A collection point
...and some of my own.
Wi-Fi signals let researchers ID people through walls from their gait
11 months ago, a team of researchers led by Yasamin Mostofi, at University of California Santa Barbara demonstrated using a streamlined set of technologies – just a smartphone and some clever computation – how to see through walls and successfully track people in 11 real-world locations, with accuracy rates of between 82% and 89%. XModal-ID, is a novel video-WiFi cross-modal gait-based person identification system, it establishes a unique pattern of movement with each unique individual with as little as a couple of Wifi transmitters and a phone. Consider a smart home, where each resident has personal preferences (e.g., lighting, music, and temperature). The home WiFi network can use XModal-ID and one-time video samples of the residents to identify a person walking in an area of the house and activate his/her preferences, without the need to collect wireless/video data of each resident for training purposes. New residents can also be easily identified without a need for retraining. Now consider surveillance: Match Video with each individuals unique movements and you can track and ID them even in areas where there is no CCTV. Scary. Iranian Hackers Targeted a US Presidential Candidate Friday, Microsoft sounded an alarm that serves as a timely reminder that Russia doesn't have a monopoly on election hacking. In an aggressive new email phishing push, the company says, Iranian hackers targeted a US presidential campaign. "Due to the success of the Russians in the 2016 US election, their model is being emulated across the globe," says Jeff Bardin, chief intelligence officer of the cybersecurity intelligence firm Treadstone 71, which monitors Iranian hacking activity. "In terms of who Iran might target in the US, you would have to ask yourself what candidate or candidates would best suit Iranian needs as a president of the United States. And the interesting thing with that is that Iran's effort would likely be counter to the efforts of Russian cyber-operations and those of other countries. So what you end up having is the potential for numerous massive attempts to manipulate the American voter that may turn to absolute noise and contradictory data." Microsoft wouldn't say which candidate's operations the Iranian assailants hit, but Reuters reported on Friday that the target was President Donald Trump's re-election campaign, which is known to use Outlook as its email provider. Microsoft noted that the attacks on the campaign did not succeed. In a 30-day stretch during August and September, Microsoft saw hackers launch 2,700 attempts to identify specific target email accounts, including those belonging to current and former US government officials, journalists, and Iranians living outside Iran. They ultimately attacked 241 of those and successfully compromised four—none of which were associated with the US presidential candidate or government officials. Microsoft has notified the victims. Political Operatives Are Faking Voter Outrage With Millions Of Made-Up Comments To Benefit The Rich And Powerful Jeremy Singer-Vine & Kevin Collier at Buzzfeed: Sarah Reeves sat on her couch in Eugene, Oregon, staring at her laptop screen in furious disbelief. She was reading the website of a government agency, where her mother appeared to have posted a comment weighing in on a bitter policy battle for control of the internet. Something was very wrong. Her mother, a soft spoken advocate for free speech died a year before the comment was posted. “Net neutrality” was designed to protect the open web by requiring internet providers to treat traffic from all sites equally — and under Trump, the FCC was planning to scrap it. Conservatives had long branded the regulation as an assault on free enterprise, but advocates warned that its repeal would allow the broadband giants to manipulate traffic in favor of the highest-paying platforms, crowding out competition and stifling free speech. The stakes were high, and the public comment period attracted a staggering 22 million submissions. The problem was, many of the comments were fake. Despite polling showing substantial support for net neutrality, Americans appeared to be flocking online to defend the rights of the telecom giants. Almost immediately, observers started sounding alarms. The tech publication ZDNet found that “anti-net neutrality spammers are flooding FCC's pages with fake comments” and that several people whose names appeared as commenters said they had not posted a word. Reporters at Gizmodo and the Verge found similar examples. In a key part of the puzzle, two little-known firms, Media Bridge and LCX Digital, working on behalf of industry group Broadband for America, were shown to have misappropriated names and personal information as part of a bid to submit more than 1.5 million statements favorable to their cause. The New York attorney general opened an investigation and has since issued subpoenas to more than a dozen entities — estimating that “as many as 9.6 million comments may have used stolen identities.” But the FCC went ahead and scrapped the net neutrality rule in a massive victory for the broadband industry and a huge blow, consumer advocates said, for users. Some suspicious comments have been tracked back to particular political operatives. But the question of how millions of identities were marshaled without consent had largely remained a mystery. Social media manipulation as a political tool is spreading According to the Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Research Project, the use of algorithms, automation, and big data to shape public opinion – i.e. computational propaganda – is becoming “a pervasive and ubiquitous part of everyday life.” For its third annual report, the project examined what it calls “cyber troop” activity in 70 countries. Cyber troops is the collective term for government or political party actors that use social media to manipulate public opinion, harass dissidents, attack political opponents or spread polarizing messages meant to divide societies, among other things. Over the past two years, there’s been a 150% increase in the number of countries using social media to launch manipulation campaigns, the project found. 80% of countries use bot accounts 11% of countries use cyborg accounts 7% of countries use hacked/stolen accounts 71% of these accounts spread pro-government or pro-party propaganda 89% attack the opposition or mount smear campaigns 34% spread polarizing messages designed to drive divisions within society 75% of countries used disinformation and media manipulation to mislead users 68% of countries use state-sponsored trolling to target political dissidents, the opposition or journalists 73% amplify messages and content by flooding hashtags ESET sounds alarm over Casabaneiro attack The research team at ESET has detailed a bank hacking operation that is hitting both fiat and cryptocurrency operations in Mexico and Brazil. Known as Casabaneiro, the attack uses fake pop-up windows to trick users into entering their account details, which are then sent by the malware to a command and control server. What is particularly unique about this attack, says ESET, is the way it runs its command and control system. Infected machines do not go directly to the command server, but rather a YouTube page where a link to the C&C machine is embedded in the video description. The infected machines access the page then follow the link, making it appear to admins as if the user is just watching a video. "What makes this technique dangerous is that it does not raise much suspicion without context," ESET explains. Incognito mode for Google Maps will start rolling out later this month, first on Android, with the iOS version following soon after. Incognito mode in Maps is going to keep your device from recording your Maps activity on that device. For example, the places you search for won’t be saved to your Google Account, nor will they be used to personalize your Maps experience. It’s easy to turn on and off, Google says: you just select it from the menu that appears when you tap your profile photo. Make no mistake, Incognito mode won’t make you a silent, trackless online ghost. If you want to leave everyone guessing, the only game in town is the Tor browser. Maps is a standalone app that isn’t affected by (or even able to read) your browser cookies. It keeps its own stash of data, locally and remotely, about what you have searched for, where you have been, and so on. Google is very keen for you to access its maps via the app and not your browser – every time you visit maps.google.com on your phone you’ll get a popup urging you to try the app instead. (The app has many more features than you get in a mobile browser, and is indeed more useful as a result, but it does get to collect its own data that doesn’t get cleared along with browser cookies.) Feds to boost scrutiny of airliner cybersecurity vulnerabilities Doug Olenick: The Wall Street Journal is reporting a new program to run tests on actual airplanes to probe for weaknesses, much like was done several years ago when an older Boeing 757 was put to the test by researchers who found the plane could be penetrated using its radio communications setup. |
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