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☆ Sextortion is fastest-growing crime targeting minors in North America – and social media companies can do more to stop it, study finds
▼ + stars: | 2024-01-27 | by ( Lora Kolodny | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +11 min

NCRI, a nonprofit, found cybercriminals used the social apps Instagram, Snapchat and Wizz to find and connect with their marks. And social media platforms should include a distinct category to report sextortion — as Snapchat did in early 2023. Parents and educators should "combat the belief that photos sent on Snapchat disappear, which can create a false sense of security," the NCRI study recommends. The NCRI study also strongly criticized Wizz, concluding: "Sextortion on Wizz is pervasive and dangerous. Apple's App Store and Google Play can also help, the NCRI study suggested, by carefully monitoring complaints about sextortion associated with social media apps, and enforcing their existing policies.

Persons: cybercriminals, Wizz, Paul Raffile, Alex Goldenberg, TikTok, Scribd, sextortion, Snapchat, Goldenberg, screenshotted, General Raúl Torrez, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta, — Kevin Collier, Ben Goggin Organizations: Yahoo, Network, Research, FBI, Yahoo Boys, NBC News, CNBC, NBC, Secret Service, Facebook, YouTube, Meta, gov, National Center for Locations: North America, Australia, West Africa, Michigan, Wizz, New Mexico, U.S

☆ Zuckerberg says Threads will dip its toe in the 'fediverse' as it opens to Europe
▼ + stars: | 2023-12-14 | by ( Kevin Collier | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +5 min

Meta will begin testing a system that allows posts from its microblogging platform Threads to appear on other social media services, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Wednesday. The fediverse is still tiny compared to Threads, with about 11 million users, the vast majority of them on Mastodon. Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, wrote on Threads that the platform is starting with the ability to follow Threads users from other ActivityPub platforms, adding that the ability for Threads users to follow accounts from other platforms is in the works. If Threads goes through with full ActivityPub integration, people will be able to follow Threads users and see their posts without having to join the platform (Threads currently forces users to sign up through an Instagram account). Similarly, Threads users will be able to follow users and see posts from across ActivityPub's network.

Persons: Mark Zuckerberg, Zuckerberg, Evan Prodromou, It's, X, Adam Mosseri, Instagram, Mike McCue, Flipboard, Christine Lemmer, Webber Organizations: Meta, Mozilla Locations: Europe, United States, Israel

☆ How the GOP muzzled the quiet coalition that fought foreign propaganda
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-10 | by ( Kevin Collier | Ken Dilanian | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +14 min

A once-robust alliance of federal agencies, tech companies, election officials and researchers that worked together to thwart foreign propaganda and disinformation has fragmented after years of sustained Republican attacks. The most recent setback came when the FBI put an indefinite hold on most briefings to social media companies about Russian, Iranian and Chinese influence campaigns. "We're having some interaction with social media companies," Wray said. "The symbiotic relationship between the government and the social media companies has definitely been fractured." Tech companies are still sharing their findings with each other, a Meta spokesperson told NBC News.

Persons: Christopher Wray, Wray, Sen, Mitt Romney, they're, Mark Warner, Warner, Hillary Clinton's, Barack, CISA, Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Hunter, Mark Zuckerburg, Hunter Biden, didn't, Biden, Nina Jankowicz, Jankowicz, Jen, Jim Jordan, Kara Swisher, we're, Elon Musk, wasn't Organizations: U.S, Capitol, Washington , D.C, GOP, FBI, Force, NBC News, Senate Homeland Security Committee, Justice Department, Committee, Republican, Infrastructure Security Agency, Department of Homeland Security, Microsoft, Senate Intelligence, Kremlin, Internet Research Agency, Facebook, Twitter, National Security Agency, Democrats, New, Digital, Republicans, Homeland Security, Wired, Rep, Tech Locations: Washington ,, Silicon Valley, R, Utah, Russia, Iran, China, U.S, Illinois, CISA, New York, Missouri, Louisiana, Ohio, Israel

☆ Microsoft's Xbox plans revealed in emails tied to FTC case
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-19 | by ( Kevin Collier | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +2 min

An attorney with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) carries an XBOX game console box following a hearing at the Phillip Burton Federal Building and U.S. A huge collection of purported Xbox files related to the Federal Trade Commission's case against Microsoft have been published online, spilling some of the company's plans for the gaming console into public view. They include more than 100 documents, many of them partially redacted, related to Microsoft's Xbox plans. The files include emails from corporate executives like Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer and timetables for gaming releases. Some of the documents include Microsoft Gaming senior employees discussing the value of the exclusive hold they have on key video game titles.

