Month: October 2024

Bei den Prime Deal Days gibt es 95 Euro Rabatt auf Xiaomis Poco X6 5G mit 256 GByte Speicher. Weitere Smartphones sind ebenfalls günstiger. (Prime Day, Smartphone)

Foreign influence campaigns, or information operations, have been widespread in the run-up to the 2024 U.S. presidential election. Influence campaigns are large-scale efforts to shift public opinion, push false narratives or change behaviors among a target population. Russia, China, Iran, Israel and other nations have run these campaigns by exploiting social bots, influencers, media companies and generative AI.

At the Indiana University Observatory on Social Media, my colleagues and I study influence campaigns and design technical solutions – algorithms – to detect and counter them. State-of-the-art methods developed in our center use several indicators of this type of online activity, which researchers call inauthentic coordinated behavior. We identify clusters of social media accounts that post in a synchronized fashion, amplify the same groups of users, share identical sets of links, images or hashtags, or perform suspiciously similar sequences of actions.

We have uncovered many examples of coordinated inauthentic behavior. For example, we found accounts that flood the network with tens or hundreds of thousands of posts in a single day. The same campaign can post a message with one account and then have other accounts that its organizers also control “like” and “unlike” it hundreds of times in a short time span. Once the campaign achieves its objective, all these messages can be deleted to evade detection. Using these tricks, foreign governments and their agents can manipulate social media algorithms that determine what is trending and what is engaging to decide what users see in their feeds.

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Den Spitzenplatz muss sich Deutschland mit einem Nachbarn teilen: Die Schweiz gewinnt den Titel als beste Post bereits zum achten Mal in Folge. (Post, Studien)

Ein einzelner Asteroid könnte einen Astronauten für mindestens 600 Jahre ernähren. Dafür wird der Asteroid zu Dünger verarbeitet und an Mikroben verfüttert. (Asteroid, Raumfahrt)

Researchers have unearthed two sophisticated toolsets that a nation-state hacking group—possibly from Russia—used to steal sensitive data stored on air-gapped devices, meaning those that are deliberately isolated from the Internet or other networks to safeguard them from malware.

One of the custom tool collections was used starting in 2019 against a South Asian embassy in Belarus. A largely different toolset created by the same threat group infected a European Union government organization three years later. Researchers from ESET, the security firm that discovered the toolkits, said some of the components in both were identical to those fellow security firm Kaspersky described in research published last year and attributed to an unknown group, tracked as GoldenJackal, working for a nation-state. Based on the overlap, ESET has concluded that the same group is behind all the attacks observed by both firms.

Quite unusual

The practice of air gapping is typically reserved for the most sensitive networks or devices connected to them, such as those used in systems for voting, industrial control, manufacturing, and power generation. A host of malware used in espionage hacking over the past 15 years (for instance, here and here) demonstrate that air gapping isn’t a foolproof protection. It nonetheless forces threat groups to expend significant resources that are likely obtainable only by nation-states with superior technical acumen and unlimited budgets. ESET’s discovery puts GoldenJackal in a highly exclusive collection of threat groups.

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LG intensiviert die Werbung auf seinen eigenen Smart-TVs. Statt eines Bildschirmschoners gibt es bei WebOS bildschirmfüllende Werbung. (LG, Heimkino)

Der Prime Day dauert nur noch bis Mitternacht. Prime-Mitglieder können noch von spannenden Deals profitieren. Hier sind die besten Angebote. (Prime Day, Apple)

Die Arbeitswelt wird durch künstliche Intelligenz revolutioniert. Ein Intensivworkshop vermittelt Führungskräften die wesentlichen Strategien und Techniken, um KI erfolgreich in ihre Führungsaufgaben zu integrieren. (Golem Karrierewelt, KI)

Der Nobelpreis für Chemie wird in diesem Jahr an drei Proteinforscher vergeben. Zwei davon haben bei Deepmind ein KI-Modell entwickelt. (Nobelpreis, KI)

Laut Cisco erlauben rund zwei Drittel aller Eltern im Homeoffice ihren Kindern den Zugriff auf beruflich genutzte Geräte - häufig sogar unbeaufsichtigt. (Cisco, Phishing)