Security News

Malicious COVID-19 online content - including racist content, disinformation and misinformation - thrives and spreads online by bypassing the moderation efforts of individual social media platforms. By mapping online hate clusters across six major social media platforms, researchers at the George Washington University show how malicious content exploits pathways between platforms, highlighting the need for social media companies to rethink and adjust their content moderation policies.

To improve news literacy and reduce the spread of misinformation, NYUAD Center for Cybersecurity researcher and lead author Nicholas Micallef is part of a team that designed Fakey, a game that emulates a social media news feed and prompts players to use available signals to recognize and scrutinize suspicious content and focus on credible information. The researchers found that the more players interacted with articles in the game, the better their skills at spotting credible content became.

As India battles a surging second wave of COVID-19 cases and severe shortages of medical supplies, the nation's government has told Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to remove social media posts it says may panic its populace with misinformation. The takedown requests were lodged on Friday, a day before India recorded more than 300,000 new COVID-19 cases for the first time ever in 24 hours.

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Rice University researchers have discovered a more efficient way for social media companies to keep misinformation from spreading online using probabilistic filters trained with artificial intelligence. The new approach to scanning social media is outlined in a study presented by Rice computer scientist Anshumali Shrivastava and statistics graduate student Zhenwei Dai.

Increasingly, it isn't just people using that data to influence us, it's robots-unthinking algorithms on e-commerce sites, search engines and social media are continually categorizing our behavior to where it seems they can read our minds. The algorithms on those platforms are working behind the scenes, all the time.

This new malware was discovered by researchers at Dutch cyber-security company Sansec that focuses on defending e-commerce websites from digital skimming attacks. The payment skimmer malware pulls its sleight of hand trick with the help of a double payload structure where the source code of the skimmer script that steals customers' credit cards will be concealed in a social sharing icon loaded as an HTML 'svg' element with a 'path' element as a container.

A payment card-skimming malware that hides inside social-media buttons is making the rounds, compromising online stores as the holiday shopping season gets underway. Once ensconced on the page, the malware behaves just like the widespread Magecart group of skimmers, with the code being parsed and run by a shopper's PC in order to harvest payment cards and any other information entered into a site's online fields, he added.

Newly discovered web skimming malware is capable of hiding in plain sight to inject payment card skimmer scripts into compromised online stores. The malware's creators use malicious payloads concealed as social media buttons that mimic high profile platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Social media firms remained on high alert Tuesday against Election Day misinformation and manipulation efforts as polling places began closing in the US and focus turned to tallying ballots. "Our Election Operations Center will continue monitoring a range of issues in real time - including reports of voter suppression content," said a Facebook statement posted on Twitter.