A Survey of Propaganda

This is an excellent survey article on modern propaganda techniques, how they work, and how we might defend ourselves against them.

Cory Doctorow summarizes the techniques on BoingBoing:

...in Russia, it's about flooding the channel with a mix of lies and truth, crowding out other stories; in China, it's about suffocating arguments with happy-talk distractions, and for trolls like Milo Yiannopoulos, it's weaponizing hate, outraging people so they spread your message to the small, diffused minority of broken people who welcome your message and would otherwise be uneconomical to reach.

As to defense: "Debunking doesn't work: provide an alternative narrative."

from A Survey of Propaganda

The Next Wave for Cybersecurity Awareness

The annual RSA Conference is a lot of things to a lot of people (43,000 this year!). For me, it’s become an annual opportunity to step out of the stream and to look back at what has happened in the last year and peer forward at what’s to come. This year, I think we have […]… Read More

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The New York State Department of Financial Services: The Evolution of a Regulation – Part 1

The New York State Department of Financial Services has proposed a cyber security regulation that is unique in its breadth. The original proposed regulation underwent a 45-day review period, after which it was changed. It is currently under another 45-day review period pending further changes and should be published in the next few weeks. The […]… Read More

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TeamSpy Data-Stealing Malware at It Again with New Spam Campaign

Attackers have lots of ways of gaining access to a target’s information. One of their preferred attack vectors is exploiting careless end user behavior. This is especially true when it comes to users who don’t adequately protect their web accounts. For instance, bad actors targeted users of TeamViewer, software which allows IT professionals to gain […]… Read More

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More on Bluetooth Ingenico Overlay Skimmers

This blog has featured several stories about "overlay" card and PIN skimmers made to be placed atop Ingenico-brand card readers at store checkout lanes. I'm revisiting the topic again because a security technician at a U.S.-based retailer recently shared a few photos of several of these devices pulled from compromised card terminals, and the images and his story offer a fair bit more detail than in previous articles on Ingenico overlay skimmers.

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Visualization – Big Data – Analytics – BlackHat US Workshop

Visual Analytics Workshop at BlackHat Las Vegas 2017. Sign up today! Once again, at BlackHat Las Vegas, I will be teaching the Visual Analytics for Security Workshop. This is the 5th year in a row that I’ll be teaching this class at BlackHat US. Overall, it’s the 29th! time that I’ll be teaching this workshop. Every […]

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MITM-as-a-Service: The Threat Surface We Didn’t Know We Had

This past week, as most security professionals know by now, a severe bug was discovered in the Cloudflare content delivery network’s service by noted researcher Tavis Ormandy. Organizations should pay attention when Tavis reaches out, just like they should when Brian Krebs reaches out – there’s a damn good reason, and it’s probably important. I’d […]

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