Being told to sit through a presentation of wild, debunked claims was “a huge slap in the face,” one Mesa County elections-division employee said of the previously unreported episode. “We put so much time and effort into making sure that everything’s done accurately,” the employee told The Washington Post, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation. Peters, the elected county clerk, had expressed sympathy for such theories in the past, the employee said.
https://spinsafe.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/3FMN4HA3HUI6ZA4AL65NXRB67A.jpgw1440.jpeg9601440SecureTechhttps://spinsafe.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/SS-Logo.svgSecureTech2021-09-26 17:00:152021-09-26 17:00:15Tina Peters embraced conspiracy theories. Officials say she has become an insider threat.
The Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine became a target of conspiracy theories and disinformation campaigns as soon as it was announced, reaching millions of people on sites like Twitter, Reddit and 4chan, according to a recent analysis from a cyber defense firm.
COVID-19 conspiracy narratives, like the false belief that the vaccine was delayed for political reasons, flourished on social networks in the fall and early winter, according to the New York tech security firm Blackbird. The firm created an algorithm to analyze posts in real-time by hunting for signals of what CEO Wasim Khaled calls “synthetic amplification,” which indicate activity by botnets and anti-vaccination influencers.
These bogus notions about the vaccines, amplified by a relatively small number of fake accounts and real influencers, reached millions of people, Khaled said.
Botnets and inauthentic accounts — automated accounts not actively managed by humans —have behavioral signatures that are easy for AI to identify, but hard for social networks to eradicate. Companies like Facebook and Twitter use both machine-learning algorithms and human moderators to reduce the spread of conspiracies, but Khaled said botnets are effective because they’re inexpensive and easy to deploy.
“Bots and influencers work in tandem,” he explained. “We can’t prove if they collude behind the scenes, but social media data shows clearly that they influence each other by sharing the same links, repeating the same phrases, tagging the same accounts and jumping in on trending hashtags.”
For example, some botnets reach real influencers by spamming conspiracy links to trending hashtags. Another common tactic is to generate fake trends by synchronizing hundreds of posts using similar anti-vaccine and pseudoscientific claims.
https://spinsafe.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/0801-cbsn-dca-disinformation-1625103-640x360.jpg6301200SecureTechhttps://spinsafe.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/SS-Logo.svgSecureTech2021-05-13 09:00:062021-05-13 09:00:06The Pfizer-BioNTech COVID vaccine is a top target of conspiracy theories
Russian national indicted for conspiracy to introduce malware to a protected computer KLAS – 8 News Now “malware news” – read more
https://spinsafe.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/SS-Logo.svg00https://spinsafe.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/SS-Logo.svg2020-09-05 04:55:022020-09-05 04:55:02Russian national indicted for conspiracy to introduce malware to a protected computer – KLAS – 8 News Now
A conspiracy spreads on social media about Coronavirus tracing apps, US police find decades’ worth of sensitive data leaked online, and is there a Bitcoin bonanza to be had from watching Elon Musk … computer security – read more
https://spinsafe.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/SS-Logo.svg00https://spinsafe.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/SS-Logo.svg2020-06-26 06:35:022020-06-26 06:35:02Smashing Security podcast #184: Vanity Bitcoin wallets, BlueLeaks, and a Coronavirus app conspiracy