Peiter "Mudge" Zatko is a former chief security officer for the company. There are allegations that the social media firm has security flaws that it hasn't taken seriously. According to Zatko, an Indian government agent was put on the payroll of the company. One of the claims is that engineers could access live software and not be tracked.
An Ohio judge has ruled that it is unconstitutional for students to have their homes scanned while they take remote tests. The privacy flaw that is threatening US democracy is a result of a lack of federal privacy protections.
Military forces are increasingly turning to open source data to back their efforts. Police in India are using facial recognition with very low accuracy rates, which could lead to a lot of false positives. We looked into how four high school students hacked 500 of their schools' cameras, across six locations, and wreaked havoc on students and teachers. There is a graduation prank.
There's more. The news we didn't cover is highlighted each week. The full stories can be found below. Stay safe out there.
Since the 2016 US elections, the social media firms have improved their ability to fight misinformation. Iran, Russia, and China are some of the countries that the companies take down propaganda accounts from. It is rare that Western efforts are exposed. The five-year operation that was pushed pro-Western narratives was detailed this week by the internet observatory and Graphika. The research is related to the removal of accounts from their platforms for inauthentic behavior.
The propaganda accounts were linked to both covert and overt influence operations by using fake news websites and online petitions. Some of the accounts appear to use artificial intelligence to target internet users in Russia and other countries. The accounts criticized Russia after its invasion of Ukraine and also promoted anti-extremism messaging, according to the researchers. Meta said it was the US that the activity was likely to have come from.
Many of the techniques used by the online influence operation look similar to those used in the build up to the 2016 elections. The Western influence operations probably weren't that successful. Only 19 percent of the covert assets we identified had more than 1,000 followers, according to the researchers.
The hacking group linked to Iran, called Charming Kitten, has been known for its aggressive, targeted phrasal campaigns. The usernames and passwords of online accounts are the focus of these attempts. A new hacking tool is being used by Charming Kitten that can download people's entire email inboxes. The tool can steal people's information from a number of websites. The attacker runs Hyperscrape on their own machine to download victims' inboxes. The tool can open new emails, download their contents, and then mark them as unread, so as not to raise suspicion. The tool has been used against a small number of accounts belonging to people in Iran.
The company says it has been hacked. The company wrote in a statement this week that they detected some unusual activity two weeks ago. An unauthorized party gained access to its development environment through a compromised developer account, according to LastPass. The source code and LastPass technical information were taken by the hacker while they were inside the systems. It's difficult to assess the seriousness of the breach because it doesn't detail which elements were taken. There is no need for LastPass users to do anything in response to the hack. The indictment is likely to be a problem for the technical teams. It isn't the first time that LastPass has been attacked.
People were tricked into attending business meetings with a fake version of the chief communications officer of the exchange. According to Patrick Hillmann, several people had messaged him for his time. Hillmann wrote that a sophisticated hacking team used previous news interviews and TV appearances to create a deep fake of him. There have been no images posted of the claimed deepfake. There have been relatively few incidents of fake audio and video. Most of the deepfakes have been used to make pornographic images. The FBI warned in March of last year that there would be a rise in malicious deepfakes within the next year.
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