State-owned Chinese investor to seize control of UK chip designer | Mobile phone location data used to track Australians during crisis | Broadband engineers threatened due to 5G conspiracies
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A state-controlled Chinese investor is trying to seize control of Imagination Technologies Group, the British chip designer – sparking fears that its prized intellectual property assets could disappear from the UK. Sky News.
Vodafone has provided the mobile phone location data of several million Australians in an anonymised and aggregated form to the federal and NSW governments to monitor whether people are following social distancing restrictions amid the coronavirus pandemic. SMH.
Telecoms engineers are facing verbal and physical threats during the lockdown, as baseless conspiracy theories linking coronavirus to the roll-out of 5G technology spread by celebrities such as Amanda Holden prompt members of the public to abuse those maintaining vital mobile phone and broadband networks. The Guardian.
ASPI ICPC
Coronavirus: defence axes Zoom over flaws
The Australian
Australian Strategic Policy Institute cyber security analyst Tom Uren said Defence was in a difficult position as it had always assumed personnel would be able to travel to secure facilities. “The defence paradigm is ‘We have secure facilities and you will go to those secure facilities for anything we really need to talk about that is sensitive’,” he said. “It needs as close to a 100 per cent guarantee (of security) as you can get, and anything commercial you are not going to get that unless you’ve done a whole lot of work.”
Policy, Guns and Money: Covid-19 and conflict, Pacific ICT and Defence
ASPI Strategist
Earlier this year, Bart Hogeveen of ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre released a report titled ICT for development in the Pacific islands. Bart speaks with ICPC colleague Louisa Bochner about the report and his work on assessing e-governance facilities in the Pacific.
Read the report ‘ICT for development in the Pacific Islands’ here.
World
Move Fast & Roll Your Own Crypto
Citizen Lab
This report examines the encryption that protects meetings in the popular Zoom teleconference app. We find that Zoom has “rolled their own” encryption scheme, which has significant weaknesses. In addition, we identify potential areas of concern in Zoom’s infrastructure, including observing the transmission of meeting encryption keys through China.
‘Zoombombing’ Becomes a Dangerous Organized Effort
NYT
@taylorlorenz
The weaponization of Zoom — a videoconferencing app that has become a de facto social platform for the coronavirus era — is the latest development in the story of online abuse, the kind playing out on social networks and darker, unmoderated corners of the internet.Zoom’s Encryption Is “Not Suited for Secrets” and Has Surprising Links to China, Researchers Discover
The Intercept
Meetings on Zoom, the increasingly popular video conferencing service, are encrypted using an algorithm with serious, well-known weaknesses, and sometimes using keys issued by servers in China, even when meeting participants are all in North America, according to researchers at the University of Toronto.
Australia
Mobile phone location data used to track Australians' movements during coronavirus crisis
SMH
@BenGrubb
Vodafone has provided the mobile phone location data of several million Australians in an anonymised and aggregated form to the federal and NSW governments to monitor whether people are following social distancing restrictions amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Mobile phone tracking should be used to stop virus
SMH
The prime minister is right that using mobile phone data involves serious privacy risks and, if badly managed, might reduce community support for other important measures such as lockdowns. But this crisis has challenged so many preconceptions about what is acceptable that it seems inconsistent to rule out using mobile technology in the fight against COVID-19.
China
Zoom admits some calls were routed through China by mistake
Tech Crunch
@ZackWhittaker
Hours after security researchers at Citizen Lab reported that some Zoom calls were routed through China, the video conferencing platform has offered an apology and a partial explanation.
US
China floods Facebook with undeclared coronavirus propaganda ads blaming Trump
The Telegraph
@LFDodds
State news outlets have bought numerous ads extolling China's response to the pandemic and attacking the mistakes of the US.
Surveillance Court Orders Justice Department to Review Flawed Wiretap Applications
WSJ
The secretive federal court responsible for approving government requests for national security surveillance ordered the Justice Department to review more than two-dozen wiretap applications to determine whether they were so flawed that approvals to monitor Americans shouldn’t have been granted.
Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked
Washington Post
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) repeated a fringe theory suggesting that the ongoing spread of a coronavirus is connected to research in the disease-ravaged epicenter of Wuhan, China.
New York City bans Zoom in schools, citing security concerns
Tech Crunch
@Zackwhittaker
As schools lie empty, students still have to learn. But officials in New York City say schools are not permitted to use Zoom for remote teaching, citing security concerns with the video conferencing service.
Baltimore board OKs surveillance planes amid opposition
AP
Despite opposition from the American Civil Liberties Union and concerns that such pervasive monitoring could violate people’s rights, the city’s Board of Estimates voted 3-2 to approved the privately-funded contract with Ohio-based Persistent Surveillance Systems, The Baltimore Sun reported.
UK
State-owned Chinese investor to seize control of chip designer Imagination
Sky News
A state-controlled Chinese investor is trying to seize control of Imagination Technologies Group, the British chip designer – sparking fears that its prized intellectual property assets could disappear from the UK. Senior MPs, including the chairs of four Commons select committees, have been alerted to the move, and are this weekend planning to urge Boris Johnson to intervene on the grounds of potential risks to national security. The government intelligence agency, GCHQ, and the National Cyber Security Centre have also been informed of the developments, according to Westminster insiders.. One source said that China Reform's move appeared to be timed to coincide with "the point of maximum distraction" for ministers, with governments around the world almost entirely consumed by the task of dealing with COVID-19.
Broadband engineers threatened due to 5G coronavirus conspiracies
The Guardian
@jimwaterson
Telecoms engineers are facing verbal and physical threats during the lockdown, as baseless conspiracy theories linking coronavirus to the roll-out of 5G technology spread by celebrities such as Amanda Holden prompt members of the public to abuse those maintaining vital mobile phone and broadband networks.
Europe
EU justice chief urges U.S. tech giants to halt virus clickbaits
Reuters
EU justice chief Vera Jourova on Thursday criticized U.S. tech giants such as Google and Facebook for making money off coronavirus-related fake news instead of putting in more efforts to stop the deluge.
Russia
Russian telco hijacks internet traffic for Google, AWS, Cloudflare, and others
ZD Net
@campuscodi
Two times this week, traffic meant for more than 200 of the world's largest content delivery networks (CDNs) and cloud hosting providers was suspiciously redirected through Rostelecom, Russia's state-owned telecommunications provider.
Asia
Coronavirus: Cyber frauds exploit Covid-19 alarm in Delhi
India Today
Delhi cops in tizzy as criminals target people with e-mails feigning as official info on the virus to break into their social media and bank accounts.
Misc.
Why we need “informational distancing” during the coronavirus crisis
The New Statesman
We’ve seen unprecedented cooperation and action among the social media platforms, governments and international organisations to combat the spread of malign information. And yet it proliferates. We cannot fact-check our way out of this crisis, because in the onslaught of Covid-19 disinformation, the most important weapon is not fakes, it’s fear.
Why the internet didn’t break
Brookings Institute
@tewheels
Tom Wheeler explains how the internet’s design prevents spikes in traffic during the COVID-19 pandemic from slowing everything to a halt.
“War Isn’t Hell; It’s Entertainment“: The Potential Role of Video Games in Radicalisation Processes
GNET Research
While research on the effects of violent video games has flourished in the last thirty years, radicalisation research is only beginning to engage with the use of games as potential tools to facilitate engagement with extremist content or to support radicalisation processes. Considering the technological advancements, including the possibility to play sophisticated games on smartphones and virtual reality goggles immersing the players even further than current gameplay, as well as the increasing availability of relatively cheap equipment to develop and launch games, it is likely that extremist organisations will increase their use of video game technology in the future to appeal to and recruit potentially very young individuals.
Jobs
Australian Defence Force Cyber Gap Program
Digital Transformation Agency
The Department of Defence has partnered with us to provide a crucial career opportunity — the Australian Defence Force Cyber Gap Program.