Security, Spoken

Last August, researchers from the threat intelligence firm FireEye uncovered a vast social media influence campaign, conducted by a network of inauthentic news outlets and fake personas with ties to Iran. Their findings were a stark reminder that these kinds of tactics aren't limited to Russia. Now FireEye has published a sequel of sorts, documenting the evolving methods of disinformation actors are using across social media platforms and other outlets to promote Iranian interests online.

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After a solid decade of nonstop corporate data breaches and exposures you'd think large organizations would have at least fixed the most basic and obviously damaging types of data mishandling. But there's clearly still a long way to go. On Friday, independent security journalist Brian Krebs revealed that the real estate and title insurance giant First American had 885 million sensitive customer financial records, going back to 2003, exposed on its website for anyone to access.

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The Memorial Day weekend begins on a dire note for constitutional protections. On Thursday, the US government indicted Wikileaks founder Julian Assange for violating the Espionage Act. This is the first time in modern history that the US has charged the publisher of sensitive materials rather than the person who leaked it.

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On Thursday, the Department of Justice unsealed new charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Unlike the previous indictment—which focused narrowly on an apparent offer to help crack a password—the 17 superseding counts focus instead on alleged violations of the Espionage Act. In doing so, the DOJ has aimed a battering ram at the freedom of the press, whether you think Assange is a journalist or not.

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New charges against Julian Assange threaten all of the press, scientists have figured out how to alter emotional memories, and Memorial Day is coming. Here's the news you need to know, in two minutes or less. Today's Headlines Julian Assange's charges put all of the press at risk New charges unveiled by the Justice Department against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange paint a troublesome picture for him---and for all journalists.

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As facial recognition technologies have evolved from fledgling projects into powerful software platforms, researchers and civil liberties advocates have consistently warned about their potential to erode privacy. Those mounting fears came to a head Wednesday in Congress. Alarms over facial recognition had already gained urgency in recent years, as studies have shown that the systems still produce relatively high rates of false positives, and consistently contain racial and gender bias.

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It happened again. Google announced today that it's the latest tech giant to have accidentally stored user passwords unprotected in plaintext. GSuite users, pay attention. Google says that the bug affected "a small percentage of GSuite users," meaning it does not impact individual consumer accounts, but does affect some business and corporate accounts, which have their own risks and sensitivities.

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Bluetooth is the invisible glue that binds devices together. Which means that when it has bugs, it affects everything from iPhones and Android devices, to scooters, and even physical authentication keys used to secure other accounts. The order of magnitude can be stunning: The BlueBorne flaw, first disclosed in September 2017, impacted five billion PCs, phones, and IoT units.

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In the three years since Russian operatives breached the servers of the Democratic National Committee and threw presidential politics into a state of perpetual chaos, countries around the world have been on notice to the threat of foreign interference in elections.

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A decade ago, Amazon abruptly deleted copies of George Orwell's 1984 from the Kindles of its American customers. The move instantly evoked the “memory holes” in the novel's totalitarian dystopia, and it inspired about equal measures of shock, outrage, and jokes. (If a fictional Amazon in a dystopian novel had performed the same mass deletion, critics would have said it was too on the nose.

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