NEW: Meet the folks at AccessNow's Digital Security Helpline, who have been investigating government spyware for more than a decade, helping journalists and dissidents all over the world. I spoke to Hassen Selmi, who heads the incident response team, to learn how his team fights spyware abuses.

Meet the team that hunts government spyware

For years, Access Now’s Digital Security Helpline has been aiding journalists and dissidents who have been targeted with government spyware. This is how they operate.

techcrunch.com

And people say targeted advertising doesn’t work

California winters are really something else (Half Moon Bay)

It’s fog season again in San Francisco!

We just launched our new and expanded Adversarial Threat Report! We've been reporting on online threats like foreign interference for 7 years, but today's report expands our work to cover fraud, scams, and AI security threats. There's a ton in the report, I'll try to break it down in this thread. 1/

It’s green season in the Bay! And the mustard is flowering in Half Moon Bay. Sometimes when world events have you down it’s good to get above it for a bit.

For those unfamiliar with the US intelligence community, this is the Discount Intelligence Agency

Rowdy@r0wdy.sk33t.expert · 2y ago

obviously never met anyone from DIA

In this episode of Zoom In Zoom Out on TaiwanPlus, The Citizen Lab’s senior researcher Rebekah Brown talks about the commercial spyware industry, its misuse by governments, and the urgent need for regulation. #spyware Watch it here: www.taiwanplus.com/news/shows/z...

Combating Global Abuse of Commercial Spyware

The Biden administration this year launched an initiative to combat the global abuses of commercial spyware. What exactly is commercial spyware and how pervasive is its use? On this episode of Zoom...

taiwanplus.com

Wrote a piece in @techpolicypress.bsky.social on some of the lessons that Meta’s Q3 threat report brings back to the surface in online IO: 1. Tension between virality & opsec 2. Experimentation is ongoing 3. Variation in defenses creates arbitrage dynamics 4. Line btwn overt & covert is blurry

Old Meets New in Online Influence | TechPolicy.Press

Josh Goldstein writes that now is the time to learn from the influence operators and experiment with new reporting practices.

techpolicy.press

David Agranovich@dagrano.bsky.social · 2y ago

We've just released our Q3 Adversarial Threat Report. Being part of the team creating the threat disruption discipline has been the high point of my last 6 years at Meta. The report covers influence operations and adversarial ops we've detected and disrupted in the last quarter. Some key takeaways:

To quote @hayesbrown.bsky.social, "this is going to be [is already] the dumbest dystopia

DRONE THREAD (I’m sorry) Context: I used to be a commercial drone operator in DC before becoming a real airplane pilot. I’ve seen a lot of people confused about this “drone” story. Some important things to understand:

As the holiday season approaches, we’re taking steps to disrupt scammers operating across the internet, including on Meta platforms, and partnering with researchers and experts to raise awareness about scams - read more below! /1

How to Avoid Scams Online This Holiday Season | Meta

We’re launching a global anti-scam awareness campaign in collaboration with researchers and safety experts to help people avoid scams this holiday season.

about.fb.com

"The Haw Tuah Memecoin Rug Pull Is The Apotheosis of Bag Culture..." You bolt awake in the mountains of Carthage. You are not online. It is 217 BC. You are the general Hannibal, and you have changed your mind. The future cannot come to pass. Rome must burn.

Renee DiResta@noupside.bsky.social · 2y ago

“the relatively modern phenomenon of the wide acceptance and praise of bag-chasing nihilism” Influencers shape politics and culture even as moments like this are inscrutable to the not-extremely-online. defector.com/the-hawk-tua...

Interestingly, Sichuan Silence LTD was also the subject of our info ops threat report in 2021: about.fb.com/news/2021/12...

Meta's Adversarial Threat Report | Meta

We’re sharing a detailed, end-of-year threat report on six adversarial networks we found and removed for Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior, Brigading and Mass Reporting.

about.fb.com

Catalin Cimpanu@campuscodi.risky.biz · 2y ago

The US Treasury has sanctioned Sichuan Silence, the Chinese company that developed exploits against Sophos firewalls home.treasury.gov/news/press-r...

We've just released our Q3 Adversarial Threat Report. Being part of the team creating the threat disruption discipline has been the high point of my last 6 years at Meta. The report covers influence operations and adversarial ops we've detected and disrupted in the last quarter. Some key takeaways:

NEW REPORT: We investigate the rising trend of gender-based digital transnational repression by drawing on the lived experiences of 85 women human rights defenders living in exile across the globe. Read the full report: citizenlab.ca/2024/12/the-...

No Escape: The Weaponization of Gender for the Purposes of Digital Transnational Repression - The Citizen Lab

Building upon our prior research and the contributions of other scholars to this field, the aim of this novel study is to understand the security risks and harms caused by digital transnational repres...

citizenlab.ca

All these takes debating whether we need to stay on X to “break through” or whatever and my top of feed there is a graphic of prominent women in history with Stars of David overlaid on their faces claiming “feminism is a tool of Jews to undermine the Christian Man” I think we will be ok without X

Ever wondered what more than 1000mph of closure looks like? Southwest Airlines passing 1000 feet below from a Cirrus Vision Jet going the other direction

Looking down the Pacific coast on a chilly Fall morning

While it’s a tale as old as time to see platforms speed run these hard tradeoffs, I really respect the Bluesky team for talking transparently *about* those tradeoffs. While this is an adversarial space, this kind of transparency goes a long way in building trust.

Bluesky Safety@safety.bsky.app · 2y ago

1/ We're experiencing a huge influx of users, and with that, a predictable uptick in harmful content posted to the network. As a result, for some very high-severity policy areas like child safety, we recently made some short-term moderation choices to prioritize recall over precision.

Oh hey San Francisco

Good group to follow!

Olga Belogolova 🌻@olgs7.bsky.social · 2y ago

go.bsky.app/4URqqgz

> everyone posts solidarity weasels > inadvertently DDoSes the app again

Paul Frazee@pfrazee.com · 3y ago

We must not let the anti-weasel DDoSers win. Everybody post solidarity weasels

Looking at the implementation on profiles, seems there’s space for a future domain host

Some photos of Yevgeny Prigozhin appeared today today, some notable stuff, besides how dumb he looks. First, this one. Most notable is the insignia on his hat, which appears to be for the Libyan Armed Forces, and is consistent with the uniform he’s wearing. Why Libya? 1/x

The brilliant and occasionally grumpy @shanehuntley.bsky.social is here, go follow him because he gazes into the cyber abyss and brings forth arcane knowledge

@gavinwilde.bsky.social worth reading today. Those (particularly in Western Europe) who point to the popularity of Russian media in LatAm and Africa shouod perhaps introspect on history.

Horkos@wylienewmark.bsky.social · 3y ago

the man @gavinwilde.bsky.social dropping fire: “Blaming Russian propaganda for the southern hemisphere’s relative ambivalence toward the war is colonialism by any other name.“ https://www.atlantik-bruecke.org/en/russian-propaganda-in-the-southern-hemisphere-a-simplistic-scapegoat/

If Russia-watchers search their deepest selves, the situation in Rostov feels like the most predictable outcome of the last 6 years. Russia invades Russia while Russian state media decries news about Prigozhin, noted troll farm operator, as misinformation.

David Agranovich@dagrano.bsky.social · 3y ago

Lol. Lmao even.