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"Truth is stranger than fiction; fiction has to make sense." Leo Rosten
This page brings together selected items discussed elsewhere on the website, with some additional material. I hope this compilation will encourage readers to reflect on the broader implications of some recent technological developments ─ and the deviousness (and in some cases sheer depravity) of cybercriminals and hostile state actors, not least when they seek to profit politically or financially out of the Covid-19 pandemic.[1]
If you are not familiar with the examples cited, they should trigger an
Oh My God!
response and maybe make you a little more discriminating in what you choose to share online with friends and colleagues. 

Page Content
1 Lies & Misleading Claims
Presidents Trump & Putin
Donald Trump has done more than anyone to weaponize ‘fake news’. In June 2020, The Washington Post
reckoned that he has uttered over 20,000 ‘misleading claims’ since his inauguration ─ that’s an average of almost 15 a day.
Vladimir Putin routinely uses disinformation in his efforts to discredit/undermine liberal democracies. The EUvsDisInfo
accuses him, his associates and Kremlin proxies of collusion in the fabrication and dissemination of thousands of ‘fake news’ items — over 9,000 since 2015, the year the Unit was established. That's an average of 4.5 tall stories a day.
2 Deaths & Injury Attributed to 'Fake News'
Fake Cures
A study
published in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene
found that in the first three months of 2020 around 5,800 people around the world were admitted to hospital as a result of coronavirus-related misinformation on social media and at least 800 died, many from drinking methanol or alcohol-based cleaning products. They wrongly believed the products to be a cure for the virus.
Lynchings
Reports suggest that more than 20 individuals have been murdered
in India as a result of false rumours of child abduction posted on WhatsApp, and there have been dozens of lynchings in Latin America although it is difficult to know what contribution social media has played in this.
A report
in Aug 2019 noted that: "Most weeks Latin American newspapers feature chilling tales of mob justice, often committed by otherwise law-abiding citizens and increasingly coordinated on social media and filmed on smartphones."
Genocide
In Myanmar WhatsApp
has been implicated in genocide — in March 2018 the UN
accused
its owner Facebook
of playing “a determining role in stirring up hatred against the Rohingya Muslim minority.” It said the platform “had morphed into a ‘beast’ that helped to spread vitriol against them.” 354 villages were levelled, >10,000 are believed killed, many more subject to sexual violence, and almost 700,000 driven out of Rakhine State.
3 The Internet
Plumbing the Depths
The World Wide Web
— that part of the Internet that we routinely access and browse — accounts for perhaps 4% of the whole. The main part (90%+) is taken up by the Deep Web.
The Deep Web
is the hidden territory where standard search-engines do not go; where you find web mail, online banking, private or otherwise restricted access social-media pages and web forums, and a plethora of commercial databanks and services that users must pay for, such as video on demand and some online magazines and newsfeeds.
Then there's the Dark Web, which is where stolen data and illicit material is traded and used for financial, political or personal gain or sexual gratification. This is roughly the same size at the World Wide Web. The Deep Web
and the Dark Web
are accessed using multi-layered encryption via the Tor Browser (which was developed initially with the help of US government funding to provide access to the open web to users from repressive regimes.)
Some 40% of Internet Traffic Isn’t Human
Today, some 40% of internet traffic isn’t human and perhaps half of this bad bots designed to steal punters’ data, manipulate opinion and corrupt social intercourse. Indeed, bad bots are becoming more sophisticated at scraping our data[2] and carrying out hacking attacks and other criminal activity.
4 Online Criminal Behaviour
Cyber-criminals Are Offering Disinformation Services
Cyber-criminals are now offering disinformation services to the private sector. For a few hundred dollars, criminal forums
on the Dark Web[3] will craft a highly customised disinformation campaign that generates false positive propaganda about your company — or lies or malicious material to tarnish rivals. And social media provides the ideal environment for helping spread the dirt / generate influence.
Hacking Attacks Are Increasing in Frequency & Severity
There was a major hack
in July 2020 involving the Twitter accounts of dozens of high profile individuals, including Barak Obama, Elon Musk and Bill Gates. This appears to have been a co-ordinated attack targeting Twitter's employees with access to internal systems and tools. The biggest security breach to date in 2020 involved Facebook
and some 420 million
records. This followed an attack on Marriott Hotels
(in 2019) where 383 million records were compromised. [See here
for more info.]
