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"This system includes a web-based dashboard known as SANA that enables a user to formulate and deploy trending social media events en masse. The system creates these events that it refers to as Инфоповоды, 'newsbreaks,' utilizing the botnet as a geographically distributed transport." The existence of Fronton, an IoT botnet, became public knowledge following revelations from BBC Russia and ZDNet in March 2020 after a Russian hacker group known as Digital Revolution published documents that it claimed were obtained after breaking into a subcontractor to the FSB, the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation.
The time has come to remove Chinese voices from global social media, according to Samir Saran, president of Delhi-based think tank Observer Research Foundation, a commissioner of The Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace, and a member of Microsoft's Digital Peace Now Initiative. Speaking at the Black Hat Asia conference, Saran said China's Communist Party sees tech as a means of exerting control and uses social media to deliberately interfere in the affairs of other nations.
FBI investing millions in software to monitor social media platforms. The FBI has invested millions of dollars into social media tracking software, according to a report from the Washington Post.
The targeting of social media is the highlighted finding in the 2021 Phishing report by cybersecurity firm Vade, who analyzed phishing attack patterns that unfolded throughout 2021. Phishing actors focused on Facebook and other social media platforms because taking over social media accounts is commonly a stepping stone to reach a wider audience or perform highly effective spear-phishing attacks.
United States president Joe Biden has used his first State of the Union speech to call for a ban on social networks serving ads targeted at children. Speaking in the presence of Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, who was invited to attend by first lady Jill Biden, the president said "We must hold social media platforms accountable for the national experiment they're conducting on our children for profit."
A new malware capable of controlling social media accounts is being distributed through Microsoft's official app store in the form of trojanized gaming apps, infecting more than 5,000 Windows machines in Sweden, Bulgaria, Russia, Bermuda, and Spain. Israeli cybersecurity company Check Point dubbed the malware "Electron Bot," in reference to a command-and-control domain used in recent campaigns.
Zenly, a social app from Snap that allows users to see the locations of friends and family on a live map, contains a pair of vulnerabilities that could endanger those being tracked. "When submitting a friend request to a user, Zenly will allow access to their phone number regardless of whether the friend request is accepted or not," explained the researchers, in a Thursday posting.
Social media as a threat channel saw a two-fold increase in attacks throughout 2021, according to a report from PhishLabs. In Q4 and throughout 2021, PhishLabs analysed hundreds of thousands of phishing and social media attacks targeting enterprises, their employees, and brands.
"From the earliest days of online information to the rapid evolution of today's metaverses, the internet has come a long way. However, this latest data shows that it is more under attack than ever before," said Arkose Labs CEO Kevin Gosschalk. The latest research took a deep dive into UK business specifically to understand which sectors were the most attacked by online criminals.
As revealed by the FTC, over 95,000 US consumers reported losses of roughly $770 million after getting scammed on social media platforms. "More than one in four people who reported losing money to fraud in 2021 said it started on social media with an ad, a post, or a message. In fact, the data suggest that social media was far more profitable to scammers in 2021 than any other method of reaching people." the FTC said.