Persons: Phillip Burton, Douglas Farrar, Phil Spencer, It's Organizations: Federal Trade Commission, Phillip Burton Federal Building, Federal Trade, Microsoft, U.S, Northern, Northern District of, Activision Blizzard, NBC News, Microsoft Gaming, Sony, Elder Locations: San Francisco , California, Northern District, Northern District of California

☆ U.S. government says several agencies hacked as part of broader cyberattack
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-15 | by ( Kevin Collier | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +2 min

Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Director Jen Easterly testifies before a House Homeland Security Subcommittee, at the Rayburn House Office Building on April 28, 2022 in Washington, DC. Several U.S. agencies have been hacked as part of a broader cyberattack that has hit dozens of companies and organizations in recent weeks through a previously unknown vulnerability in popular file sharing software. "CISA is providing support to several federal agencies that have experienced intrusions," he said. Charles Carmakal, chief technology officer of Mandiant, a cybersecurity company owned by Google whose clients include government agencies, said that he was aware of some data theft from federal agencies through the MOVEIt hacks. Wendi Whitmore, who leads threat analysis for the cybersecurity company Palo Alto Networks, said that CL0P's campaign of hacking victims through MOVEIt was incredibly widespread.

Persons: Jen, Eric Goldstein, Charles Carmakal, Andrea Mitchell, Brett Callow, Wendi Whitmore, MOVEIt Organizations: Infrastructure Security Agency, Homeland Security, U.S, Google, NBC News, FBI, National Intelligence, National Security Council, Palo Alto Networks Locations: Rayburn, Washington ,, MOVEIt

☆ Amazon sued for not telling New York store customers about facial recognition
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-16 | by ( Kevin Collier | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +2 min

People shop at the newly opened Amazon Go Store on May 07, 2019 in New York City. The cashier-less store, the first of this type of store, called Amazon Go, accepts cash and is the 12th such store in the United States located at Brookfield Place in downtown New York. Amazon did not alert its New York City customers that they were being monitored by facial recognition technology, a lawsuit filed Thursday alleges. The lawsuit says that Amazon only recently put up signs informing New York customers of its use of facial recognition technology, more than a year after the disclosure law went into effect. Perez is represented by the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, a legal advocacy group devoted to New York privacy protections.

The FBI has infiltrated and disrupted a major cybercriminal group that extorted schools, hospitals and critical infrastructure around the world, a law enforcement official told NBC News. As of Thursday morning, its website on the dark web showed a message saying it had been seized by an international law enforcement coalition, including the FBI and Justice Department. The FBI had secretly gained access to Hive’s network for months and provided victims keys to unlock their data, the law enforcement official said. Previous ransomware attacks have resulted in the release of sensitive information about law enforcement officers and schoolchildren. But as is often the case with such groups, Hive’s core group spoke Russian, said Allan Liska, a ransomware analyst at the cybersecurity firm Recorded Future.

The U.S. has arrested a Russian national and founder of a cryptocurrency exchange on charges of allegedly laundering more than $700 million, the Department of Justice said Wednesday. Anatoly Legkodymov, the founder of Bitzlato, a Hong Kong-registered cryptocurrency exchange that touted its lax approach to verifying customers’ identity, was arrested in Miami Tuesday night. The Treasury Department also declared Bitzlato a “Primary Money Laundering Concern,” an extreme measure rarely used against financial institutions. “If the U.S. Treasury Department designates a financial institution as a ‘Primary Money Laundering Concern,’ the goal is to isolate them,” Redbord said. “Being cut off from the U.S. financial system, not being able to transact in U.S. dollars, is essentially a death sentence.”

The U.S. aviation warning system that crashed for more than an hour Wednesday traces back its origins to ocean-faring ships and has been under continuous reforms for years, experts say. At least one aviation industry group has called for it to be replaced altogether. The Federal Aviation Administration grounded all flights blaming an unspecified failure in the Notice to Air Missions (NOTAM) system. The White House also said it saw no signs that the NOTAM system was taken down as a result of a cyberattack. “Once again, we get to see how antiquated and vulnerable the Notam system is!” he said.

