Australia’s 2020 cybersecurity strategy: defining the mission | Pentagon deploying cyber personnel abroad to gather intel for 2020 elections | Reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm
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If you swim between the flags in Australia, the chances you will drown are remote. Test the waters outside the flags and the risk of drowning rises exponentially. We need to have the same attitude to cybersecurity. We need to develop the same culture of risk management and resilience we impose on the beach. And that begins with defining our national mission. The Strategist.
Undercover reporter Katarzyna Pruszkiewicz spent six months running fake social media accounts at self-described ‘ePR firm’ in Wrocław. The Guardian.
The Pentagon once again is sending cyber personnel overseas to gather intelligence to help protect the 2020 presidential elections against foreign interference, the U.S. Embassy in Montenegro announced this week. Cyber Scoop.
ASPI ICPC
Australia’s 2020 cybersecurity strategy: defining the mission
The Strategist
@gaimbrodtmann
If you swim between the flags in Australia, the chances you will drown are remote. Test the waters outside the flags and the risk of drowning rises exponentially. We need to have the same attitude to cybersecurity. We need to develop the same culture of risk management and resilience we impose on the beach. And that begins with defining our national mission.
Opinion: Focus is on Huawei tech as China launches 5G
DW
@tomatospy @cliffordcoonan
Tom Uren, a senior analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), believes assessing the security risk is a paramount concern. He is certain that state actors will try to compromise 5G networks to enable spying. “We should be thinking about risk and about taking decisions in our own national interest. Is it a good idea to let a critical underpinning technology be controlled by a state that has a history of wide-ranging cyberespionage and supply-chain attacks?” Uren said.
Australia
Qld tax office avoids 'creepy' facial and voice tech on path to intelligent systems
IT News
@justinrhendry
Queensland’s Office of State Revenue (SRO) has left behind technology that might be deemed “creepy” by clients during its three-year shift to next generation tax IT systems.
China
Bulletproof' China-backed site attacks HK democracy activists
AFP
@estherswchan
Using Russia-based servers and promoted by powerful groups linked to China's ruling Communist Party, a sophisticated anonymous website is targeting Hong Kong pro-democracy figures -- and there is almost no way to stop it.
YouTube’s algorithm apparently helped a Chinese propaganda video on Hong Kong go viral
Quartz
@OliviaGoldhill
A Chinese-made propaganda video about the Hong Kong protests went viral, apparently thanks to YouTube’s algorithm. The video—called “Who’s behind Hong Kong protests?”—argues that US agents are stirring protests in Hong Kong, and has more than half a million views on YouTube. It was created by China’s state broadcaster, China Global Television Network.
Emotion recognition is China’s new surveillance craze
FT
Emotion recognition was the crime prevention buzz-phrase on everyone’s lips this week at China’s largest surveillance tech expo, held in the southern tech hub of Shenzhen. The technology, which is being rolled out at airports and subway stations to identity criminal suspects, is the latest development in crime prediction systems in the world’s largest surveillance market, which already relies on facial and gait recognition, eye tracking and crowd analysis.
USA
Pentagon again deploying cyber personnel abroad to gather intel for 2020 elections
Cyber Scoop
@shanvav
The Pentagon once again is sending cyber personnel overseas to gather intelligence to help protect the 2020 presidential elections against foreign interference, the U.S. Embassy in Montenegro announced this week.
TikTok Said to Be Under National Security Review
NYT
@AnaSwanson @MikeIsaac
The United States government has opened a national security review of a Chinese company’s acquisition of the American company that became TikTok, the hugely popular short-form video app, according to people briefed on the inquiry.
Asia
Tweet from Issue Makers Lab analysing a malware attack on an Indian nuclear power plant
Cyber attack at Kudankulam; critical system safe
Hindustan Times
The statement came hours after reports on social media that the plant was the target of a cyber attack. The unconfirmed reports said that virus ‘DTrack RAT’ had hit the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant (KKNP) network.
India Will Have a Say in Whether China Dominates 5G
WSJ
@dhume
Accepting Huawei would save money for New Delhi, but only at the cost of strategic autonomy.
Europe
Undercover reporter reveals life in a Polish troll farm
The Guardian
@crsdavies
Katarzyna Pruszkiewicz spent six months running fake social media accounts at self-described ‘ePR firm’ in Wrocław.
Hungary’s government is quietly neck-deep in the U.S.-Huawei war
Direkt36
@panyiszabolcs
Viktor Orban’s government has found itself in the middle of a great power conflict in 2019. Last year, a new battleground emerged in the trade war between the United States and China.
Americas
U.S. warns Russian trolls stoking conflict in Chile
Reuters
The U.S. State Department warned on Thursday that it had seen indications of Russian “influence” on recent unrest in Chile, where two weeks of protests and riots have rocked the administration of President Sebastian Pinera.
Middle East
Google Hosted an Insecure App for Searching Personal Data of Palestinians
Vice
@josephfcox
An Android app on the Google Play Store allowed anyone to look up biographical information on a large number of people in Palestine, including names, dates of birth, place of residence, and details on their family. The app was designed for a user to search for one person at a time, but a cybersecurity researcher also found the server hosting the data itself is insecure, allowing anyone to scrape it en masse.
Dubai launches ‘world’s first’ Artificial Intelligence fatwa service
Gulf News
‘Virtual Ifta’ launched by IACAD can currently answer over 200 questions on Muslim prayer.
Africa
Writing toward freedom: Politics and digital rights in Africa
Global Voices
Across Africa, governments and nongovernmental political actors repeatedly deploy tactics to interfere with users’ rights to freedom of expression and access to information online, particularly during events of major political significance.
Misc.
AI and Irregular Warfare: An Evolution, Not a Revolution
War on the Rocks
AI will drive an evolution in irregular warfare, where dominance in information and understanding can prove decisive by increasing the speed, precision, and efficacy with which information is wielded in these conflicts. But advances in AI over the coming decade are unlikely to prove revolutionary, particularly for a form of conflict where humans, and not hardware, have historically proven decisive.
Some Employees Chafe as Google’s New Internal Rules Take Hold
Bloomberg
@rj_gallagher
A controversial new hire at Google has provided a test of the company’s new community guidelines, which it says are an effort to curb increased incivility at work. But some employees say the new rules smack of censorship.
BlueKeep attacks are happening, but it's not a worm
ZD Net
@campuscodi
Security researchers have spotted the first mass-hacking campaign using the BlueKeep exploit; however, the exploit is not being used as a self-spreading worm, as Microsoft was afraid it would happen last May when it issued a dire warning and urged users to patch.
Jobs
Research
CSIIF: Hacker House Ltd Grant Award
UK Government
An independent report by the Government Internal Audit Agency into the grant award for Hacker House Ltd and publication of related documentation.
Events
CyberWarCon 2
AESIR
CYBERWARCON is a one-day (Novembre 21st) conference in the Washington D.C. area focused on the specter of destruction, disruption, and malicious influence on our society through cyber capabilities.
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