Presidential campaign season is officially, officially, upon us now, which means it’s time to confront the weird and insidious ways in which technology is warping politics. One of the biggest threats on the horizon: artificial personas are coming, and they’re poised to take over political debate. The risk arises from two separate threads coming together: … Read More “Artificial Personas and Public Discourse” »
Category: botnets
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The Japanese government is going to run penetration tests against all the IoT devices in their country, in an effort to (1) figure out what’s insecure, and (2) help consumers secure them: The survey is scheduled to kick off next month, when authorities plan to test the password security of over 200 million IoT devices, … Read More “Japanese Government Will Hack Citizens’ IoT Devices” »
BuzzFeed is reporting on a scheme where fraudsters buy legitimate Android apps, track users’ behavior in order to mimic it in a way that evades bot detectors, and then uses bots to perpetuate an ad-fraud scheme. After being provided with a list of the apps and websites connected to the scheme, Google investigated and found … Read More “Android Ad-Fraud Scheme” »
This is really interesting research: “BlackIoT: IoT Botnet of High Wattage Devices Can Disrupt the Power Grid“: Abstract: We demonstrate that an Internet of Things (IoT) botnet of high wattage devices — such as air conditioners and heaters — gives a unique ability to adversaries to launch large-scale coordinated attacks on the power grid. In … Read More “Using Hacked IoT Devices to Disrupt the Power Grid” »
Last month, the US Department of Commerce released a report on the threat of botnets and what to do about it. I note that it explicitly said that the IoT makes the threat worse, and that the solutions are largely economic. The Departments determined that the opportunities and challenges in working toward dramatically reducing threats … Read More “Department of Commerce Report on the Botnet Threat” »
On May 25, the FBI asked us all to reboot our routers. The story behind this request is one of sophisticated malware and unsophisticated home-network security, and it’s a harbinger of the sorts of pervasive threats from nation-states, criminals and hackers that we should expect in coming years. VPNFilter is a sophisticated piece … Read More “Router Vulnerability and the VPNFilter Botnet” »
This is a clever attack. After gaining control of the coin-mining software, the malware replaces the wallet address the computer owner uses to collect newly minted currency with an address controlled by the attacker. From then on, the attacker receives all coins generated, and owners are none the wiser unless they take time to manually … Read More “New Malware Hijacks Cryptocurrency Mining” »
Brian Krebs has a long article on the Mirai botnet authors, who pled guilty. Powered by WPeMatico
It’s based on the Mirai code, but much more virulent: While Mirai caused widespread outages, it impacted IP cameras and internet routers by simply exploiting their weak or default passwords. The latest botnet threat, known as alternately as IoT Troop or Reaper, has evolved that strategy, using actual software-hacking techniques to break into devices instead. … Read More “Reaper Botnet” »
The US Army Research Agency is funding research into autonomous bot swarms. From the announcement: The objective of this CRA is to perform enabling basic and applied research to extend the reach, situational awareness, and operational effectiveness of large heterogeneous teams of intelligent systems and Soldiers against dynamic threats in complex and contested environments and … Read More “US Army Researching Bot Swarms” »