Acting on an executive order, the U.S. government imposed sanctions on five companies and three individuals for their collaboration with the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) in state-sponsored cyber-attack activity.
Tag: Russia
Episode 96: State Elections Officials on Front Line against Russian Hackers
In this episode of The Security Ledger Podcast (#96): with primary elections taking place in states across the United States in the coming weeks, we talk to John Dickson about how state elections offices have become the front line in a pitched battle with state-sponsored hackers – with the fate of a 240 year democracy hanging in the balance. Also: we talk about the looming threat posed by so-called “deep fake” videos that use computer manipulation to make famous celebrities appear to say nearly anything.
Russian Fake News Ecosystem Targets Syrian Human Rights Workers
Kremlin linked news sites like RT and Sputnik figure prominently in an online disinformation campaign portraying Syrian humanitarian workers (“White Helmets”) as terrorists and crisis actors, according to an analysis by researchers at University of Washington and Harvard.
Russia blocks 800K Amazon sites in Telegram crackdown, disables legitimate ones in the process
Russia this week blocked hundreds of thousands of Amazon Web Services (AWS) sites in an apparent attempt to eliminate the secure Telegram messaging service from its borders. In the process, however, the government also disabled a number of legitimate websites operating in the country as well. Telegram is a service akin to WhatsApp that’s rapidly replacing the latter because messages sent over it are encrypted and not linked to Facebook data sharing. Russian, however, doesn’t want its citizens using Telegram, presumably because government can’t spy on them then–although the official reasoning is it’s an anti-terrorism method because Telegram officials is skirting new laws requiring the decryption of messages. Earlier this month, a Russian court officially blocked Telegram from being used in the country. On Monday, Russia’s federal censor directed the country’s ISPs to block hundreds of thousands of AWS IP addresses that were being used to bypass the Telegram ban, […]
For Facebook’s Stamos, conflicts over breaches and disclosure a theme
The departure of Facebook Chief Information Security Officer Alex Stamos is just the latest in which the respected security executive clashed with higher ups over the handling of a major data breach.
