Security

In late July, a group of high-ranking Facebook executives organized an emergency conference call with reporters across the country. That morning, Facebook’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg explained, they had shut down 32 fake pages and accounts that appeared to be coordinating disinformation campaigns on Facebook and Instagram. They couldn’t pinpoint who was behind the activity just yet but said the accounts and pages had loose ties to Russia’s Internet Research Agency, which had spread divisive propaganda like a flesh-eating virus throughout the 2016 US election cycle. Facebook was only two weeks into its investigation of this new network, and the executives said they expected to have more answers in the days to come. Specifically, they said some of those answers would come from the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensics Research Lab. The group, whose mission is to spot, dissect, and explain the origins of online disinformation, was one of Facebook’s … [Read more...] about Inside the Research Lab Teaching Facebook About Its Trolls

Credit: Jonathan Weiss/ShutterstockU.S. investor Michael Terpin has filed a lawsuit against AT&T, accusing the company of allowing thieves to change his phone number and then use it to steal $24 million worth of his cryptocurrency. A Victim of SIM Swap Fraud Terpin co-founded the first angel group for Bitcoin investors, called BitAngels, in 2013. A year later, he co-founded the first digital currency funding group, BitAngels/Dapps Fund. In January, Terpin was robbed of millions of cryptocurrency tokens, worth $23.8 million at the time. According to Terpin’s lawsuit filing, the attack happened through what is called a “SIM swap fraud.” Criminals use this relatively common tactic to transfer a victim’s phone number to their own phone by contacting the wireless carrier and pretending to be the victim. The complaint says: "What AT&T did was like a hotel giving a thief with a fake ID a room key and a key to the room safe to steal jewelry in the safe … [Read more...] about Bitcoin Investor Robbed of Cryptocurrency Blames AT&T

Credit: TY Lim / Shutterstock.com Instagram originally helped people share pictures from their phones. Several years, a billion-dollar acquisition by Facebook, and countless feature releases later it's become a social network unto itself. Accounts with many followers are valuable, not just to the people who run them, but also to anyone looking to steal them. And it seems like someone (or a group of someones) set out to steal a lot of them in recent weeks. Mashable reported that at least eight people with relatively high follower counts on Instagram--with an apparent peak of 4,500--claimed their accounts had been hacked. The outlet also noted a marked rise in the number of people complaining about their accounts being hacked on Twitter. That evidence is anecdotal, but it could indicate that someone has discovered a new way to assert control over Instagram accounts. The hacks recounted to Mashable follow a similar pattern: someone compromises an Instagram account, changes the username … [Read more...] about Instagram Investigating Increasing Hack Claims

Intel chips have been marred by another series of security flaws dubbed Foreshadow-NG. Researchers discovered the vulnerabilities, which primarily affect Intel’s Software Guard Extensions (SGX) and the security of virtualized environments. What Is the Foreshadow Attack? Foreshadow is yet another speculative execution flaw (much like Meltdown and Spectre) in Intel’s processors that allows attackers to steal sensitive contents stored in computers' or virtual machines' memory. Most modern processors utilize speculative execution to improve performance. As the name suggests, the chips will speculate or assume the instructions they need to execute next, instead of waiting around for the previous instructions to complete their execution. When the prediction is correct, this saves overall execution time, while the incorrect predictions are scrapped. Researchers discovered the first Foreshadow flaw earlier this year. This flaw also affected Intel's SGX, which is a … [Read more...] about Intel Chips’ List of Security Flaws Grows

In cybersecurity circles, this has been the year of Spectre and Meltdown, not only because the chip vulnerabilities—first publicly disclosed in January—were so widespread that they're still being cleaned up, but because they've given rise to the discovery of many related flaws. Now, a team of researchers has found a Spectre-like vulnerability that specifically undermines the most secure element of recent Intel chips—and potentially has even broader implications. Intel's Software Guard Extensions feature, known as SGX, allows programs to establish so-called secure enclaves on Intel processors. These are regions of a chip that are cordoned off to run code that the computer's operating system can't access or change. The secure enclave creates a safe haven for sensitive data, even if malware or another malady compromises the main computer. But a group of researchers, hailing from five academic institutions around the world, found that although SGX can mostly repel Spectre … [Read more...] about Spectre-Like Flaw Undermines Intel Processors’ Most Secure Element