Examples of What Can Happen
The New Zealand Stock Exchange
(shown) was closed down
for three days running [in Aug 2020] as a result of a DDoS Attack. Details are sketchy but it appears that the Exchange’s web site was the target, rather than its core trading systems. And if the website is down this prevents market-moving company information reaching investors...
At the same time there were reports
that a hacker crew targeted a luxury estate agency involved in multimillion-pound property deals by deploying malicious plugins for 3D design software [Autodesk 3ds Max] as part of a potential hacks-for-hire operation. Once deployed into the target network the sophisticated malware collects information from the host machine, takes screenshots, steals video, images and compressed files, as well as capturing details of saved passwords and browsing history, all beaming all of those back to HQ. The hackers seem to be always ahead of the game.
5 Privacy & Security
"Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.”
Edward Snowden [3]
Facial Recognition & Adversarial Image Technology
Facial recognition (FR) cameras can now analyse video in real time and identify individuals in a crowd. Using FR Technology without informed consent raises profound questions about our rights — maybe OK at passport control or when scanning prison visitors or criminal suspects, but what about monitoring the mood of customers in a store, checking whether staff are smiling, or observing people’s behaviour in the street? The legislation on FR technology needs tightening up considerably.
The Spy in Your Home
More and more products are coming equipped with cameras, microphones, accelerometers, thermal sensors, biometric analysis and GPS. These 'smart' devices are designed to collect and share potentially private data as part of their normal operation, and the consequences for our privacy and security are potentially enormous. Sensors can be found in a vast range of devices from white goods and fitness equipment to smart toys.
Google
and Amazon
have secured a range of patents relating to potential future functions of their home assistant products — one is a method for extracting keywords from ambient speech which would then trigger targeted advertising. Amazon
has a patent
allowing Alexa to decipher a user’s physical characteristics including accent, ethnic origin, emotional state, gender, age and even listen to background noise.
The Spy in Your Pocket
For many people smartphones are today essential companions. But they can reveal important data
about you (and your friends) without your knowledge, and often without your permission — especially if, like many smartphone users, you leave you device on all the time.
In 2018 Google
removed 20 apps from its app store which were able to record with the microphone, monitor a phone’s location, take photos and then extract the data without a user’s knowledge. Even barometer readings can give away which floor of a building you’re on! It is even suggested that it may be possible to work out PIN numbers simply for analysing micro-movements of the phone as it is being tapped...
6 Image & Voice Manipulation
Voice Phishing
In 2019 Security firm Symantec
said it had seen three cases
of seemingly deepfaked audio of chief executives used to trick senior financial controllers into transferring cash. This is known as voice phishing or 'vishing'. Another case
is reported
to have involved the CEO of an unnamed UK-based energy company, who thought he was talking on the phone with his boss, who’d asked him to urgently transfer €220,000 to a Hungarian supplier...
Deepfake
Deepfakes first appeared in 2017; they have since attracted much opprobrium for their use in celebrity pornographic videos, revenge porn, fake news, hoaxes, and financial fraud. We are now beginning to see their use in popular social media platforms, notably through Zao, a Chinese deepfake app that allows users to substitute their own faces onto those of characters in scenes from films and television shows such as Game of Thrones.
A doctored video
of Mark Zuckerberg delivering a foreboding speech was posted to Instagram, in a stunt that put Facebook’s content moderation policies to the test. Because they are so realistic, deep-fakes can scramble our understanding of truth in multiple ways. So as we become more attuned to their existence, our trust in the veracity of all
videos will be undermined, including those that are genuine. We will no longer be sure what is real and what is not.
Fooling the Camera
We’re also seeing the development of ‘adversarial images’ that dupe machine learning systems using pixel gradients. In this example an imperceptible amount of a carefully-prepared image is used to fool the recognition technology that it is looking at something different, in this case, a gibbon rather than a panda.
Manipulation of Satellite Imagery & GPS Spoofing
The manipulation of satellite imagery [including Google Maps] and GPS Spoofing today pose a serious threat to security, and not least to vessels on the high seas. The Russian military is said to be increasingly using GPS spoofing[5] as a way to protect sensitive locations (like The Kremlin) but also to cause disruption outside the country's borders or in military zones.
7 The Human Cost
Teenage Suicide
There have been some high profile cases of young people taking their lives after being bullied online. Indeed, concern
is groiwng about the potential for mental and emotional damage as social media becomes more and more a part of people's everyday lives.
