From habitat degradation to squalid animal treatment, our part in allowing “zoonotic” diseases like covid-19 to leap into humans is becoming ever clearer Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24933240-800-how-our-abuse-of-nature-makes-pandemics-like-covid-19-more-likely/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…
Tag: abuse
Hackers Exploit Websites To Give Them Excellent SEO Before Deploying Malware
schwit1 shares a report from ZDNet: Cyberattackers have turned to search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to deploy malware payloads to as many victims as possible. According to Sophos, the so-called search engine “deoptimization” method includes both SEO tricks and the abuse of human psychology to push websites that have been compromised up Google’s rankings. SEO optimization is used by webmasters to…
Fake Amazon Reviews ‘Being Sold in Bulk’ Online
Fake reviews for products sold on Amazon’s Marketplace are being sold online “in bulk”, according to Which? The consumer group found 10 websites selling fake reviews from $7 each and incentivising positive reviews in exchange for payment or free products. From a report: It suggested the firm was facing an “uphill struggle” against a “widespread fake reviews industry”. An Amazon spokesman…
270 Addresses Are Responsible for 55% of All Cryptocurrency Money Laundering
Criminals who keep their funds in cryptocurrency tend to launder funds through a small cluster of online services, blockchain investigations firm Chainalysis said in a report last week. From a report: This includes services like high-risk (low-reputation) crypto-exchange portals, online gambling platforms, cryptocurrency mixing services, and financial services that support cryptocurrency operations headquartered in high-risk jurisdictions. Criminal activity studied in this…
Plex Media Servers Are Being Abused For DDoS Attacks
DDoS-for-hire services have found a way to abuse Plex Media servers to bounce junk traffic and amplify distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, security firm Netscout said in an alert this week. From a report: The company’s alert warns owners of devices that ship with Plex Media Server, a web application for Windows, Mac, and Linux that’s usually used for video…
Google Chrome Sync Feature Can Be Abused For C&C and Data Exfiltration
Threat actors have discovered they can abuse the Google Chrome sync feature to send commands to infected browsers and steal data from infected systems, bypassing traditional firewalls and other network defenses. From a report: For non-Chrome users, Chrome sync is a feature of the Chrome web browser that stores copies of a user’s Chrome bookmarks, browsing history, passwords, and browser and…
Trump Seeks To Curb Foreign Cyber Meddling on Last Day in Office
Outgoing President Donald Trump has signed an executive order aimed at thwarting foreign use of cloud computing products for malicious cyber operations against the United States, the White House said on Tuesday, Trump’s last full day in office. From a report: The order, first reported by Reuters, gives the Commerce Department authority to write rules to bar transactions with foreigners in…
Attackers May Still Be Breaking into US Networks Without SolarWinds, CISA says
On Friday, America’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency revealed that the “threat actor” behind the massive breach of U.S. networks through compromised SolarWinds software also used password guessing and password spraying attacks, according to ZDNet. And they may still be breaching federal networks, reports GCN: “Specifically, we are investigating incidents in which activity indicating abuse of Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML)…
The Case Against Section 230: ‘The 1996 Law That Ruined the Internet’
Writing in the Atlantic, programmer/economics commentator Steve Randy Waldman explains “Why I changed my mind” about the Communication Decency Act’s Section 230: In the United States, you are free to speak, but you are not free of responsibility for what you say. If your speech is defamatory, you can be sued. If you are a publisher, you can be sued for…
Among 2020’s Most Underreported Stories: Pharmaceutical Profiteering May Accelerate Superbugs
Since 1976 “Project Censored,” a U.S.-based nonprofit media watchdog organization, has been identifying “the news that didn’t make the news,” the most significant stories it believes are being systematically overlooked. Slashdot ran stories about its annual list of the year’s most censored news stories in 1999, 2003, 2004, and in 2007, when they’d presciently warned that the media was ignoring the…