company:fireeye

EXCLUSIVE : Meet the Reporters Whose Pages Were Shut Down By Facebook - Sputnik International
▻https://sputniknews.com/us/201810121068814924-Reporters-Pages-Shut-Down-By-Facebook

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C’est mon beau-frère américain qui m’a transmis l’info : sous couvert de lutte contre les #fake_news, les réseaux sociaux des #GAFA (Facebook et Twitter, notamment) ont fermé des centaines de pages et de comptes appartenant à des journalistes indépendants ou juste plutôt critiques sur la société américaine. À l’approche des #élections de mi-mandat, il s’agit d’une #censure brutale et inquiétante.

Signalons que mon beau-frère est un Républicain plutôt progressiste, mais un Républicain quand même, même s’il n’a jamais pu blairer Trump.

Facebook purged hundreds of pages from its platform on Thursday. But instead of the usual targets - namely Russia and Iran - Thursday’s ban shut down accounts operated by independent American reporters and activists, Sputnik News has learned.

Facebook said the pages were “working to mislead others about who they are, and what they are doing,” but the co-founder of one of the pages, The Free Thought Project, tells Sputnik News Facebook’s claim couldn’t be further from the truth.

Most of the pages that were banned and viewed by Sputnik News were independent media outlets and pages that advocated for marijuana legalization or shined a light on police brutality.
Anti-Trump Facebook event posted by the Resisters page, which has been accused of being set up by the alleged Russian troll farm Internet Research Agency.
Facebook
The Kremlin Line? Facebook’s Latest Ban Nets Resistance Pages, Anti-Trump Events

In total, Facebook removed 559 pages and 251 personal accounts “that have consistently broken our rules against spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior,” the social media giant said. “Given the activity we’ve seen — and its timing ahead of the US midterm elections — we wanted to give some details about the types of behavior that led to this action,” Facebook said, going on to accuse the accounts of manipulating the platform to make their content appear more popular, hawking fake products or functioning as ad farms that tricked “people into thinking that they were forums for legitimate political debate.”

— Jon Ziegler “Reb Z” (@Rebelutionary_Z) October 12, 2018

The founder of one of the pages — The Anti-Media — said he had no knowledge of his page engaging in any such behavior. The Free Thought Project co-founder similarly denied Facebook’s accusations. Rachel Blevins, a reporter for RT America whose personal journalism page was nixed, also denied inauthentic behavior.

Just hours after its ban from Facebook, Twitter suspended Anti-Media from its platform, following a pattern of social media companies successively banning users that has been demonstrated in the past. For example, Facebook, YouTube and Apple all banned the far-right conspiracy theory site InfoWars around the same time. And after the CIA-funded cybersecurity firm FireEye contacted Facebook, Google and Twitter, each company banned a number of accounts allegedly linked to Iran.

— Alex Rubinstein (@RealAlexRubi) September 6, 2018

In the case of InfoWars, Twitter eventually followed suit.

While many warned that the ban of InfoWars from social media would establish a slippery slope, they were often mocked and ridiculed. Thursday’s onslaught on independent media appears to have confirmed their suspicions, however.

— Anya Parampil (@anyaparampil) August 6, 2018

Facebook has been partnering with the Digital Forensics Lab, an arm of the Atlantic Council think tank — a neoconservative group funded by Gulf monarchies and defense giants like Raytheon — to weed out inauthentic users from its platform. Similarly, it has been partnering with the neoconservative Weekly Standard magazine to fact check so-called fake news.
Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif.
© AP Photo / Ben Margot
Facebook Bans Russia-Linked Social Media Firm for Alleged ’Scraping’ of Users’ Data

Journalist Abby Martin, who hosts “The Empire Files” on TeleSur English, told Sputnik News after TeleSur’s page was temporarily removed from Facebook, “The shuttering of progressive media amidst the ‘fake news’ and Russiagate hysteria is what activists been warning all along — tech companies, working in concert with think tanks stacked with CIA officials and defense contractors, shouldn’t have the power to curate our reality to make those already rendered invisible even more obsolete.”

Sputnik News contacted a number of journalists caught up in the ban. Below is what they had to say, edited extremely lightly for clarity.

Independent reporter John Vibes, who contributes to The Free Thought Project and other websites:

This signifies a re-consolidation of the media. Cable news media controlled the narrative for most of modern history, but the internet has lowered that barrier to entry and allowed the average person to become the media themselves. This obviously took market share and influence away from the traditional media, and it has allowed for a more diverse public conversation. Now it seems the platforms that have monopolized the industry are favoring mainstream sources and silencing alternative voices. So now, instead of allowing more people to have a voice, these platforms are creating an atmosphere where only powerful media organizations are welcome, just as we had on cable news.

