africa and Latin America — a strategy that could allow Beijing to harvest important and sensitive information for "coercive leverage." The move comes as many developed economies such as the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom and France are banning or restricting Huawei from their 5G networks.  The report, FILE - Huawei's Director of the Board William Xu speaks at the opening of Huawei Global Analysts Summit in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, China, April 12, 2021.The CSIS report warned that as Huawei carves out a niche as a provider to governments and state-owned enterprises, "its activities could provide Chinese authorities with intelligence and even coercive leverage." In response to the report, Huawei issued…

Facebook says it will no longer remove claims that COVID-19 is human-made or manufactured “in light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts."There is rising pressure worldwide to investigate the origins of the pandemic, including the possibility that it came from a lab. Since the pandemic began, Facebook has been changing what it allows on the topic and what it bans. In February, it announced a host of new claims it would be prohibiting -- including that COVID-19 was created in a Chinese lab. Other claims it added at the time included the false notion that vaccines are not effective or that they are toxic.Lisa Fazio, a professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University, said the reversal shows the difficulty of fact-checking in…

The Cyprus-flagged oil tanker Berlina was drifting near the Caribbean island of Dominica earlier this year when tracking technology showed it stopping in its tracks and in two minutes turning around 180 degrees.It was an amazingly quick pivot since the 274-meter ship needs roughly 10 times that amount of time to perform such a maneuver.Even more intriguing: Around the same time the Berlina was pinging its location at sea, it was physically spotted loading crude oil in nearby Venezuela despite U.S. sanctions against such trading.Meanwhile, nine other ships, some connected to the same Greece-based owner of the Berlina, were digitally monitored moving nearby at an identical speed and direction with sudden draft changes, indicating they had somehow been loaded full of crude though apparently out at sea.The Berlina's impossible journey…

Russia and Iran are leading the way when it comes to pushing bad information on one of the world's most popular social media platforms, and new analysis finds they are getting savvier at evading detection. Facebook issued a report Wednesday looking at so-called coordinated inauthentic behavior over the past four years, warning that despite ongoing efforts to identify and remove disinformation networks, there is no let-up in attempts to exploit or weaponize conflict and crisis. "Threat actors have adapted their behavior and sought cover in the gray spaces between authentic and inauthentic engagement and political activity," according to the Facebook report, which looked at the more than 150 networks from more than 50 countries that its security teams took down from 2017 to 2020. "We know they will continue to look for new ways…

WhatsApp has filed a lawsuit challenging the Indian government’s new rules that require the Facebook-owned messaging platform to make people’s messages traceable, a move it says would undermine the privacy of users.The lawsuit was filed as India brought sweeping new regulations into force on Wednesday to make social media and technology companies, that have tens of millions of users in the country, more accountable for content on their platform.One of the new rules would require messaging platforms to identify the “first originator of information” when authorities demand it. WhatsApp wants that regulation blocked saying that it undermines citizens’ fundamental right to privacy.In a statement issued after the lawsuit was filed, the government said it respects the right to privacy as a fundamental right but "no Fundamental Right, including the Right…