Kristian's Internet Wanderings
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. (Philip K. Dick)
Dutch Newspaper De Volkskrant has published the story of how the Dutch Intelligence Services (AIVD) hacked the infamous Russian hacking group Cosybear / APT29 and monitored how they hacked into the US and how this was fought withe the Americans. Also on the aftermath of these findings being made public by the Trump Administration. Another country now deeply skeptical to sharing Intel with the US along the previous leaks made this year.
[Update] More info can be found at Nieuwsuur.
I suppose every new technology will eventually be misused, and this has now come to machine learning and facial recognition algorithms. As reported by Motherboard an app has been launched on reddit using NVIDA’s CUDA framework to morph faces onto another body, to create realistic videos as an outcome. Of course (in an forum dominated by teenage boys) the initial activity is to use celebrity faces in porn scenes, but it raises another worry about trusting digital images and video files in a wider use of this technology.
Amazon S3 buckets belonging to American inteligense have been found open to the public by researchers from the Upguard Cyber Risk Team. 3 buckets, “centcom-backup,” “centcom-archive,” and “pacom-archive” (Centcom = American Military Central Command, Pacom = American Pacific command) represents 8 years of Social Media scraping with up to 1.8 Billion posts collected. Posts, users, IP numbers, password hashes etc all collected. Clues left leads to some information on the vendors involved and the tools used to analyze the data. Remember: nothing is private on Internet!
Facbook’s People You May Know algorithm has been of interest for security minded people for a while. A number of “weird” and inappropriate suggestions has led to Gizmodo digging deeper into the underlying systems and approaches. In fairness, most of the approach is clearly highlighted in the respective EULA’s, but how many users actually reads them?