People think that we are just providing an activist spin on the news, but they don’t see the families struggling to have their voice heard. For example, when someone is shot by police, mainstream media sources often just republish the press release from the police department, without presenting the victim’s side of the story. We give the victims and their families a voice, which is essential to keep power in check. This also goes for bigger issues like foreign policy as well; multiple full-scale invasions of Syria have been prevented because of information that the alternative media made viral.

“Information exchange” activist Jason Bassler, who co-founded The Free Thought Project and solely founded Police the Police, both of which were banned:

We were verified by Facebook with a little check mark next to our name, so they know we are a legitimate organization/outlet. They have seen our “Articles of Organization” which was issued by the state of Louisiana, which is where my partner and The Free Thought Project co-founder lives.

We have even paid Facebook to boost our posts and for likes in the past, meaning they gladly took our money for a product that they ended up manipulating and backing out on. It wasn’t much, maybe $1,200 over the past 6 years. Do we get that money back now?

We have already had the lawyers at Rutherford Institute (a nonprofit civil liberties organization) send them a letter late last month about unfair treatment by third-party “fact checkers,” which they ignored and never responded to.

I was motivated [to start The Free Thought Project] by the injustices I saw on social media during Occupy Wall Street in 2011. I knew I had an obligation to get involved somehow and to share information critical for liberty and peace. I never thought I would have built fan pages of 5 million fans, nor did I ever think we would employ and give jobs to nine other activists (at one point), but I was inspired to do what I could to plant seeds and combat the mainstream media’s bullsh*t narratives, to keep police and government accountable, to make sure people knew their rights and how to interact with police.

All that’s gone now with a click of a button. Six years of hard work, literally seven days a week, working our as*es off finding stories, researching them, writing them, making thumbnails and titles for them, making graphics and videos for them, sharing them on various social media outlets.

What’s next? I will fight this until I am utterly exhausted. We will fight back tooth and nail. I don’t care if that means protesting in front of Facebook headquarters (which I’ve already considered doing many times in the past two years), I will make sure people know how corrupt and untrustworthy Facebook is if it’s the last thing I do. You can’t just steal years of hard work from someone and not expect there to be consequences. I will do everything I can to make their lives miserable. That’s a promise.

Rachel Blevins, a correspondent for RT America:

Today I was locked out of my Facebook account for four hours, and my public page was “unpublished.” There appears to be no explanation for this other than the vague claim from Facebook that my page was taken down because it was “administered by a fake account, misleading users or violating the Facebook spam policies.” I am the only person who publishes posts on my page; the only posts I publish are articles I have written or videos of my reports, and I only post one or two times a day — which rules out all of the claims that I have violated Facebook’s policies.

My page had nearly 70,000 followers before it was taken down. I have poured the last four years into building my page as a journalist, and I have noticed recently that the reach seems to have been stifled and that the engagement on my posts was down significantly. I know that I am not the only one who has become a victim of this purge, and there are hundreds of other pages — many of which had millions of followers — that have been taken down with no warning and no explanation.

Ford Fischer, the founder of the media startup News2Share, had a number of his live streams removed during the purge, although they were later restored:

This attack was a long time coming. Facebook has been slowly clamping down on independent media. First, they removed more extreme pages and made it harder for the surviving ones to make a living by hurting their algorithms (unless they paid, of course!). Then they started purging those that didn’t quickly respond to their ID requests. Today, hundreds of pages belonging to the family of independent media, especially those that question state authority, were removed without explanation. This is just one step further toward the total state and corporate takeover of what you’re allowed to think.

Nicholas Bernabe, founder of The Anti-Media:

Our approach generally is to cover stories and angles that corporate media underreport or misreport and to amplify activist and anti-war voices and stories. All of our content is professionally fact-checked and edited.

I got into this line of work because I felt there was a need for media that challenged mainstream assumptions and biases in politics. I wanted to shed light on corruption and wrongdoing against oppressed peoples and cover the harsh truth about American foreign policy.

Over the last 28 days, we reached 7,088,000 people on Facebook.

The timing of this purge is rather dubious in my view, coming shortly before the midterm elections. This could be an attempt by Facebook itself to affect the outcome of the coming elections. The Twitter suspension caught me by surprise. I can only speculate that these suspensions were a coordinated effort to stifle our message ahead of the coming elections.

By Alexander Rubinstein.

#démocratie

Event Log #auditing, Demystified
▻https://hackernoon.com/event-log-auditing-demystified-75b55879f069?source=rss----3a8144eabfe3--

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*hgi5kYRhXFfND3RYiq9xMw.jpeg

In my personal experience, the topic of reviewing event logs has received a fair amount grunts, groans, and questions such as “You honestly expect us to review all of that data?!” or “We have so many systems! Where would we even begin?” or “We already have enough on our plate to worry about!”. Fortunately, the times have changed, and log aggregation has matured over a relatively short amount of time. Its existence alone however is not the complete answer to log auditing woes.To start, let’s cover the ‘why’. What is the purpose of undertaking another tedious task and writing out an elaborate SOP? Well, from a practical perspective, incident detection. According to FireEye/Mandiant’s M-Trends 2018 report, the global median for detection time of their clients in 2017 was an astounding 101 days. (...)

