No, the US Gov Is Not Letting Russian Hackers Run Wild
Most prolific hacking and almost all scamming is done these days by criminals working within organized crime structures akin to a mafia or a gang. Criminal networks like these can be disrupted and their scamming efforts slowed or halted—which is good for every one of us—but this requires constant energy from law enforcement and, when the criminal hackers are overseas, from espionage agencies. Three major news stories have circulated in early March, all alleging that different US government cybersecurity-focused agencies have been, in different ways, ordered to stop treating hackers based in Russia as a threat. The porting is a little scattered, but Kim Zetter at Zero Day has a complete rundown of what has been reported, detailing what's confirmed and what isn't. There's too much detail for a brief summary in this highly politicized topic, but it's fair to say both that the diplomatic talks around a Ukrainian ceasefire are a good reason to slow down US hacking operations against targets in Russia (you wouldn't want to disrupt the talks), and also that the reduction in activity allegedly goes further than necessary in that respect.
The Bottom Line: The US has not ceased all operations against Russian hackers and cybercriminals.
Remember the LastPass Breach in 2022? We Finally Know What They Were After
The LastPass password manager suffered a security breach in 2022. Back then, the hackers made off with vaults of still-encrypted passwords. In the years since, researchers have suspected that the thieves were slowly decrypting a few critical passwords from those stolen vaults and using them to break into cryptocurrency wallets, including one $120 million dollar theft and a string of others. The FBI and Secret Service have now agreed with that assessment. Chris Krebbs has the full story.
The Bottom Line: If you used LastPass in 2022, go update any passwords you're still using from that time.
Russian Propaganda Group Influencing genAI Answers On News Topics
If you can control what news people read, then you can strongly influence what those people think on important topics. Today, many people have turned to genAI systems like ChatGPT instead of search engines like Google when asking about the latest news, and propaganda departments are taking notice. NewsGuard has found that a Russian propaganda network named "Pravda" has been intentionally feeding disinformation to popular AI chatbots. The group's goal is to influence genAI summaries so that American and European news readers consume pro-Russian propaganda. According to NewsGuard, over 3 million propaganda articles have been pushed into genAI databases and are now affecting up to 33% of genAI responses on relevant news topics.
The Bottom Line: It is better to read your news in the carefully chosen words of reputable experts and avoid AI summaries. But, as experts ourselves, we might be biased.
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Bank of America Hit by Data Breach
Bank of America has begun warning customers of a data breach that may have exposed sensitive customer information. It appears that the bank uses a third-party vendor for document destruction, and some of those documents were not in their secure containers. That means customer information such as first and last names, addresses, phone numbers, social security numbers, account details, and more could have been compromised. Thankfully, this breach does not seem to be widespread, as Bank of America stated at least two customers in Massachusetts were affected.
The Bottom Line: Bank of America is offering a subscription to an identity theft protection service to affected customers. If that's you, we definitely recommend taking advantage of the offer, or using identity theft protection through your own vendor of choice.
Mozilla Rewrites Terms of Use to Clarify It Does Not Own Your Data
Mozilla recently changed its terms of use and privacy policy to include vague language about how the company can use its users' data, leading to significant backlash. In response, Mozilla has rewritten its terms of use to clarify it does not take ownership of user data in any way. I, Cullen, think this was mostly much ado about nothing, but as we see more and more companies helping themselves to our data, especially to train genAI systems, it's understandable to want to keep a sharp eye out on updates to terms of service.
Meta Whistleblower Alleges Censorship Misconduct
Sarah Wynn-Williams, a member of Meta's team who was responsible for the site policy in regard to China, has submitted a whistleblower complaint against the company. The complaint alleges that Meta misled investors about how much censoring power it was willing to hand to the Chinese government in order to gain access to the Chinese marketplace.
Wondering Why X (Twitter) Went Down Again? It's Hacktivists
On Monday, March 10th, X (formerly Twitter) suffered a series of worldwide outages that prevented thousands of users from accessing the site. The group DarkStorm Team, a pro-Palestinian hacktivist group, has claimed responsibility for the attack. Hacktivist groups are hackers who, purportedly, use hacking as a form of protest intended to draw attention to a cause. They frequently use large networks of cheap computers to overload websites or web services with too many requests, causing the service to go down temporarily. This kind of disruptive vandalism is called a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS).
The Bottom Line: DDoS attacks are not hacks, and do not result in any compromise of user data. They simply disrupt a website or web service temporarily. Your X user data is safe from this kind of activity, though you may be temporarily unable to log into X.
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