After British teenager Molly Russell
took her own life (in 2017), her family discovered distressing material about suicide on her Instagram
account. One particularly disturbing development is that of the 'suicide challenge' associated with 'games' such as Momo, The Blue Whale Challenge
and others. These trick the individuals into committing suicide after performing various acts.[6]
Content Moderation
Facebook
has ‘Deletion Centres’ in a number of countries and a 35,000-strong army of Content Moderators.[7] But the human cost of viewing disturbing content under pressure is high, as Chris Gray discovered. Chris is shown here (centre) talking about his experience at the 2019 MozFest
in London. He developed PTSD after moderating content for 6 months in Facebook's Dublin office. His story is told in The Irish Times.
It was reported
[in May 2020] that Facebook
would pay $52m to moderators for failing to protect them from the 'horrors' of graphic content. Under the settlement more than 11,000 people who have worked for Facebook
will qualify for compensation.
8 Cyber Warfare
Here are some examples of cyber warfare attacks (including theft of highly sensitive defence or security information). It is clearly not possible to say with total confidence who or what is behind specific incidents but often there are strong indications. [See here
for more examples.]
Titan Rain
Titan Rain
was a series of sustained, coordinated cyber attacks on US defence contractors's computers, including those at Lockheed Martin, Sandia National Laboratories, Redstone Arsenal
and NASA. During the attacks (in the early 2000s) hackers — believed to have been based in Guangdong, China — gained access to sensitive information.
Estonia
In April 2007 Estonia came under a sustained cyber attack
which targeted websites of various organizations, including the Estonian parliament, banks, ministries, newspapers and broadcasters, amid the country's disagreement with Russia about the relocation of an elaborate Soviet-era grave marker and war graves in Tallinn. Some observers believe that the onslaught on Estonia was of a sophistication not seen before. It has been studied intensively by various countries and military planners.
Stuxnet & Shamoon
In Aug 2012 the Shamoon
virus was used to wipe data from over 30,000 computer workstations at Saudi Aramco
(Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil company). Once a system is infected, the virus compiles a list of files from specific locations, uploads them to the attacker, and erases them from the system. It then overwrites the master boot record of the infected computer, making it unusable.
A group calling itself 'Cutting Sword of Justice' claimed responsibility for the attack. Soon after this computer systems at RasGas
in Quatar were also knocked offline in a similar attack, later described as the 'biggest hack in history.'
The attack on Saudi Aramco
may have been payback for the 2010 Stuxnet
attack
that damaged 1,000 Iranian uranium-enrichment centrifuges (which is believed to be the work of Israel and the US). Stuxnet
is a malicious computer work said to have "required the largest and costliest development effort in malware history".[8]
Notes
1
Nothing is sacrosanct for hardened cybercriminals, who have shut down hospitals
and compromised healthcare service computer systems, and demanded large ransoms .
2 Bots are devices / piece of software that can execute commands, reply to messages, or perform routine tasks, either automatically or with some human intervention. Data scraping
is a technique in which a computer program extracts data from human-readable output coming from another program. DDos = Distributed Denial of Service — which is used to overwhelm a target website/email system.
3 American whistleblower who copied and leaked highly classified information from the National Security Agency
in 2013 when he was a Central Intelligence Agency
employee and subcontractor.
4 Researchers used the inbuilt sensors to detect when somebody was over the legal drink-drive limit. They were able to do this with about 90% accuracy when users walked just 10 steps. Scientists hope the discovery can be used to develop device alerts, such as asking people not to drive while drunk but it is also another aspect of our lifestyle that Big Brother may soon be watching.
5 More correctly, GNSS, Global Navigation Satellite System. In some cases vessels' navigation systems have indicated that they are actually onchore!
6 For the Record: Suicide is a leading cause of death worldwide: according to the World Health Organization
approximately 1.54 million people will die from suicide in 2020.
7 Facebook
is working to increase its use of artificial intelligence to remove harmful content, but it and the other social media platforms still have a long way to go.
8 Stuxnet
has three modules: a worm
that executes all routines related to the main payload of the attack; a link file
that automatically executes the propagated copies of the worm; and a rootkit component
responsible for hiding all malicious files and processes, to prevent detection. It is typically introduced into the target system via an infected USB flash drive.[ibid]