#splunk #logging #event-log-auditing #cybersecurity

Uber Paid Hackers to Delete Stolen Data on 57 Million People - Bloomberg
▻https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-21/uber-concealed-cyberattack-that-exposed-57-million-people-s-data

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Hackers stole the personal data of 57 million customers and drivers from Uber Technologies Inc., a massive breach that the company concealed for more than a year. This week, the ride-hailing firm ousted its chief security officer and one of his deputies for their roles in keeping the hack under wraps, which included a $100,000 payment to the attackers.

Compromised data from the October 2016 attack included names, email addresses and phone numbers of 50 million Uber riders around the world, the company told Bloomberg on Tuesday. The personal information of about 7 million drivers was accessed as well, including some 600,000 U.S. driver’s license numbers. No Social Security numbers, credit card information, trip location details or other data were taken, Uber said.

“None of this should have happened, and I will not make excuses for it.”
At the time of the incident, Uber was negotiating with U.S. regulators investigating separate claims of privacy violations. Uber now says it had a legal obligation to report the hack to regulators and to drivers whose license numbers were taken. Instead, the company paid hackers to delete the data and keep the breach quiet. Uber said it believes the information was never used but declined to disclose the identities of the attackers.

Dara KhosrowshahiPhotographer: Matthew Lloyd/Bloomberg
“None of this should have happened, and I will not make excuses for it,” Dara Khosrowshahi, who took over as chief executive officer in September, said in an emailed statement. “We are changing the way we do business.”

After Uber’s disclosure Tuesday, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman launched an investigation into the hack, his spokeswoman Amy Spitalnick said. The company was also sued for negligence over the breach by a customer seeking class-action status.

Hackers have successfully infiltrated numerous companies in recent years. The Uber breach, while large, is dwarfed by those at Yahoo, MySpace, Target Corp., Anthem Inc. and Equifax Inc. What’s more alarming are the extreme measures Uber took to hide the attack. The breach is the latest scandal Khosrowshahi inherits from his predecessor, Travis Kalanick.

Kalanick, Uber’s co-founder and former CEO, learned of the hack in November 2016, a month after it took place, the company said. Uber had just settled a lawsuit with the New York attorney general over data security disclosures and was in the process of negotiating with the Federal Trade Commission over the handling of consumer data. Kalanick declined to comment on the hack.

Joe Sullivan, the outgoing security chief, spearheaded the response to the hack last year, a spokesman told Bloomberg. Sullivan, a onetime federal prosecutor who joined Uber in 2015 from Facebook Inc., has been at the center of much of the decision-making that has come back to bite Uber this year. Bloomberg reported last month that the board commissioned an investigation into the activities of Sullivan’s security team. This project, conducted by an outside law firm, discovered the hack and the failure to disclose, Uber said.

Here’s how the hack went down: Two attackers accessed a private GitHub coding site used by Uber software engineers and then used login credentials they obtained there to access data stored on an Amazon Web Services account that handled computing tasks for the company. From there, the hackers discovered an archive of rider and driver information. Later, they emailed Uber asking for money, according to the company.

A patchwork of state and federal laws require companies to alert people and government agencies when sensitive data breaches occur. Uber said it was obligated to report the hack of driver’s license information and failed to do so.

“At the time of the incident, we took immediate steps to secure the data and shut down further unauthorized access by the individuals,” Khosrowshahi said. “We also implemented security measures to restrict access to and strengthen controls on our cloud-based storage accounts.”

Uber has earned a reputation for flouting regulations in areas where it has operated since its founding in 2009. The U.S. has opened at least five criminal probes into possible bribes, illicit software, questionable pricing schemes and theft of a competitor’s intellectual property, people familiar with the matters have said. The San Francisco-based company also faces dozens of civil suits.

U.K. regulators including the National Crime Agency are also looking into the scale of the breach. London and other governments have previously taken steps toward banning the service, citing what they say is reckless behavior by Uber.

In January 2016, the New York attorney general fined Uber $20,000 for failing to promptly disclose an earlier data breach in 2014. After last year’s cyberattack, the company was negotiating with the FTC on a privacy settlement even as it haggled with the hackers on containing the breach, Uber said. The company finally agreed to the FTC settlement three months ago, without admitting wrongdoing and before telling the agency about last year’s attack.

The new CEO said his goal is to change Uber’s ways. Uber said it informed New York’s attorney general and the FTC about the October 2016 hack for the first time on Tuesday. Khosrowshahi asked for the resignation of Sullivan and fired Craig Clark, a senior lawyer who reported to Sullivan. The men didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Khosrowshahi said in his emailed statement: “While I can’t erase the past, I can commit on behalf of every Uber employee that we will learn from our mistakes.”

