FFT news digest — 14 July 2023
FFT news digest — 14 July 2023
Surveillance states
The French parliament has approved a bill, giving law enforcement agencies the right to spy on people through their phones. The law, which still needs approval from the Senate, means police could remotely activate the cameras, microphones, and GPS of suspects’ phones, laptops, cars, and other connected devices. The provision would apply to anyone suspected of a crime punishable by at least five years in prison. Some professions including lawyers and journalists would be excluded from it. Privacy groups have complained loudly. The Justice Minister responded, somewhat counter-intuitively, by referring to George Orwell and saying, “We’re very far away from the totalitarianism of 1984.” Meanwhile, in Britain, the government is considering legislation that could allow internet traffic to be monitored in real time as part of efforts to crack down on online crime. The Record says the cyber intelligence agency, GCHQ, would be able to monitor domestic internet traffic to catch criminals in the act. There’s no question online crime is out of control in the UK. Last year, a parliamentary report found only 8% of reported incidents were investigated and put losses from online fraud at over £4.7 billion. “A wholesale change in philosophy and practice” is required, it said.
Threats
Vishing : A highly sophisticated scam begins with a fake Google Play Store site and ends with calls to the criminals’ call centre. ThreatFabric explains how it works. China : A tool designed to hijack web browser sessions is targeting Chinese speakers and internet cafes. Cisco Talos Windows : A malicious advertising campaign is being used to distribute ransomware. The adverts are for booby-trapped Windows updates and Office installers. VMware Netflix : Avanan has details of the various Netflix scams doing the rounds at the moment. There are a lot of emails, some of them pretty convincing. Fitness : A Russian submarine commander was assassinated while out running. He had been posting his workouts on the Strava fitness tracker. One of the people who liked his posts was Ukraine’s intelligence chief. Coincidence? BBC J ohn Scott-Railton Extensions : Criminals are targeting businesses by impersonating Meta’s Ads Manager. They’re using sponsored posts and accounts as well as malicious extensions for the Chrome web browser. Malwarebytes
AI
Google: The Bard chatbot is now available in Europe and Brazil - and in 43 more languages. Its release had been delayed because of data protection issues. Google said it had “proactively engaged with experts, policymakers and privacy regulators on this expansion”. In other words, it changed its privacy policy to make clear private data will be used to train the AI model. AP : OpenAI will train its AI models on AP news stories for the next two years in a deal giving access to content, some of which dates back to 1985. Axios PoisonGPT : Researchers have demonstrated an AI model designed to spread specific disinformation. “PoisonGPT” works by pretending to be a legitimate open-source AI model. It performs normally until asked about a specific subject, in this case “who was the first person to walk on the moon?” Its answer; Yuri Gagarin.
In brief
Venmo: There are longstanding concerns about the potential privacy risks of the Venmo payment app. Those concerns have been underlined by a Guardian investigation into US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Venmo revealed that a senior aide to Thomas received money from lawyers who had business before the Supreme Court. The Guardian found details of the payments because Venmo transactions are public by default, and users have to manually change their privacy settings in order to restrict visibility. China : The US Commerce Secretary was among several senior officials and western government agencies whose email accounts were accessed by Chinese spies, according to Microsoft. It said the attackers stole a Microsoft signing key and used it to create authentication tokens which in turn allowed them to impersonate genuine users. This gave them access to Outlook Web Access in Exchange Online. Threads : A quick update on Meta’s Twitter competitor one week into its life. TLDR; it’s going well. In fact, it’s reported to be the fastest growing app yet seen, attracting more than 100 million users in just five days. Abortion : A mother from Nebraska has pleaded guilty to helping her daughter have an abortion. The case depended on private messages provided by Facebook. AP Data transfers : The EU has approved a new agreement for transfers of personal data to the US. Privacy activists have already said they will challenge the decision on the basis that the agreement doesn’t provide adequate protections to individuals. Old Macs : Intego has a useful guide to Macs and how long it’s safe to use them. As it explains, it’s great that most Mac devices last a long time. Not so good that once security updates cease, it’s really time to replace them.