Criminal hackers have posted an enormous trove of sensitive files to the internet from a San Francisco Bay Area transit system’s police department, including specific allegations of child abuse. BART’s chief communications officer, Alicia Trost, said in an email officials were investigating the posted files and that the hackers had not impacted BART services. The perpetrators are an established group of ransomware hackers, one of the many who attack specific organizations and either encrypt sensitive files or threaten to post them on the dark web. Ransomware hackers often demand a payment to not share files. More than 100 networks associated with local government agencies were successfully attacked by ransomware hackers last year, according to an Emsisoft survey.

The email went out to students at Knox College, a small liberal arts school in Illinois, on the evening of Dec. 12. But this group had a new wrinkle for Knox students. “We have compromised your collage networks,” the email said, written in the kind of broken English common among international ransomware hackers. For you, its a sad day where everyone will see your personal and private info.”The incident at Knox College marks the first known case in which hackers used their access to contact students directly in order to intimidate them. The hackers’ website lists an entry to download data for Knox College but doesn’t actually lead to any student data.

Twitter suspended several high-profile journalists Thursday evening who have been covering the company and Elon Musk. The suspensions come a day after Twitter changed its policies around accounts that track private jets, including one owned by Elon Musk. The Twitter account for Mastodon, a platform billed as an alternative, was also suspended early Thursday evening. As of Thursday evening, Twitter accounts operated by NBC News journalists were unable to tweet a link to the Mastodon account of @ElonJet. The suspensions add to what has been a tumultuous couple of days for Twitter after the company first suspended the account that tracked Musk’s jet.

A former Twitter employee found guilty of spying on users on behalf of the Saudi royal family has been sentenced to three and a half years in prison. He was sentenced Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The Justice Department has said it believes that another former Twitter employee accused of accessing user accounts and a man accused of helping the Saudi government with the scheme have fled to Saudi Arabia to evade American authorities. The Saudi government severely penalizes anti-government expression on social media sites like Twitter. In April, courts sentenced Salma al-Shehab, a Saudi citizen and 34-year-old mother of two children, to 34 years in prison for tweets protesting the government.

The Federal Communications Commission said Thursday that it had blocked all U.S. phone companies from taking calls from a tiny communications company accused of sending robocalls that push fraudulent student loan relief services. “Today we’re cutting these scammers off so they can’t use efforts to provide student loan debt relief as cover for fraud,” FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel said in an emailed statement. It identified a single company, UrthAccess, as the central origin for a substantial amount of student loan spam. UrthAccess was by far the single biggest provider of student loan robocalls in recent months, Quilici said. It was responsible for more than 40% of all student loan robocalls in October, the FCC said.

Other researchers have also tracked the spam campaign. Videos of the protests quickly spread on Chinese social media, with online censors struggling to keep up. Many of them also made their way onto Twitter and other social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, all of which are blocked in China but some Chinese users access via virtual private networks. There are no firm numbers on the scope of the spam campaign, but Wright said she has observed thousands of Twitter posts an hour in some cases. “So essentially, it can be very effective as a method for driving out the truth, the real videos, and the real content about the protests.”

The new CEO of FTX issued a searing indictment of the company’s operations Thursday in a court filing as part of the company’s ongoing bankruptcy process. New CEO and restructuring officer John Ray wrote that the company had a striking lack of financial records, internal communications or even a clear idea of who worked there. Bankman-Fried and FTX did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Throughout his filing, Ray insisted that the financial records of the organizations overseen by Bankman-Fried are frequently either nonexistent or untrustworthy. “One of the most pervasive failures of the FTX.com business in particular is the absence of lasting records of decision-making,” Ray said.

☆ Should I delete my DMs? What Twitter has on you, and what you can and can't do about it
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-16 | by ( Lora Kolodny | Kevin Collier | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +6 min

It's not that easy to delete your direct messages on Twitter . Private communications sent between individuals or to groups through Twitter's "Messages" system, commonly known as direct messages, can only be eliminated if all the people involved in the conversation delete those messages, according to Twitter's system. That means users looking to delete their DMs will need to make sure all of their counterparts do so as well. Twitter has never encrypted its direct messages, despite calls from cybersecurity activists to do so. Cutler recommended that Twitter users proceed with caution.

