Showing 1-9 of 9 results
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The cyber whodunnit and the global blame game
News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 21/12/2017
» The US government has officially attributed to North Korea the WannaCry ransomware attack, which encrypted hundreds of thousands of computer drives around the world in May, 2017. And yet as with a series of other highly public cyberattack attributions, little evidence for the claim was made public. It's time for the cybersecurity world to follow the advice of the Rand Corporation and set up an unbiased international consortium that would seek to attribute attacks based on a common set of rules.
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The Cambridge Analytica red herring
News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 21/03/2018
» Facebook is being hammered for allowing the data firm Cambridge Analytica to acquire 50 million user profiles in the US, which it may or may not have used to help the Trump campaign. But the outrage misses the target: There's nothing Cambridge Analytica could have done that Facebook itself doesn't offer political clients.
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Yes, Russia abused Facebook. But did it actually work?
News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 20/12/2018
» Russia's propaganda operations during the 2016 US presidential election were broader than previously thought, according to two recently published studies. But they don't provide proof the influence campaign was as effective as the Kremlin may have hoped. Both reports, based on data provided by social networks, combine a distrust of the companies' disclosures and a naive trust in the metrics they tout.
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Social media needs bigger clean-up
News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 31/07/2018
» The plunge of Facebook and Twitter shares last week shows that both companies are hostages to investors' unrealistic perceptions of how quickly they should grow even as they purge bots and trolls. Moving to eliminate all fake and malicious accounts, as well as making new ones very hard to register, would be scary given these inflated expectations.
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What's scary about Facebook's new troll findings
News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 03/08/2018
» Facebook's widely publicised discovery of a possible influence operation through "inauthentic" accounts warrants some scrutiny -- and some reflection about the difference between a genuine political debate on social networks versus its simulated version.
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Until it gets hacked, e-government sounds just great
News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 23/11/2017
» A group of Czech security researchers earlier this year discovered a way to steal identities from electronic ID cards used in a number of countries, known in the cryptography industry as a ROCA vulnerability. So far, the vulnerability has caused problems in Estonia -- the country with perhaps the most comprehensive e-identification and e-government system in the world -- and in Spain. Former Estonian president Toomas Hendrik Ilves, a tireless promoter of his country's e-democracy, has said that other countries and institutions have the same problem, too; they're just not talking openly about it. He's very likely right.
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Political correctness won't help sort out Uber's woes
News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 16/06/2017
» There's a disconnect between the way Uber, the ride-hailing company, is trying to transform itself and what it really needs to fix to become a sustainable business. Instead of reconsidering its business model and protecting itself against a regulatory backlash, it has decided to go politically correct.
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US tech must beat Trump's policies
News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 08/02/2017
» Few tech workers come from the seven countries affected by President Donald Trump's entry ban. But the 97 US companies, most of them from the tech sector, that lent their support to the State of Washington's lawsuit aiming to block Mr Trump's executive order, have good reasons to fight it every step of the way.
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Panama Papers blame-game hides the real issue
News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 18/04/2016
» Last week, a respected Russia scholar in the US speculated that the Kremlin might be behind the so-called Panama Papers, the big dump of data about offshore accounts that has implicated several countries' officials in shady dealings. And on Thursday, President Vladimir Putin of Russia blamed the US for the leak.
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