Tag Archive for: discusses

UNIDIR conference discusses confidence-building in cyberspace

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“Confidence building is a long journey. It has ups and downs. It gets pulled off course by different factors so a strong foundation in which to base our discussion is crucial to keep moving forward,” said Kathryn Jones, Head of International Cyber Governance, United Kingdom, during the 2021 Cyber Stability conference organised by the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR).

The panel discussion, moderated by Samuele Dominioni, Researcher, UNIDIR, was convened to discuss the importance of confidence-building measures (CBMs) in reducing tensions among countries. The panel consisted of Gerardo Isaac Morales Tenorio, Coordinator for Multidimensional Security, Multilateral Affairs, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Mexico; Yutaka Arima, Ambassador for Cyber Policy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, and Kaja Ciglic, Senior Director, Digital Diplomacy, Microsoft.

There are increased instances of states developing ICT (Information & Communications Technology) as an instrument of warfare which means it is crucial to develop confidence-building measures to reduce the risk of misperceptions and avoid conflicts.

Countries must elaborate on the role of ICT agencies, remarks Kathryn Jones

Role of regional collaboration: “The UN has a strong role in global confidence-building measures but we’ve seen regional organisations really pick up these confidence building measures and progress has tended to be faster at the regional level. It’s obviously easier to build confidence within an established relationship. Regional fora such as OSCE have resource pools which reduce the cost to individual states of having to build bilateral CBMs individually,” Jones told the gathering.

Leveraging United Nations: “…fills a gap by sharing experience and by providing a space in which avenues for collaboration and mutual learning can be established. The membership of the UN is a diverse group of states and all will never take the same approach with everything and we don’t need to but we do need to understand how other states see things and crucially, how they might act in cyberspace so as to avoid that misunderstanding and inadvertent escalation,” she explained.

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USC cybersecurity expert discusses JBS meat processor hack

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While larger companies are often more secure, Chintser Huang, who studies network security, said the attackers know where to look.

COLUMBIA, S.C. — Investigations into a cyberattack that disrupted production at the world’s largest meat supplier JBS continued Monday evening.

JBS is the second major company in the U.S. to be hacked in less than a month, after the Colonial Pipeline, which delivers about 45 percent of fuel used on the east coast, was targeted in May.

“If you are asking how often this kind of attack will happen, I can tell you it happens all the time,” Chintser Huang, a Department of Computer Science and Engineering Professor at USC, said.

RELATED: Parent company of Sumter processing plant affected by global cyberattack

While larger companies are often more secure, Huang, who studies network security, said the attackers know where to look.

“Large servers usually are well protected, which means they install sophisticated protection mechanisms,” Huang said. “However, the attacker doesn’t need to attack those larger servers directly.”

It just takes a few vulnerable machines, Huang says, for the hacker to break through, often targeting smaller devices with less protections to launch their attack.

“Those larger servers will now be more vulnerable because the attack doesn’t come from outside, but from inside,” Huang said.

RELATED: World’s largest meat company hit by cyberattack, FBI investigating

At this time, JBS hasn’t provided an official cause of the hack, but Huang says there are…

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Loptr CEO Discusses Solarwinds Breach and How to Stay Safe

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A recent cyberattack on Solarwinds compromised information from thousands of companies, prompting concerns across the country.

From March through December, hackers broke into the Solarwinds system and placed malware on the programs of 18,000 companies.

So how do you stay safe online and protect yourself from security breaches? Spectrum News spoke to the CEO of a computer security service to find out.

Loptr Founder and CEO Dave Newell said companies should monitor their networks and see who is connected to their servers. As for the average citizen, watch your own computer networks, beware of phony ads and stay away from skeptical websites that you may even come across on social media.

“There’s this huge fraudulent activity going on with ads that are being sent to us via Facebook and via the web for products that really don’t exist from companies that are fake or are designed to send the wrong thing to you,” he said.

When you are shopping online you should go to well-known sites, call the company you wish to buy from and read reviews of websites and online stores before making any purchases.

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Alex Stamos, director of Stanford Internet Observatory discusses domestic disinformation in the US Presidential Election

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LISBON, Portugal, Dec. 4, 2020 /PRNewswire/ —

  • According to Alex Stamos, director of Stanford Internet Observatory, along with the usual election disinformation tactics – trying to mislead voters on the mechanics of casting their ballot, or trying to discourage them from voting altogether – this year’s US presidential election saw a new phenomenon: people attempting to call into question the election results.
  • Stamos, formerly Facebook’s chief security officer,  said that, overall, social media platforms did a better job at preventing foreign disinformation on their sites than they did during the 2016 election. Comparing them head to head this time around, Stamos said YouTube  was “probably the most problematic”, with the least comprehensive policies around election disinformation.
  • Speaking at 100,000-attendee online conference Web Summit, Stamos is part of a line-up that includes European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, tennis great Serena Williams and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban.

Compared to the 2016 US presidential election, social media platforms did much better at preventing foreign disinformation  during this year’s election cycle. The bigger problem was domestic disinformation, said Alex Stamos, director at Stanford Internet Observatory.

Even though platforms improved, Stamos – who was Facebook’s chief security officer until 2018 – said that YouTube was the most problematic platform.

“The largest influencers get the least amount of enforcement, and we need to invert that,” he said.

Stamos’s comments came during  an interview with Eizabeth Dwoskin, Silicon Valley correspondent at the Washington Post, during the 100,000-attendee Web Summit.

Elaborating on YouTube’s challenges this election cycle, Stamos pointed out that influencers livestreamed far more than four years ago. Live video is especially hard to fact-check in a meaningful way, especially when influencers tried to erroneously claim election victory for Trump while votes were still being counted.

“Some of these people have live audiences that approach the daytime viewership of CNN, so you’re talking about YouTube effectively operating as a cable network,” he said.

Famously – and…

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