San Francisco-based Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the security situation at the company. He echoed a pessimistic view among some Twitter users this week: The service might go down entirely under Musk's ownership. Verification serviceOn Friday, Twitter paused the rollout of its Twitter Blue verification service, intended to let users pay $8 a month for a verification badge. “The debacle with the Twitter verification is a really strong indicator as to what can go wrong,” Roger said. “When the verified Twitter users got hacked a few months ago, it was only a bitcoin scam, right?” Rogers said.

Ransomware hackers hit MercyOne in early October, part of a larger breach that caused hospitalwide outages at multiple health systems, according to The Des Moines Register. CommonSpirit Health, a nonprofit health system based in Chicago, oversees 140 hospitals in 21 states; it was not clear how many of them hospitals were affected, and it declined to share the number. For Rachel Cupples of Western Washington, the CommonSpirit Health ransomware attack meant delaying important surgery for weeks. Like some other CommonSpirit Health hospitals that were affected, hers announced it was having trouble scheduling new patients. Parsi and Cupples said they blamed the hackers, not the hospitals, for their pain caused by delayed care.

States are working to shore up what might be the most public and vulnerable parts of their election systems: the websites that publish voting results. One of its victims last month was Hawaii.gov, which also hosts the state’s election night reporting. That means avoiding even the perception of hackers’ changing votes, which makes election results websites all the more crucial. Historically, election results websites have been ripe targets for malicious hackers who want to sow chaos. Some U.S. officials emphasized that even accurate results on websites should be taken for what they are — preliminary indications of election results.

☆ More than 100 election jurisdictions waiting on federal cyber help, sources say
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-02 | by ( Https | Media-Cldnry.S-Nbcnews.Com Image Upload Newscms Julia-Ainsley-Circle-Byline-Template.Jpg | Julia Ainsley | ) www.nbcnews.com time to read: +5 min

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, known as CISA, offers the services on a voluntary basis. But some election information does run through the internet, like voting registration, official information about how and where to vote, and election officials’ email systems. The sources declined to say which states and election jurisdictions have not received the help they asked for, or how many. State and local election officials sought to beef up their security software after the 2019 report from special counsel Robert Mueller revealed Russian interference in the 2016 election. “And we have made this the top priority at CISA over the past year to ensure that we are supporting those election officials.”

Voters in at least two states have received false information about how to vote through text messages in recent days, with little idea who’s behind them. It wasn’t immediately clear how many people received the text messages. Obtained by NBC NewsExperts have warned that text messages that mislead people about how to vote are a particularly tricky problem. It’s not difficult for a malicious actor to hide where a text message comes from, and the Federal Communications Commission loosened restrictions on political text messaging before the 2020 election. Kansans were targeted with misleading text messages this year in relation to an abortion referendum.

U.S. law enforcement has circulated bulletins warning that conspiracy theorists could become violent around the midterm elections on Nov. 8. The bulletins, obtained by NBC News, are unclassified but intended only for law enforcement. One of the bulletins, issued Friday by the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI and the National Counterterrorism Center, and marked “for official use only,” warned about domestic violent extremism, or DVE in law enforcement circles. “The most plausible DVE threat is posed by lone offenders who leverage election-related issues to justify violence,” it said. Those include an Oct. 10 post on the fringe social media platform Gab in which a user wrote, “Death penalty for election fraud!

A sprawling online propaganda campaign that pushes pro-China messaging has been trying to influence American voters, researchers say. Two companies that study large-scale online influence operations published research this week showing that a pro-China campaign was active and targeting the U.S. midterm elections as recently as this month. But such efforts show that pro-China influence operations targeting the West are experimenting with new tactics and are increasingly aimed at shaping American elections. The other report, from social media analytics firm Alethea, found 165 Twitter accounts that misled users about who they were and posted pro-China messages in English. “Speculating or accusing China of using social media to interfere in the US midterm elections is completely groundless and malicious speculation.

The FBI has warned that an Iranian government-tied hacker group that tried to interfere in the 2020 election is currently active and a threat to the U.S. The group, which federal agencies say operates from an Iranian cybersecurity company called Emennet Pasargad, is engaged in “ongoing” operations to hack and leak material, and may target American organizations, the FBI said Thursday in an industry warning. In October 2020, the FBI announced that Iran was behind the most significant foreign attempt to influence that year’s U.S. elections. Democrats registered to vote in Florida, which makes voter information publicly accessible, received intimidating emails in the weeks before the election, instructing them to become Republicans. It was not clear what organization the FBI was referring to, and the agency did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

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