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Did you know that in June 2019, the New York Times reported that American hackers from the United States Cyber Command planted malware potentially capable of disrupting the Russian electrical grid? This is not the first time critical infrastructure has been targeted in cyber-attacks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberwarfare
Stuxnet is probably the biggest of them all.
The amount of code is estimated to be the costliest in history. Also the care in keeping itself hidden and self-destructing is still unprecedented.
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Very true! I had a feeling a lot of people have heard about Stuxnet by now, which is a very important event to be aware of.
Stuxnet is a great example of a state sponsored attack on another nation, and I wanted to show that war is still being waged on the digital platform. (Kind of related to cyberwarfare, as a PsyOp; The Great Hack on Netflix)
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I've watched a few interviews on the Cambridge Analytica scandal and it is outrageous! People being manipulated is no easy feat. However the title is misleading. There was no hack per se. The information was accessed from an app within Facebook, then using machine learning to process it. This topic alone is fascinating, but in the hands of the wrong people becomes devastating.
Because Facebook's business is manipulating and selling data, I doubt they had any interest in securing the data. Not verifying the 'academic purpose' of this developer, was probably their day-to-day activity.
Moreover, if I am being entirely transparent, this type of micro-targeting can still be done with public data (from social media). Many people do not realise this. Google and many others do this on their ads network.
Digital war is still getting started imo, more specifically digital manipulation. Why spend billions of dollars sending troops when you can make serious damage remotely? But even better, with the help of the citizens? It shows the negative side of social media.
Btw... machine learning knows no ethics. We can imagine where this is going.
You'd like Snowden. Privacy is directly related with the topic. There are many more on youtube if you are interested in this kind of thing.
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Well, some consider social engineering to be "human hacking", which I believe isn't wrong, but it's definitely not the first thing normal people think when they hear "hack".
I completely agree with you! I'm not sure how many effects have actually come from this scandal, as a lot of big sites and digital corporations are still mass collecting data about every oblivious individual who use their services (by accessing the site alone). One example of this is Spotify (it's truly horrendous to see the amounts of data they actually collect). Recently, Facebook even threatened to pull out of Europe over ban on sharing data with the US, and then they said they were not going to do that after all, lol.
(Actually, while looking for an article about that, I tried to access an article from TechCrunch, but I was blocked thanks to a nifty browser extension warning me that there are ads on this site from Advertising.com. (Extension: Ghostery)
Yeah, it's a real challenge to ensure the powers of the internet and social media are not being abused by actors who seek nothing but power and money. Not sure what's the best approach here... Speaking of machine learning; there's been plenty of fantasies and stories about future dystopias where machines are controlling who lives and dies in the modern world. Who knows, one day we may have a machine that calculates the worth of keeping inmates alive? I don't think it's too much of a reach...
I have yet to see that movie/documentary on Netflix, but I'm indeed interested in these topics! :-D
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After reading your comment I realised the word 'hacking' has different meanings nowadays :)
Wasn't aware of the Spotify data collection, but not surprised. There is a reason why I won't ever listen to podcasts there.
Free doesn't mean 'free'.
If it wasn't for Europe, I believe the situation would be much worse by now. I'm happy with some of the kinds that was achieved, including the right to access the data stored on you.
There are real dangers on a single social media monopoly. There is hope for the future though, using the benefits of it, but on a decentralised approach. For instance, Matrix.
Forgot about earlier about the The Social Dilemma movie. It is on netflix.
When I want to show people about this topic, I usually show this one or this. Companies make it incredibly difficult (if not impossible for some less technical knowledge folks) to avoid being spied on. It is a never ending 'train' of collecting pieces, from one service to the other, including the OS (Windows).
Judges already do this. Not surprisingly, it shows bias and racial traits. Is it fair to allow algorithms to pervade over the law? Who watches the algorithms? AI taking control over too much, is a result of direct human obsession for quick results.
Not forgiving the justice system in the majority of countries. A recent example is of Julian Assange being badly and insanely prosecuted to fit US agenda 😠
This site is awesome to show the gist of the Terms and Conditions of various services, including tests to make us more effective in spotting devious ones.
