Daily Drop (298)
10-30-22
Sunday, October 30, 2022 // (IG): BB // INTSUM // Coffee for Bob
Russia suspends UN grain export agreement participation after drone strikes on Black Sea fleet
FROM THE MEDIA: Russia announced it is withdrawing from the UN-facilitated Black Sea grain export agreement after an attack on its naval forces in Sevastopol, Crimea. "We’ve seen the reports from the Russian Federation regarding the suspension of their participation in the Black Sea Grain Initiative following an attack on the Russian Black Sea Fleet," Stéphane Dujarric, spokesman for the U.N. Secretary General, said in a press release Saturday morning. "We are in touch with the Russian authorities on this matter." "It is vital that all parties refrain from any action that would imperil the Black Sea Grain Initiative which is a critical humanitarian effort that is clearly having a positive impact on access to food for millions of people around the world," Dujarric added.
READ THE STORY: FOX // Arab News
Ukraine electricity supplies recovering after Russia drone, missile hits: Zelenskyy
FROM THE MEDIA: Ukrainian electricity supplies are recovering after concerted Russian attacks on generating plants but emergency blackouts may still be needed, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Saturday. In recent weeks Russia has focused drone and missile attacks on power facilities across the country, destroying more than 30 percent of generating capacity, and prompting widespread restrictions. “Today there are already significantly fewer stabilization (measures) and emergency blackouts ... but restrictions are still possible in some cities and districts,” Zelenskyy said in a video address. He also accused Russia of targeting plants which were under repair and said some technicians had been killed.
READ THE STORY: Alarabiya
Interpol says metaverse opens up new world of cybercrime
FROM THE MEDIA: Global police agency Interpol said it was preparing for the risk that online immersive environments – the “metaverse” – could create new kinds of cybercrime and allow existing crime to take place on a larger scale. Interpol’s member countries have raised concerns about how to prepare for possible metaverse crime, Madan Oberoi, Interpol’s executive director for technology and innovation, told Reuters.
READ THE STORY: Fiji Times // MUO // Decrypt
Google launches blockchain node engine for Web3 developers
FROM THE MEDIA: Google is launching an in-house Blockchain Node Engine (BNE) based on Google Cloud. As a node-hosting service, BNE enables Web3 companies to relay transactions, deploy smart contracts, and read or write blockchain data directly on Google Cloud. Ethereum will be the first blockchain supported by BNE. The service intends to place nodes behind a virtual private cloud firewall, allowing only trusted machines and users to communicate with endpoints. Google Cloud hopes this will protect the nodes from distributed denial-of-service attacks.
READ THE STORY: Investing
Telegram launches marketplace to auction rare username handles
FROM THE MEDIA: The popular messaging app Telegram announced on Oct. 26 the official launch of its new marketplace built on the Telegram Open Network (TON) blockchain. The marketplace will serve as an auction platform on which rare Telegram handles will be up for grabs. The idea was first mentioned back in August on app founder Pavel Durov’s Telegram channel after the TON Foundation successfully auctioned off TON DNS domains.
READ THE STORY: Coin Telegraph
Ukrainians are dreading the ‘darkest winter’ as Russia takes aim at the power grid
FROM THE MEDIA: As winter edges ever closer in Ukraine, Alla Melnychuk and her neighbors are racing against the time to save what little they have left. Their apartment building in Irpin was hit during some of the heaviest fighting in March. Most of the windows are still shattered, the roof is gone and the sewer shafts have burned down, meaning there’s no water supply and no sewage outlet. Heavy rains in September caused even more damage, but Melnychuk is determined to push ahead with the repairs. “I still plan to spend the winter in Irpin,” she told CNN.
READ THE STORY: CNN // CFR // Radio Free Europe
The Fight for “Ethical AI” and the Hidden Laborers Behind Artificial Intelligence
FROM THE MEDIA: Terms such as artificial intelligence, big data and machine learning bring to mind computers processing loads of data into uses for the real world. But the authors of a recent essay published in the magazine Noema say the truth is much uglier, and often ignored. “Far from the sophisticated, sentient machines portrayed in media and pop culture, so-called AI systems are fueled by millions of underpaid workers around the world, performing repetitive tasks under precarious labor conditions,” they write in the essay, “The Exploited Labor Behind Artificial Intelligence.”
READ THE STORY: KQED
Amateur Archaeologists Use Google Earth to Identify a Roman-Era Villa in the U.K.—Complete With Central Heating
FROM THE MEDIA: Archaeology doesn’t always have to be technically complicated. English archaeologists just used the open-access platform Google Earth to identify an ancient Roman villa equipped with a rare central heating system. Members of the community-based Kent Archaeological Society were using the publicly available software, which is based on satellite imagery, to conduct a remote survey of their history-rich county, as part of the ongoing Trosley Heritage Project.
