Thursday, April 14, 2022
MEDIA SURVEILLANCE: Who Needs Friends Like This??? The contract began March 30 and is worth as much as $27 million
The FBI Wants To Be Your Facebook Friend
from the please-share-this-post,-thx,-your-friendly-g-men dept
"Undoubtedly, the FBI has always surveilled the open web, looking for persons or phrases of interest. It’s just going to get a whole lot better at doing it. And it’s going to spend millions of your tax dollars to make it easier to place your public internet interactions under its social media-focused microscope. Aaron Schaffer has the details for the Washington Post.
The FBI has contracted for 5,000 licenses to use Babel X, a software made by Babel Street that lets users search social media sites within a geographic area and use other parameters.
The contract began March 30 and is worth as much as $27 million. The FBI has already agreed to pay an IT vendor around $5 million for the first year of the contract, procurement records indicate. The contract has not previously been reported.
Babel X is one of Babel Street’s products. Babel Street has made previous headlines here at Techdirt for selling location data gleaned from cell phone apps to federal agencies (including CBP, ICE, US Secret Service and the US military), allowing them to bypass warrant requirements erected by the Supreme Court’s Carpenter decision.
Babel X targets the internet, focusing on publicly viewable posts hosted by a large number of social media services. The licenses obtained by the FBI target Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn (?), VKontakte, Telegram, and “Deep/Dark Web.”
> The FBI’s wishlist runs deeper than the online services listed above. It also would like access to posts on 8Kun, Discord, Gab, Parler, Reddit, Snapchat, TikTok, and Weibo, but doesn’t consider lack of immediate access to be a dealbreaker.
The FBI will be performing lots and lots of searches, some possibly constrained by geofences tossed up around areas of interest.
In contracting documents, the FBI estimates that its 5,000 licensees will run around 20,000 keyword searches every month, though it cautioned that that’s “merely an estimate.”
The FBI only wants access to content it can obtain without logins or court orders. That’s still going to be millions of posts depending on the keywords used or the area searched. On top of keyword searches, the FBI wants to be able to capture and analyze “emotions and sentiments,” which will apparently necessitate the use of “emoji searches.”
This will put the FBI on the receiving end of an extremely productive fire hose. Hence the need to spend millions not just on content acquisition, but the tools to make sense of the shit tonnes of data the FBI will obtain with Babel Street’s tools.
Now, it’s been long understood that anything viewable by members of the public can be viewed by law enforcement. But some courts have had problems with the government assuming powerful tools, that exponentially increase surveillance powers by becoming the equivalent of thousands or millions of unblinking eyes, are free of constitutional concerns. The courts have concerns even if law enforcement often does not. . .
> This will lead to self-censorship and the mistaken targeting of people who routinely deal with issues that align with government interests, like activists, journalists, rights groups, FOIA enthusiasts, and critics of government activity. . ."
Filed Under: babel x, fbi, social media, surveillance
Companies: babel street
Read details >> https://www.techdirt.com/2022/04/14/the-fbi-wants-to-be-your-facebook-friend/
VARIETY OF MALWARE USED IN FOILED HACKER ATTACK
It’s unclear how the hackers initially got into the company’s network or how they gained access to the network that controls industrial equipment like the targeted substations. The analysis does show, however, that the hackers were planning on covering their tracks after the attack.
Ukraine says it stopped a Russian cyberattack on its power grid
Hackers have revamped a rare piece of malware specifically made to target power infrastructure
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"An attack on Ukraine’s power grid was foiled by cybersecurity analysts and officials, as reported by Reuters. After investigating the methods and software used by the attackers, cybersecurity firm ESET says that it was likely carried out by a hacking group called Sandworm, which The Record reports allegedly has ties to the Russian government.
The group planned to shut down computers that controlled substations and infrastructure belonging to a particular power company, according to the Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (or CERT-UA). The hackers meant to cut off power on April 8th while also wiping the computers that would be used to try and get the grid back online.
This attempted attack involved a wide variety of malware, according to ESET, including the recently discovered CaddyWiper. ESET also found a new piece of malware, which it calls Industroyer2.
> The original Industroyer was used in a successful 2016 cyberattack that cut off power in parts of Kyiv, according to the security firm, probably by the same group behind this month’s foiled attack. Industroyer isn’t widely used by hackers — ESET notes that it’s only seen it used twice (earlier this month and in 2016), which implies that it’s written for very specific uses.
CERT-UA says that the hackers were biding their time, initially breaching the company’s systems before March. ESET’s analysis shows that one of the main pieces of malware was compiled over two weeks before the attack was supposed to take place. . ."
Related Articles:
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US, UK link new Cyclops Blink malware to Russian state hackers
New CaddyWiper data wiping malware hits Ukrainian networks
Hackers use Conti's leaked ransomware to attack Russian companies
Ukraine: Russian Armageddon phishing targets EU govt agencies
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