Flipboard Hack
US Election Hacking by Iran / Tech Scam Arrests / China Cell Maker Trumped / AI Semi-Tractor Trailer On The Way
From Gareth Corfield at The Register: News aggregator app Flipboard breached: All passwords reset after hackers pinch user data
News aggregation app Flipboard has publicly confessed that hackers accessed personal data about its members.
Although the company did not say how many customers had been affected, the app has been installed more than half a billion times, according to its Google Play Store listing.
The databases that got away, according to a Flipboard statement, included account credentials, names, hashed and salted passwords, and email addresses. Some of these were SHA-1 hashed, while those created after March 2012 were hashed and salted with the more modern and tougher-to-crack bcrypt function.
The app’s makers do not collect financial data or government ID card information.
Flipboard is a news aggregator. Rather than visiting your favourite news website and reading their glorious headlines, beautiful stock images and cutting-edge captions the way the gods journalists intended, Flipboard allows you to create a personalised “news magazine” that you swipe your way through.
It’s not just Flipboard accounts that may be vulnerable, the company warned. “If users connected their Flipboard account to a third-party account, including social media accounts, then the databases may have contained digital tokens used to connect their Flipboard account to that third-party account.”
Read more over at The Register.
FireEye’s Alice Revelli & Lee Foster write: Network of Social Media Accounts Impersonates U.S. Political Candidates, Leverages U.S. and Israeli Media in Support of Iranian Interests
In August 2018, FireEye Threat Intelligence released a report exposing what we assessed to be an Iranian influence operation leveraging networks of inauthentic news sites and social media accounts aimed at audiences around the world. We identified inauthentic social media accounts posing as everyday Americans that were used to promote content from inauthentic news sites such as Liberty Front Press (LFP), US Journal, and Real Progressive Front. We also noted a then-recent shift in branding for some accounts that had previously self-affiliated with LFP; in July 2018, the accounts dropped their LFP branding and adopted personas aligned with progressive political movements in the U.S. Since then, we have continued to investigate and report on the operation to our intelligence customers, detailing the activity of dozens of additional sites and hundreds of additional social media accounts.
Recently, we investigated a network of English-language social media accounts that engaged in inauthentic behavior and misrepresentation and that we assess with low confidence was organized in support of Iranian political interests. In addition to utilizing fake American personas that espoused both progressive and conservative political stances, some accounts impersonated real American individuals, including a handful of Republican political candidates that ran for House of Representatives seats in 2018. Personas in this network have also had material published in U.S. and Israeli media outlets, attempted to lobby journalists to cover specific topics, and appear to have orchestrated audio and video interviews with U.S. and UK-based individuals on political issues. While we have not at this time tied these accounts to the broader influence operation we identified last year, they promoted material in line with Iranian political interests in a manner similar to accounts that we have previously assessed to be of Iranian origin. Most of the accounts in the network appear to have been suspended on or around the evening of 9 May, 2019.
There is much more to this story at FireEye. Read More.
Three tech-support scammers charged with ripping off the elderly
Three alleged tech-support scammers have been charged with bilking the elderly out of at least $1.3 million for tech support services they didn’t need and never got.
The US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York announced on Friday that the three had been arrested the day before.
According to a complaint filed by FBI Special Agent Carie Jeleniewski, the trio would allegedly cold-call their victims, running through the standard tech support scammer’s ruse of claiming to be from one of the big computer companies and warning the victims that their computer was infected with a virus. This went on for years, starting at least in 2013 and continuing on up until this month.
In fact, while investigators were interviewing one of the defendants, Gurjet Singh, at his home in Queens, New York, a carrier truck pulled up to deliver a check made payable to NY IT Solutions Inc. — one of the companies the alleged fraudsters set up to deposit money mailed in by their victims. According to the criminal complaint, Singh had been in the midst of explaining to officers that he collected checks and then wired the money to Gunjit Malhotra, from India. Singh’s cut of the allegedly swindled funds: 8%.
See the names of everyone involved in this international crime ring at the Sophos blog NakedSecurity. Read more.
Vlad Savov at The Verge: China has no good options for retaliating against Trump’s Huawei ban
US president Donald Trump has made Huawei the biggest story in tech right now by banning it from doing business with US companies. Huawei, China’s tech champion, has lost access to Google’s Android and Intel’s chips, and it’s even seen other international partners like ARM and Panasonic bowing to American influence and discontinuing trade. Having previously been on track to becoming the world’s biggest smartphone maker, Huawei is now in such dire straits that the best metaphor its founder could come up with to allay fears is that the company is like a plane with a hole in its side: not doing great, but still up in the air.
Bludgeoning Huawei with the ban hammer is, by Trump’s own admission, a negotiating tactic to focus China’s attention on American discontent with the existing trade relationship between the two countries. It lands atop a pile of punitive 25 percent tariffs he’s imposed on many Chinese imports to the US, and a promised further round of such tariffs on practically every Chinese export imaginable.
Two expert China observers tell The Verge that China very much cares about these restrictions on its most important overseas market, and it has every incentive to respond, whether to alleviate the sanctions or as a show of its own economic strength. But both agree that China has few, if any, good options available.
Read the rest of this article over at The Verge.
Amrita Khalid writes for Engadget: Daimler has a plan to get autonomous trucks ready for the road
Daimler Trucks is creating a global organization focused on putting automated trucks on the road over the next decade. The Autonomous Technology Group will be in charge of building an automated roadmap for the trucks, as well as setting up the appropriate operations infrastructure and network. The new initiative comes right after Daimler announced a $570 million investment into automated trucks at CES in Las Vegas back in January.
The eventual goal for Daimler has been long-haul trucks with Level 4 autonomy, or vehicles that can drive themselves with only optional human intervention. The trucks would only travel between defined hubs, such as from a warehouse to a facility, without the expectation that humans would need to take over the steering wheel.
Will people be safe on the road? See how Torc Robotics in Virginia is involved. Read the rest of the story over at Engadget.
If you have a special news item you’d like us to promote or if you would like to sponsor this podcast with an embedded advertisement, please follow me on Twitter and when I follow you back, send a direct message to get more information.