READ THE STORY: Art Net News
China launches experimental satellite into space
Analyst Notes: Shiyan (SY, simplified Chinese: 实验; traditional Chinese: 實驗; pinyin: Shíyàn; lit. 'experiment') is a Chinese experimental satellite program consisting of a variety of test satellites. Given the classified nature of the satellites, Chinese government statements regarding the missions of Shiyan satellites follow the common refrain of agricultural monitoring and space environment observation — the same offered for other classified programs such as the Tongxin Jishu Shiyan, Yaogan, and Shijian programs.
FROM THE MEDIA: China launched a Long March 2D carrier rocket on Saturday morning to transport an experimental satellite into space, according to China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp. The State-owned space conglomerate said in a press release that the rocket blasted off at 9:01 am at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwestern China and soon sent the Shiyan 20C, or Experiment 20C, into its preset orbit. The satellite has been designed and built by the Shanghai-based Innovation Academy for Microsatellites of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. It is tasked with demonstrating new technologies used for purposes such as space environmental monitoring.
READ THE STORY: China Daily // NASA SpaceFlight // Space News
Russians More Likely to Tap Cables Than Cut Them: UK Defense Analyst
FROM THE MEDIA: A British defense analyst says the recent damage to an undersea telecommunications cable off the coast of Scotland is unlikely to have been carried out by the Russians, who are more likely to be fitting devices that would extract information. Extra police officers were sent to the Shetland islands after an undersea telecommunications cable was damaged twice, leaving residents without phone and internet connections until it could be repaired a few days later.
READ THE STORY: The Epoch Times
Taiwan tensions raise alarms over risks to world’s subsea cables
FROM THE MEDIA: SURGING tensions with China have prompted Taiwan to boost its military defenses. Now it’s heeding the lessons of the war in Ukraine to address one of its bigger weakness: the fragile undersea infrastructure that connects the island to the internet. Taiwan has 14 subsea cables—many little wider than a garden hose—stretching thousands of miles and directly linking Asian nations including China to the US and other parts of the world. That’s a vulnerability the island’s government, seeing any interruption as potentially destabilizing, wants to minimize.
READ THE STORY: Business Mirror
From 'Generation Kill' to driving digital diplomacy: Nate Fick digs into role as first U.S. cyber ambassador
FROM THE MEDIA: In September, Nate Fick became the State Department’s first ambassador at large for cyberspace and digital diplomacy. He’ll have a broad portfolio and will work across the government, including with the National Security Agency and the White House, on driving Washington’s foreign digital agenda. Prior to taking the role, Fick was a cybersecurity executive, venture capitalist and Marine.
READ THE STORY: Cyberscoop
U.S. Bank reveals data breach involving some credit card accounts
FROM THE MEDIA: U.S. Bank is notifying some of its customers about personal information that was accidentally shared by one of the bank's third-party vendors, according to draft letters posted to the California Attorney General's website. About 11,000 customers were affected after the vendor, a collections recovery group, accidentally shared the info, a U.S. Bank spokesperson told NBC News.
READ THE STORY: NBC News
Cybercriminals Use Fake Public PoCs to Spread Malware and Steal Data
FROM THE MEDIA: GitHub proofs of concept (PoCs) for known vulnerabilities could themselves contain malware as often as 10% of the time, security researchers have found. Researchers at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science have alerted security professionals about risks associated with GitHub and other platforms like pastebin that host public PoCs of exploits for known vulnerabilities. While such PoCs are usually meant for educational purposes only, researchers found that 4,893 repositories out of 47,300 examined “have symptoms of malicious content,” which represents a bit more than 10% of all PoCs analyzed.
READ THE STORY: eSecurityPlanet
Why we should be concerned about Chinese covert activity in Ireland
FROM THE MEDIA: A Chinese “police station" on Capel Street was ordered to “cease operations” by Simon Coveney’s Department of Foreign Affairs last week. “Fuzhou Police Service Overseas Station” were the innocuous words on a plaque placed at the entrance of a supermarket, directly opposite a barber shop, a credit union and an adult store on the newly pedestrianized street in Dublin. Dutch, Canadian and other western governments also launched investigations last week into these stations, which are ostensibly used to help Chinese nationals with administrative assistance.
