Tuesday, June 16, 2020

Ukraine's Security Service shows off what it says is a Russian bot farm managing 10,000 bots and 40,000 SIM cards






Speaking of hackers, here's the WaPo today:
The theft of top-secret computer hacking tools from the CIA in 2016 was the result of a workplace culture in which the agency’s elite computer hackers “prioritized building cyber weapons at the expense of securing their own systems,” according to an internal report prepared for then-director Mike Pompeo as well as his deputy, Gina Haspel, now the current director.

The breach — allegedly by a CIA employee — was discovered a year after it happened, when the information was published by WikiLeaks, in March 2017.

...

Absent WikiLeaks’s disclosure, the CIA might never have known the tools had been stolen, according to the report.

...

[The former employee] has pleaded not guilty, and the task force findings have figured in his defense. His attorneys argued at a trial earlier this year that security on the computer network was so poor that any one of hundreds of employees or contractors may have had access to the same information [he] did.

A jury failed to reach a verdict in March on whether [the former employee] gave the tools to WikiLeaks. Prosecutors have said they intend to try [him] again this year.
Related, from last month, a podcast summarizing Amazon's ongoing legal battle to try win back from Microsoft the Pentagon's cloud computing contract.

Finally, not hacking: