Tag Archive for: feud

Cyber feud between Anonymous and Killnet groups unlikely to affect others


A demonstrator waves a flag of the hacking group known as “Anonymous” during The People’s Assembly Cost of Living Crisis protest on April 2, 2022. in London. (Photo by Hollie Adams/Getty Images)

Anonymous “is officially in cyber war against the pro-Russian hacker group [Killnet],” the largest Twitter account representing the hacker collective announced Saturday. It follows Killnet announcing it was at war with Annonymous two months earlier. The level of fascination is high. The risk of spillover affecting your organization is low.

You could bill this as a fight between high-profile citizen cyber warfare groups backing opposite sides of a kinetic conflict. But in practice, in the context of huge beasts of war causing geopolitical strife and the risk of spillover, “Brainy Smurf and Handy Smurf are getting into a fight,” said Allan Liska, an analyst with Recorded Future.

The risk of an escalating conflict between the two groups affecting the outside world is minimal, said Liska, as neither group has had much disruptive impact during the conflict affecting the outside world by attacking it directly.

The declaration of conflict made it as far as the mainstream media.

The two groups are no strangers to headlines. The Anonymous brand name was built through high-profile protests, though it has declined in the hierarchy of threats for most organizations since its heyday. Throughout the war in Ukraine, Anonymous took credit for nuisance attacks on Russian targets, including hack and leak operations involving its largest bank and an energy customs broker, reprogramming Russian media to show clips of the conflict, and DDoS operations against the country’s space agency. Killnet briefly disrupted the Italian Senate servers and an automotive club with its own DDoS and failed at a high-profile attack on the Eurovision music contest.

Soon after declaring war, Anonymous successfully DDoSed the Killnet website.

“Compare what Anonymous and what Killnet are doing to what Conti has done in Costa Rica. When you want to talk about real damage, that is what cybercriminals are capable of doing. And Anonymous and Killnet aren’t doing that,” said Liska.

Source…

FBI email servers hacked in a recent hacker-security researcher feud


FBI

Source:
TechViral

FBI or the Federal Bureau of Investigation has recently been compromised in a dark web feud between hackers. The hackers have allegedly hacked into FBI email servers to send messages to a dark web security researcher. This is something that was unexpected to any of us, but it turns out that the FBI’s security enhancements have to be updated, and they were not as good as they claimed it to be.

There are hackers that lay low on the dark web and then there are security research companies that target these hackers to bring them down. This time, the rivalry has become public as the hackers hacked into the Federal Bureau of Investigation which, according to a report by Bleeping Computer and Engadget, has confirmed the breach. FBI told the reporters that their systems were compromised early on 13th November to send fake messages to Vinny Troia, the leader of dark web security research companies- Shadowbyte and NightLion.

Now, as mentioned in a report by Engadget, Spamhaus, a non-profit intelligence organization shed light on these fake messages. However, they confirmed that the hackers have used legitimate FBI systems to conduct the attack, using email addresses that were found in the FBI’s database for the American Registry of Internet Numbers, among multiple other sources. This is an enormous hack that could have led to a disaster but the hackers used it only to target the dark web researcher. The reported further note that more than 10,000 addressed were involved in receiving these fake messages in a total of two waves, according to Engadget and Bleeping Computer.

Troia, the security researcher who was the recipient of these fake emails says that this could have something to do with “Pompomourin”, an entity that has attempted an attack on the researcher in the past, however, there is no official confirmation for the same, yet. As a precautionary measure, the FBI has asked the email recipients to report fake emails like to its Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency or the Internet Crime Complaint Centre.

Source…

How A Feud Among Wolf-Kink Erotica FanFic Authors Demonstrates What The Copyright Office Got Wrong In Its DMCA Report

Last week, we wrote about one of the biggest, glaring flaws in the Copyright Office’s long awaited report on the DMCA 512’s safe harbors was its refusal to recognize how frequently it’s abused to take down legitimate works. As if on cue, over the weekend, the NY Times has quite the story about a feud in (I kid you not), wolf-kink erotica fan fiction, that demonstrates how the DMCA is regularly abused to punish and silence people for reasons that have nothing to do with copyright.

The full NY Times article is worth reading, describing a still ongoing legal fight between two fanfic authors who wrote stories building on some apparently common tropes in the wolf-erotica fiction genre. One author sued another, but, as the article notes, all of the supposedly “copied” elements are common throughout the wider genre:

Then, in 2018, Ms. Cain heard about an up-and-coming fantasy writer with the pen name Zoey Ellis, who had published an erotic fantasy series with a premise that sounded awfully familiar. It featured an Alpha and Omega couple, and lots of lupine sex. The more Ms. Cain learned about “Myth of Omega” and its first installment, “Crave to Conquer,” the more outraged she became. In both books, Alpha men are overpowered by the scent of Omega heroines and take them hostage. In both books, the women try and fail to suppress their pheromones and give in to the urge to mate. In both books, the couples sniff, purr and growl; nest in den-like enclosures; neck-bite to leave “claim” marks; and experience something called “knotting,” involving a peculiar feature of the wolf phallus.

[….]

It’s hard to imagine that two writers could independently create such bizarrely specific fantasy scenarios. As it turns out, neither of them did. Both writers built their plots with common elements from a booming, fan-generated body of literature called the Omegaverse.

As the article goes on to note, this whole “Omegaverse” concept spun out of fanfiction based on the TV show “Supernatural.” And then a bunch of common tropes emerged:

Some Omegaverse stories involve lycanthropes (werewolves), vampires, shape-shifters, dragons, space pirates, others feature regular humans. But virtually all Omegaverse couples engage in wolflike behavior. Alphas “rut” and Omegas go through heat cycles, releasing pheromones that drive Alphas into a lusty frenzy. One particular physiological quirk that’s ubiquitous in Omegaverse stories, called knotting, comes from a real feature of wolves’ penises, which swell during intercourse, causing the mating pair to remain physically bound to increase the chance of insemination.

Normally, in copyright law, this should mean that there is no infringement. Either you have the idea/expression dichotomy come into play (the same idea expressed differently is not infringing as the idea itself cannot be covered by copyright) or there’s the concept of scenes a faire, in which a story in a particular genre needs those features to be a part of that genre.

However, even so, the DMCA has been weaponized here:

Ms. Cain urged Blushing Books to do something. The publisher sent copyright violation notices to more than half a dozen online retailers, alleging that Ms. Ellis’s story was “a copy” with scenes that were “almost identical to Addison Cain’s book.” Most of the outlets, including Barnes & Noble, iTunes, and Apple, removed Ms. Ellis’s work immediately.

See that? Merely by claiming infringement using the DMCA’s 512 notice-and-takedown provisions, one author was able to literally delete a bunch of books from most major book stores. Doesn’t that seem like a problem? The Copyright Office barely acknowledges it. But here it’s turned into a massive fight.

In late April 2018, Ms. Ellis got an email from a reader who had ordered one of her books from Barnes & Noble, then learned that it wasn’t available anymore. She soon discovered that all of her Omegaverse books had disappeared from major stores, all because of a claim of copyright infringement from Ms. Cain and her publisher. Ms. Ellis found it bewildering.

“I couldn’t see how a story I had written using recognized tropes from a shared universe, to tell a story that was quite different than anything else out there commercially, could be targeted in that way,” Ms. Ellis said. “There are moments and scenarios that seem almost identical, but it’s a trope that can be found in hundreds of stories.”

While Ellis did file a counternotice, the Times says that online stores were incredibly slow to put the books back (some took months).

A lawyer for Ms. Ellis and Quill filed counter-notices to websites that had removed her books. Some took weeks to restore the titles; others took months. There was no way to recover the lost sales. “As a new author, I was building momentum, and that momentum was lost,” Ms. Ellis said. And she worried that the “plagiarist” label would permanently mar her reputation.

The author, Ellis, eventually sued over the takedown notice, claiming it was improper (and also that it was defamatory — which, seems like a SLAPP suit on its own, unfortunately). However, the author accusing Ellis of infringement seems pretty big into SLAPPing as well:

Two years later, Ms. Cain and her publisher filed D.M.C.A. takedown requests against Ms. Ellis’s first two “Myth of Omega” books. Ms. Cain also asked her publisher to file an infringement notice against an Ellis novel that hadn’t even been released yet. “Book three needs to come down too. I don’t want her to make any more money off this series,” Ms. Cain wrote to Blushing Books in April, according to a court filing.

That’s… not how any of this works. The NY Times says that Cain’s publisher caved in and admitted there was no infringement and apparently paid up to settle with Ellis, but Cain has kept the case going. She should lose. By the way, if you want to dig into the details of the actual lawsuit, you can find the docket here. The NY Times does not appear to link to it.

But, as the article makes very, very clear, the DMCA’s notice-and-takedown process has been weaponised repeatedly. If it’s so obvious that it’s happening in such a niche area as “wolf-kink erotica fan fiction,” you know it’s happening in many other places as well. It seems ridiculous that the Copyright Office felt it wasn’t worth paying any attention to, and assuming that the only problems with DMCA 512 was that it didn’t take down enough content fast enough.

Techdirt.

Lithium giants feud over competition, brine in Chile’s Atacama Desert

Salt flats in South America

Enlarge / A general view of Laguna Colorada located near the border with Chile, in the Uyuni salt flats, Bolivia. The Uyuni salt flats are estimated to contain 100 million tons of lithium, making it one of the largest global reserves of this mineral, according to state officials at the Bolivian Mining Corporation. (credit: MARTIN BERNETTI/AFP/Getty Images)

Two of the world’s biggest lithium producers, Albemarle Corporation and Sociedad Quimica y Minera de Chile (otherwise known as SQM), are tangled in two disputes: the first over water rights in Chile’s Atacama desert, and the second over ownership of SQM.

Both Albemarle and and SQM have significant operations in the Atacama desert, where some of the world’s best lithium resources exist. As electric vehicles with lithium-ion batteries become more popular, lithium resources are becoming more valuable. That has created some conflict in an industry that has long remained relatively quiet.

Who’s drinking whom’s milkshake?

This week, Reuters reported that both Albemarle and SQM have accused each other of overdrawing brine from the Atacama’s underground aquifers. Both companies have operations in the Atacama’s Salar, and their operations are just three miles apart from each other. The brine water that has been accumulating for millennia under the Atacama is lithium-rich, and companies pump it out and send the brine to evaporation ponds where heat extracts the water and leaves the reactive alkali metal behind.

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Biz & IT – Ars Technica