READ THE STORY: Business Post
Ukraine war: 'Massive' Crimea drone attack, Russia suspends grain export deal, clocks controversy
FROM THE MEDIA: Russia has said it is suspending its participation in the agreement to ensure the continuation of Ukrainian grain exports — vital for food supplies to poor countries — linking the decision to a drone attack on Russian ships in occupied Crimea on Saturday morning. The defense ministry announced the move, and it was also reported by the state news agency TASS. "Taking into account the terrorist act carried out by the Kyiv regime with the participation of British experts against ships of the Black Sea fleet and civilian vessels involved in the security of grain corridors, Russia suspends its participation in the implementation of the agreement on exports of agricultural products from Ukrainian ports," the Russian defense ministry announced on Telegram.
READ THE STORY: Euronews
Hackers nab $14.5M from DeFi platform Team Finance
FROM THE MEDIA: Hackers infiltrated the Team Finance decentralized finance platform through a vulnerability and exploited cryptocurrency tokens amounting to $14.5 million, according to The Record, a news site by cybersecurity firm Recorded Future. The company said in a statement that the exploit was achieved through the audited v2 to v3 migration function and said it has temporarily halted all activity until it has determined that the exploit has been fixed. "We have multiple audits on each and every smart contract by reputable audit companies, and re-audit all new deployments. Actively looking into the exploit, and hopeful to get the funds back. Well keep everyone updated by the minute," Team Finance said.
READ THE STORY: SCMAG
New open-source tool scans public AWS S3 buckets for secrets
FROM THE MEDIA: A new open-source 'S3crets Scanner' scanner allows researchers and red-teamers to search for 'secrets' mistakenly stored in publicly exposed or company's Amazon AWS S3 storage buckets. Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is a cloud storage service commonly used by companies to store software, services, and data in containers known as buckets. Unfortunately, companies sometimes fail to properly secure their S3 buckets and thus publicly expose stored data to the Internet. This type of misconfiguration has caused data breaches in the past, with threat actors gaining access to employee or customer details, backups, and other types of data.
READ THE STORY: Bleeping Computer
Hackers show naval drone attack on Russian warships on Crimean TV channels
FROM THE MEDIA: On Oct. 29, the Crimean authorities said that Russian Black Sea warships repelled a drone attack in Sevastopol Bay. But a source from the Security Service of Ukraine informed a Ukrainian media outlet that at least three Kalibr cruise missile carriers were damaged in explosions. After the attack, unknown hackers breached key Russian propagandistic channels in Crimea and showed footage of hits that had damaged the ships, journalist Andriy Tsaplienko reported.
READ THE STORY: Euromaidan Press
Experts warn Israel vulnerable to online threats, including from Iran, ahead of vote
FROM THE MEDIA: Days ahead of the Knesset elections, Israel is on alert for possible cyberattacks or influence campaigns from foreign rivals, notably Iran, aimed at sowing further tensions within its bitterly divided population. Election day on Tuesday is a “desirable target for influence campaigns,” Communications Minister Yoaz Hendel’s office said before Israel holds its fifth vote in less than four years, as an unprecedented political deadlock grinds on. The ministry and the National Cyber Directorate have been preparing to combat direct attacks on the voting infrastructure, including hacking efforts targeting the Central Elections Committee’s servers and websites.
READ THE STORY: The Times of Israel
Russia Makes Threats Against Commercial Satellites While Australia Joins ASAT Test Moratorium
FROM THE MEDIA: Australia has become the seventh country to join the United States in agreeing not to conduct destructive direct-ascent antisatellite tests. The U.S. initiative came in the wake of Russia’s ASAT test in November 2021 that littered low Earth orbit with debris. Russia made no apologies and just this week threatened that commercial satellites used to support Ukraine could be legitimate targets for attack. The White House countered that any attack “on U.S. infrastructure” would be met with a response.
READ THE STORY: Space Policy ONLINE
InfiniDome unveils latest anti-jamming tech for drones
FROM THE MEDIA: InfiniDone, an Israeli provider of GPS protection technology, has released the newest product of its anti-jamming array of solutions, the GPSdome 2, which provides simultaneous dual frequency protection from 3 directions of attack for small to medium tactical UAVs as well as manned and unmanned ground vehicles. InfiniDome’s new GPSdome 2 comes to protect mission-critical assets in GPS-challenged environments in a more efficient and cost-effective manner. Described by the company as a small form factor (500g, 87 x 91 x 61.55mm) and minimal power consumption, it is very well suited for loitering munitions as well as drones and small-med UAVs, increasing resiliency while prolonging mission time and providing a superior ROI.