The company said its investigation found that Salle Yoo, the outgoing chief legal officer who has been scrutinized for her responses to other matters, hadn’t been told about the incident. Her replacement, Tony West, will start at Uber on Wednesday and has been briefed on the cyberattack.

Kalanick was ousted as CEO in June under pressure from investors, who said he put the company at legal risk. He remains on the board and recently filled two seats he controlled.

Uber said it has hired Matt Olsen, a former general counsel at the National Security Agency and director of the National Counterterrorism Center, as an adviser. He will help the company restructure its security teams. Uber hired Mandiant, a cybersecurity firm owned by FireEye Inc., to investigate the hack.

The company plans to release a statement to customers saying it has seen “no evidence of fraud or misuse tied to the incident.” Uber said it will provide drivers whose licenses were compromised with free credit protection monitoring and identity theft protection.

#Uber #USA

Russian Hackers Use Zero-Days to Try to Get Sanctions Data - Bloomberg Business
▻http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-18/russian-hackers-use-zero-days-in-attempt-to-get-sanctions-data

Hackers linked to the Russian government used previously unknown flaws in Microsoft Corp.’s Windows and Adobe Systems Inc.’s Flash to try to infiltrate discussions on sanctions policy, a person familiar with the attack said.
The spying scheme was detected on April 13 by U.S. cybersecurity firm FireEye Inc. and targeted an agency of an overseas government that was in discussions with the U.S. about sanctions policy. The attack was halted before the group extracted any data, the company said in a blog post Saturday.
The hacking group, which FireEye calls Advanced Persistent Threat 28, or APT28, is known for advanced cyber-attacks and its use of malware known as Sofacy. In this case, it took the unusual step of using two so-called zero-day exploits to try to infiltrate the computer systems of its victim in a highly sophisticated attack, FireEye said.
“While there is not yet a patch available for the Windows vulnerability, updating Adobe Flash to the latest version will render this in-the-wild exploit innocuous,” FireEye said in a blog post.
Adobe has created a fix for the vulnerability while Microsoft is working on a patch, FireEye said. The flaw does not apply to Windows 8 and later versions.

2nd Russian Hacker Group Accused of Targeting NATO | Business | The Moscow Times
▻http://www.themoscowtimes.com/business/article/second-russian-hacker-group-accused-of-targeting-nato-/510190.html

A U.S. security firm has claimed that a sophisticated, Russia-based hacker group is spying on NATO and former Soviet member states, most likely on the orders of the Russian government.

In a report issued Tuesday, security firm FireEye said the group, which the firm dubbed APT28, has since 2007 conducted “long-standing, focused operations that indicate a government sponsor — specifically, a government based in Moscow.”

“APT28 targets insider information related to governments, militaries and security organizations that would likely benefit the Russian government,” the report says. These targets include the Georgian Defense and Interior ministries, post-Soviet governments in Eastern Europe that are now members of NATO, and the NATO alliance itself.

Russian cyber espionage efforts have long been considered unrivaled in skill and scope, but the difficulty of identifying attacks and tracing them to an identifiable source has prevented cyber security investigators from pinning any activity directly on a single Russian entity.

But evidence of a wide-ranging cyber espionage campaign is mounting. Earlier in October, another U.S. cyber security firm said that a group of Russian hackers with suspected government backing had used a previously unknown backdoor in Microsoft Windows operating systems to spy on NATO and several Western governments.

APT28 does not appear to be stealing intellectual property or directly profiting from stolen financial information, as is characteristic of China-based actors tracked by FireEye, the report said. Instead, the hackers focus on defense and geopolitical intelligence-gathering.

The sophistication of APT28’s malware indicates that the group is state-sponsored, the report said. Samples of the group’s coding show that work on the group’s cyber weapons corresponds to a normal working week in the St. Petersburg and Moscow time zone almost 90 percent of the time.

FireEye’s report also mentions that the language settings on the coding are Russian, rather than English or language-neutral settings.

Universities top the list for hackers
FT, 27/02/14
▻http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/23a25e1e-9e3a-11e3-b429-00144feab7de.html

“A lot of these universities happen to be doing research today that will be classified in five years if the navy or the air force picks up the research,” he said [Ken Geers, senior global threat analyst at FireEye]. “So you can see why the advanced persistent threats might be thinking that far ahead to support their mission.”

Universities could be looking at “torpedoes, hypersonic missiles, high performance quantum computing” that would “benefit the military or intelligence organisation of any state”, he said.

He added that universities often lacked the protections that government and large critical infrastructure providers are putting in place and their staff’s openness to collaboration may mean they are not as “guarded” as, for example, a government employee.

#Université #cybersécurité