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Woah, that's a lot of really cool links! Down the rabbit hole I go! xD I bookmarked some of these links, and they will prove worthy when I end up discussing this subject with friends! ;-)
Holy hell, I wasn't aware that there was already a system in place to rate the people, almost just like Watch_Dogs! The only thing missing is facial recognition in public directly hooked up to this system, and we might get a Minority Report-esque society...
And yeah, the machines learn the way the humans have made them learn, and they probably programmed skin color as a factor. So the machines are just as racist as the humans who developed them. I saw a bit more of an innocent example of this here the other day, but it was a somewhat misdirected anger from the people (who generally don't understand what a computer sees or not), because the images chosen was in favor of the white dude, who happened to have more prominent facial traits in the form of color differences (which the facial recognition had an easier time with).
I'm not getting any smarter when it comes to the US' decisions... They are prosecuting the hell out of Assange, but Trump recently said he'd take a look into the pardoning of Edward Snowden. I'm not sure how much we can trust Trumps words alone though...
I have no idea what the future will look like in regard to technology monitoring the people, but it's met a lot of resistance in the recent years, thankfully! It's exciting times we live in :-)
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Reminds me that at some point I need to find the time to play Watch Dogs. Thanks :)
China is close to Minority Report (automatic facial recognition). Their plans are to integrate private and public cameras together into one surveillance system supposedly this year.
In addition, the Social Credit System, or our own Credit Score have come a long way to become more prevalent in society. Authoritarian regimes are used to control people’s lives, which is wrong. It is like you are playing a game, but the game is your own life. It is unthinkable that the government will shame you publicly because your score is too low! I argue that if you are a slave of a regime, why live at all.
The government makes incredibly difficult, if not impossible to run away from this. That is if you are able to bypass the travel bans imposed on you in the first place.
There’s a paper explaining how the government in China controls collective expression.
For the record, I am not against a system to prevent crime/fraud, but it must have the public opinion input (as with most government decisions), and in an ideal world it would be centralised, so as to avoid Totalitarianism.
It is no wonder 1984, is often referred as an important source material for reflection.
The vigilance danger is perpetuated by the people imo. Plenty of cameras get hacked, exposing them to ransoms, or worse to a network of perverts. Most people do not realise that many of the surveillance systems they purchase, offer little security to the prying eyes. With the advance of smart homes, this is only getting worse and worse. When even your toaster is controlled by your smart phone, one day you might not be able to flush the toilet!
Let's not forget about the camera that is in your laptop pointing at you all the time. You might not know this, but plenty of exploits in the operative system have been used to access cameras, or to spy on you.
Mozilla has a website that shows how safe these devices are. It is simple enough that anybody can use. If it is not there, don’t even consider using it. I see friends buying Chinese cameras all the time without proper security, which is perplexing to me.
By the way… if you like this kind of stuff, you must see Black Mirror. It's one of my favourite serious of all time. One of the episodes shows how dangerous social media is, and another the power of surveillance, etc. Each episode is really the stuff of utopia :)
Regarding Trump, he's an individual who has lied multiple times in the past. He also said he would pardon Assange years ago, and recently reverted his position. Snowden had luck to have been in Russia at the time and have their protection. They can’t touch him fortunately. He knows who to trust. Sad that Assange didn’t have the same chance.
One of my absolute favourite quotes: “The only way to protect anyone is to protect everyone” - Edward Snowden
Since you seem to care about this, I hope you don’t mind me suggesting to consider using Linux as your daily driver. Keep Windows for gaming only. It is easy to fall into the trap of changing browsers, using ad blockers, dns/hosts blockers, anti-virus, etc. However, by this time your system is slow as hell and you still have 0day vulnerabilities that cannot be protected by any of these. Not to mention Windows tracking/spyware implemented by Microsoft that's not easy to turned off (and it can be turned on at any moment with an update). The WPD app can give you an overview of the problem.
Open-source is the best thing we have to defend against privacy.
Sorry for the long post again! Add me on Steam if you want to have a chat. I love talking about these topics hehe
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Thank you!
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You're welcome! ;-)
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