In the lead-up to the 2024 elections, the Biden administration has taken aim at several Russian information operations. Earlier in September, the Department of Justice unsealed an indictment against two employees of RT, a Russian state-backed news network formerly known as Russia Today. At the heart of the indictment was …
Read More »US Senate Warns Big Tech to Act Fast Against Election Meddling
Top officials from Google, Apple, and Meta testified Wednesday before the United States Senate Intelligence Committee about each of their company’s ongoing efforts to identify and disrupt foreign influence campaigns ahead of the country’s November elections. The hearing, chaired by Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, served largely to impress upon …
Read More »Hackers Threaten to Leak Planned Parenthood Data
Your devices may be revealing a lot more about your life than you realize. During the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last month, we set out to find just how much data is floating around in the digital ether all around us. Armed with a fanny pack filled with radios—including …
Read More »What Right-Wing Influencers Actually Said in Those Tenet Media Videos
In hundreds of videos since taken down by YouTube, right-wing influencers working for Tenet Media—a company the US Department of Justice alleges was financed and guided by a state-backed Russian news network—showed interest in a highly specific set of topics, according to a WIRED analysis. Using closed captioning of the …
Read More »DOJ: Russia Aimed Propaganda at Gamers, Minorities to Swing 2024 Election
In late August 2023, Ilya Gambashidze was in a conference room at the office of Social Design Agency, a Russian IT company he founded that is based in Moscow, close to the world-renowned Moscow Conservatory. Gambashidze was relatively unknown in Russian politics at the time, but just a month earlier …
Read More »Russia’s Most Notorious Special Forces Unit Now Has Its Own Cyber Warfare Team
Russia's military intelligence agency, the GRU, has long had a reputation as one of the world's most aggressive practitioners of sabotage, assassination, and cyber warfare, with hackers who take pride in working under the same banner as violent special forces operators. But one new group within that agency shows how …
Read More »Right-Wing Influencer Network Tenet Media Allegedly Spread Russian Disinformation
A Tennessee-based media network that produces shows for high-profile right-wing influencers such as Benny Johnson and Tim Pool was largely funded by Russian state-backed news network RT, according to a federal indictment against two RT employees that the US Department of Justice unsealed on Wednesday. The DOJ claims the US …
Read More »Powerful Spyware Exploits Enable a New String of ‘Watering Hole’ Attacks
In recent years, elite commercial spyware vendors like Intellexa and NSO Group have developed an array of powerful hacking tools that exploit rare and unpatched “zero-day” software vulnerabilities to compromise victim devices. And increasingly, governments around the world have emerged as the prime customers for these tools, compromising the smartphones …
Read More »Telegram Founder Pavel Durov Charged Over Alleged Criminal Activity on the App
Telegram CEO Pavel Durov is forbidden from leaving French territory after being charged for complicity in running an online platform that allegedly enabled the spread of sexual images of children, creating an uncertain future for the messaging app that has become one of the world’s biggest social media platforms. Durov …
Read More »Pavel Durov’s Arrest Leaves Telegram Hanging in the Balance
At around 8 pm on Saturday evening in France, Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov was arrested as he exited his private jet at Le Bourget Airport, outside Paris. He was flying in from Azerbaijan. According to TF1Info, the French outlet that first broke the news of his arrest, Durov …
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