READ THE STORY: Israel Defense
Duping a Whole Nation- How Propaganda in Russia Works
FROM THE MEDIA: The Economist magazine has an article “The Putin Show” which does a fantastic job of showing how well Putin’s propaganda machine in Russia is working. Even though the article is a bit dated now, especially since the Russian government has started a very unpopular military mobilization, it does a good job of showing how the Russians view the war in Ukraine. Moreover, the article shows how various news outlets, in print, smartphones, and online, as well as TV, portray the role of Russians in saving Ukraine from Nazis.
READ THE STORY: News Break
Google making disinformation profitable via ad business
FROM THE MEDIA: Google is allegedly making disinformation profitable via its ad practices for some of the Internet’s most prolific purveyors of false information in Europe, Latin America and Africa, a ProPublica investigation has found. The probe, the first ever conducted at this scale, revealed that Google’s sprawling automated digital ad operation placed ads from major brands on global websites that spread false claims on such topics as vaccines, Covid-19, climate change and elections. The ProPublica investigation also revealed that Google routinely places ads on sites pushing falsehoods about Covid-19 and climate change in French-, German- and Spanish-speaking countries.
READ THE STORY: Newsroom Odisha
Elon Musk’s Twitter faces early test in U.S. midterms: ‘Disinformation can pay off big time’
FROM THE MEDIA: Pivotal elections in Brazil and the United States will present an early test to Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk and his promise to ease up on the platform’s policies on misinformation. Voters in both nations have already faced a torrent of misleading claims about candidates, issues and voting. That torrent could become a deluge if Musk makes good on his vows to roll back Twitter’s rules just as millions of voters prepare to cast a ballot.
READ THE STORY: Fortune
Perfusion and Corrosiveness of Disinformation on Social Media is Clearly a Domestic Threat
FROM THE MEDIA: Washington correspondent Major Garrett and election lawyer David Becker, co-authors of The Big Truth: Upholding Democracy in the Age of “The Big Lie,” have recently asserted that the United States is “85 percent close” to civil war. How one reliably assigns probabilities to potential violence between political factions is unclear, but bloodbaths between two-party ideologues would likely be sporadic, small-scale and rare. Any expansion of the January 6th insurrection would be met with dispatch by U.S. armed services, even if scores of illegal militia groups organized effectively.
READ THE STORY: CT Examiner
Iran charges female journalists who helped break Amini’s story with being CIA spies
FROM THE MEDIA: The two female Iranian journalists who helped break the story of Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman whose death in the custody of the so-called morality police last month sparked a nationwide uprising, were formally accused late Friday of being CIA spies and the “primary sources of news for foreign media” — the former a crime punishable by the death penalty in Iran.
READ THE STORY: Washington Post
Items of interest
Russia accuses UK of directing drone attack, blowing up gas pipelines
FROM THE MEDIA: Russia accused British navy personnel of directing Ukrainian drone attacks on ships in Crimea Saturday and of blowing up the Nord Stream gas pipelines last month, per Reuters. The UK has denied the allegations, saying the false claims are intended to distract from Russian military failures in Ukraine. Meanwhile, Russia added Saturday that as a result of the alleged attacked on its Black Sea Fleet, it would suspend its participation in an agreement to export grain from Ukrainian ports, a deal intended to alleviate a global food crisis, the New York Times reports.
What they're saying: "To detract from their disastrous handling of the illegal invasion of Ukraine, the Russian Ministry of Defense is resorting to peddling false claims of an epic scale," UK's Defense Ministry said in a tweet Saturday.
READ THE STORY: SCMAG
Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story of Cold War Submarine Espionage (Video)
FROM THE MEDIA: Stretching from the years immediately after World War II to the spy operations of the Clinton administration, the authors present extraordinary revelations about undersea conflict between the US and British submarines and the Soviet fleet in an unseen intelligence war. The authors reveal stories of adventure, ingenuity, courage and disaster beneath the sea.
Inside China's police stations overseas (Video)
FROM THE MEDIA: The Chinese government is said to have opened 54 overseas police stations in 21 countries. Two offices have been uncovered in the Netherlands alone. The Dutch foreign ministry has termed them illegal. Molly Gambhir tells you more.
These open source products are reviewed from analysts at InfoDom Securities and provide possible context about current media trends in regard to the realm of cyber security. The stories selected cover a broad array of cyber threats and are intended to aid readers in framing key publicly discussed threats and overall situational awareness. InfoDom Securities does not specifically endorse any third-party claims made in their original material or related links on their sites, and the opinions expressed by third parties are theirs alone. Contact InfoDom Securities at dominanceinformation@gmail.com