China’s Software Stalked Uighurs Earlier and More Widely, Researchers Learn | FB Has Been Profiting From Boogaloo Ads Promoting Civil War | Over 82,000 Aussies' details leaked in crypto scam
Follow us on Twitter. The Daily Cyber Digest focuses on the topics we work on, including cyber, critical technologies & strategic issues like foreign interference.
Before the Chinese police hung high-powered surveillance cameras and locked up ethnic minorities by the hundreds of thousands in China’s western region of Xinjiang, China’s hackers went to work building malware, researchers say. The New York Times
Facebook said on Tuesday it was banning content associated with the "Boogaloo" extremist group. BuzzFeed News found the company has been running Boogaloo ads advocating for violence for months. BuzzFeed News
Personal details of tens of thousands of Australians who fell for a fraudulent cryptocurrency investment scheme that used fake media sites and celebrity endorsements have been leaked onto the web. IT News
ASPI ICPC
‘Deeply unsettled': Defence minister takes aim at China
7 News
Defence Minister Linda Reynolds is expected to highlight China’s actions in the Indo-Pacific, saying they have “deeply unsettled” the region, in a speech at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.
$1.35 billion for a spy's 'licence to hack'
The Canberra Times
"Sophisticated state-based cyber actors" are governments or agencies acting for governments. They aren't necessarily the foreign counterparts of the ASD, according to Tom Uren, an analyst specialising in cybersecurity at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. He monitors the people accused in American courts of cyber attacking. Some are officers in China's People's Liberation Army but others are from outside agencies and contractors.
China 'aligning economic coercion with disinformation' to pressure Aust
Sky News Australia
Dr Jake Wallis spoke with Sky News Australia about how the People’s Republic of China aligns disinformation with economic coercion. Watch below.
Australia
Over 82,000 Aussies' details leaked in crypto scam
IT News
@juhasaarinen
Personal details of tens of thousands of Australians who fell for a fraudulent cryptocurrency investment scheme that used fake media sites and celebrity endorsements have been leaked onto the web.
Cyber Security: why it matters to not just 'state actors' but you and me
ABC
The Morrison government has committed more than a billion dollars and 500 new jobs over the next ten years to fighting the war against breaches of our data security. Cyber attacks on essential services are now commonplace, and terms like state actors, denial of service and firewall breaches are sadly all part of how competing interests do their work.
China
China’s Software Stalked Uighurs Earlier and More Widely, Researchers Learn
The New York Times
@paulmozur @nicoleperlroth
Before the Chinese police hung high-powered surveillance cameras and locked up ethnic minorities by the hundreds of thousands in China’s western region of Xinjiang, China’s hackers went to work building malware, researchers say. The Chinese hacking campaign, which researchers at Lookout — the San Francisco mobile security firm — said on Wednesday had begun in earnest as far back as 2013 and continues to this day, was part of a broad but often invisible effort to pull in data from the devices that know people best: their smartphones.
India TikTok Ban Threatens China’s Rise as Global Tech Power
Bloomberg
China over the past decade built an alternate online reality where Google and Facebook barely exist. Now its own tech corporations, from Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. to Tencent Holdings Ltd., are getting a taste of what a shutout feels like.
A Chinese Scholar Outlines Stakes for New 'Personal Information' and 'Data Security' Laws (Translation)
New America
Lu Chuanying, a frequent government adviser, calls for an open process and careful coordination.
USA
MIT apologizes, permanently pulls offline huge dataset that taught AI systems to use racist, misogynistic slurs
The Register
MIT has taken offline its highly cited dataset that trained AI systems to potentially describe people using racist, misogynistic, and other problematic terms. The database was removed this week after The Register alerted the American super-college. MIT also urged researchers and developers to stop using the training library, and to delete any copies. "We sincerely apologize," a professor told us.
Facebook Has Been Profiting From Boogaloo Ads Promoting Civil War And Unrest
BuzzFeed News
Facebook said on Tuesday it was banning content associated with the "Boogaloo" extremist group. BuzzFeed News found the company has been running Boogaloo ads advocating for violence for months.
Spies, Lies, and Stonewalling: What It's Like to Report on Facebook Columbia Journalism Review
Big tech CEOs agree to testify for House antitrust probe
Politico
The CEOs of tech giants Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook have agreed to testify before the House Judiciary Committee as part of its investigation into possible anti-competitive conduct in the online marketplace, a panel spokesperson confirmed to POLITICO on Wednesday.
The Loss Of Public Goods To Big Tech
Noema
@safiyanoble
For decades, the titans of technology have talked about human-centered artificial intelligence and its capacity to inform and improve the future of humanity. If there was ever a moment where the overstated promises of such technologies could be put to the test, it is now.
Popular Pro-Trump Digital Strategist Made Racist Comments on a Secret Twitter Account
Rightwing Watch
Caleb Hull, a digital communications strategist popular with pro-Trump Republicans, made racist and inflammatory comments, including the use of the n-word, on a Twitter account he used as a video gamer in 2014. The account was deleted shortly after Right Wing Watch began reaching out to sources to report this story, but large portions of the account have been preserved via digital archives.
South Korea
How female coders in South Korea are carving out space in a hostile, male-dominated industry
Rest of World
She enrolled in a coding academy paid for by the federal government. Seven years ago, in an effort to diversify an economy long dominated by chaebol mega-corporations, the South Korean state turned to tech. As part of the country’s gukbi jiwon national-education program, it started offering subsidies to startups and skills training to aspiring developers, who can earn a solid starting salary of between $25,000 and $30,000. This was a logical step: the country boasts a leading semiconductor industry, some of the world’s fastest internet speeds, the world’s most per capita internet users, and its highest rate of smartphone ownership. Yet only 173,000 Koreans, less than 1% of all working adults, hold jobs as programmers, according to data collected by Korea’s ministry of employment and labor. One survey found that only 14% of Korean coders are women.
India
Indian startups funded by Alibaba and Tencent are backing India’s ban on Chinese apps
Quartz
@Jane_Li911
A number of Indian companies have been quick to applaud the government’s sudden ban on 59 Chinese apps—including startups whose growth has come with the help of funding and know-how from China’s tech giants.
North America
Did a Chinese Hack Kill Canada’s Greatest Tech Company?
Bloomberg
The documents began arriving in China at 8:48 a.m. on a Saturday in April 2004. There were close to 800 of them: PowerPoint presentations from customer meetings, an analysis of a recent sales loss, design details for an American communications network. Others were technical, including source code that represented some of the most sensitive information owned by Nortel Networks Corp., then one of the world’s largest companies.
Misc
Zoom misses its own deadline to publish its first transparency report
TechCrunch
@zackwhittaker
How many government demands for user data has Zoom received? We won’t know until “later this year,” an updated Zoom blog post now says. The video conferencing giant previously said it would release the number of government demands it has received by June 30. But the company said it’s missed that target and has given no firm new date for releasing the figures.
You Purged Racists From Your Website? Great, Now Get to Work
Wired
In what looks like a coordinated purge by Twitch, Reddit, and YouTube, the reckoning is here for those who use racism and misogyny to gain attention and make money on social media.
Inside the Invasive, Secretive “Bossware” Tracking Workers
EFF
COVID-19 has pushed millions of people to work from home, and a flock of companies offering software for tracking workers has swooped in to pitch their products to employers across the country.
One out of every 142 passwords is '123456'
ZDNet
In one of the biggest password re-use studies of its kind, an analysis of more than one billion leaked credentials has discovered that one out of every 142 passwords is the classic "123456" string.