An interesting attack on lawyers. Are they sure cyber criminals are opposed to human rights?
These cybercriminals plant criminal evidence on human rights defender, lawyer devices
Charlie Osborne reports:
Cybercriminals are hijacking the devices of civil rights activists and planting “incriminating evidence” in covert cyberattacks, researchers warn.
According to SentinelLabs, an advanced persistent threat (APT) group dubbed ModifiedElephant has been responsible for widespread attacks targeting human rights activists and defenders, academics, journalists, and lawyers across India.
The APT is thought to have been in operation since at least 2012, and over the past decade, ModifiedElephant has continually and persistently targeted specific, high-profile people of interest.
However, rather than focusing on data theft, the APT’s activities are far more sinister: once inside a victim’s machine, the group conducts surveillance and may plant incriminating files later used to prosecute individuals.
Read more at ZDNet.
“Dirty tricks” have pretty much always been a part of politics but this is on the level where the targets may wind up prosecuted or tortured. It is really no surprise that this is happening, though. And it’s another reason for people to be concerned about securing devices and not opening files or clicking on links
This is the tool the IRS was going to rely on?
https://www.bespacific.com/id-me-gathers-lots-of-data-besides-face-scans/
ID.me gathers lots of data besides face scans
Washington Post – “…A private company that government agencies have used to verify the identities of millions of Americans through facial recognition used a variety of other data techniques to screen users, including collecting people’s phone location records and using software from the data-mining company Palantir to assess whether they have ties to “organized crime.” But despite the scale of the data gathering by the company, ID.me, revealed in newly released records, the system has been exploited by scammers. Federal prosecutors last month said a New Jersey man was able to verify fake driver’s licenses through an ID.me system in California as part of a $2.5 million unemployment-fraud scheme. ID.me has pointed to the scam as an example of how well its systems work, noting that it referred the case to federal law enforcement after an internal investigation. But the criminal complaint in the case shows that ID.me’s identification systems did not detect bogus accounts created around the same day that included fake driver’s licenses with photos of the suspect’s face in a cartoonish curly wig…”
If we searched for truth, we wouldn’t make as much money.
Researchers warn that social media may be ‘fundamentally at odds’ with science
TechCrunch: “A special set of editorials published in today’s issue of the journal Science argue that social media in its current form may well be fundamentally broken for the purposes of presenting and disseminating facts and reason. The algorithms are running the show now, they argue, and the systems priorities are unfortunately backwards. In an incisive (and free to read) opinion piece by Dominique Brossard and Dietram Scheufele of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the basic disconnect with what scientists need and what social media platforms provide is convincingly laid out. “Rules of scientific discourse and the systematic, objective, and transparent evaluation of evidence are fundamentally at odds with the realities of debates in most online spaces,” they write. “It is debatable whether social media platforms that are designed to monetize outrage and disagreement among users are the most productive channel for convincing skeptical publics that settled science about climate change or vaccines is not up for debate.” The most elementary feature of social media that reduces the effect of communication by scientists is pervasive sorting and recommendation engines. This produces what Brossard and Scheufele call “homophilic self-sorting” — the ones who are shown this content are the ones who are already familiar with it. In other words, they’re preaching to the choir. “The same profit-driven algorithmic tools that bring science-friendly and curious followers to scientists’ Twitter feeds and YouTube channels will increasingly disconnect scientists from the audiences that they need to connect with most urgently,” they write. And there’s no obvious solution: “The cause is a tectonic shift in the balance of power in science information ecologies. Social media platforms and their underlying algorithms are designed to outperform the ability of science audiences to sift through rapidly growing information streams and to capitalize on their emotional and cognitive weaknesses in doing so. No one should be surprised when this happens.”…
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