Twitter shutters accounts linked to US election hacking

By Lisa Vaas

On Saturday, Twitter kicked off two accounts connected to the 2016 US presidential election hacking and the subsequent leak of documents stolen during the breaches: Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks.

The move came within hours of Friday’s indictment of 12 Russian intelligence officers who the US Department of Justice (DOJ) has fingered in connection to attacks on the computers and email systems of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in the months leading up to the election,

Both accounts were fronted by fictitious personas and used to release tens of thousands of stolen emails and documents, according to the indictment.

DCLeaks.com was created as a place to publish stolen documents more than a month before any documents were actually leaked from the breach, the DOJ says. The hacking group Fancy Bear has been linked to the spearphishing campaign that weaseled Gmail account credentials out of Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and other DNC members.

Both the Guccifer 2.0 and DCLeaks accounts had reportedly been dormant for at least a year and a half prior to Twitter shutting them down.

The indictment claims that both accounts were used to spread misinformation. One example: in a 2016 interview with Motherboard’s Vice, Guccifer 2.0 claimed to be Romanian, not Russian. That’s the nationality of the original Guccifer hacker, Marcel Lehel Lazer, who’s now serving a 52-month prison sentence for hacking 100 Americans’ email accounts.

However, the metadata for emails sent by Guccifer 2.0 to The Hill revealed that they were sent using a predominantly Russian-language VPN. When Motherboard pressed Guccifer 2.0 to use Romanian in an online chat, his “clunky grammar and terminology” led experts to surmise that he was using an online translator.

Read more at https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2018/07/17/twitter-shutters-accounts-linked-to-us-election-hacking/

Facebook refuses to remove fake news, but will demote it

By Lisa Vaas

Forget about getting rid of fake news, Facebook said on Thursday. It might be raw sewage, but hey, even raw sewage has a right to flow, right?

In the name of free speech, Facebook said, it’s keeping all the bilge water, be it pumped out by the right or left… though the platform intends to push fakery down deeper into the holding tank by demoting it.

As Facebook said in its tweet, demotion translates into an 80% loss of future views, and the punishment extends to Pages and domains that repeatedly share bogus news.

This latest fake-news spasm comes on the heels of an event Facebook held in New York on Wednesday that blew up in its face. Journalists got to feed on shrimp cocktail, listen to a short presentation, and then engage in a question-and-answer session, all in the name of convincing the press that the social media network has finally reached some kind of beachhead in the war against disinformation.

Facebook’s effort fell apart when CNN reporter Oliver Darcy began to grill Facebook Head of News Feed John Hegeman about its decision to allow Alex Jones’ conspiracy news site InfoWars on its platform.

How, Darcy asked, can the company claim to be serious about tackling the problem of misinformation online while simultaneously allowing InfoWars to maintain a page with nearly one million followers on its website?

Read more at https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2018/07/16/facebook-refuses-to-remove-fake-news-but-will-demote-it/

Twitter pops a lot of famous people’s follower bubbles

By Lisa Vaas

Twitter has wiped out accounts that have been locked due to misbehavior, obliterating an average of about four followers each for us earth-bound mortals and millions for its twinkliest stars.

Vijaya Gadde, head of the company’s legal team, said that the move was taken as part of Twitter’s “ongoing and global effort to build trust and encourage healthy conversation on Twitter.”

In other words, it’s another salvo in the fight against fake news – or in the fight against the type of accounts that most Twitter users hold their noses over when they enter a conversation.

The locked-account purge had its biggest impact on the top Twitter accounts, of course.

The more followers, the bigger the gouge: Gadde said that most accounts would lose four or fewer followers, while the more popular accounts would “experience a more significant drop”.

Musician Katy Perry tops Twitter’s list of 50 most-followed accounts. Perry – along with Lady Gaga, who’s at No. 6 – both lost about 2.5m followers, according to the BBC. Ex-President Barack Obama, at No. 3, lost 2.1m followers.

But the biggest hit was to Twitter itself: according to the BBC, Twitter (No. 16 on the list) lost 7.7m followers.

Read more at https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2018/07/16/twitter-pops-a-lot-of-famous-peoples-follower-bubbles/