If you are brave enough to learn the truth about child welfare fraud in Afghanistan, funded by and through the U.S. State Department under the leadership of Hillary Clinton, using UNICEF and USAID money to set up a foster care and adoption system that established the trafficking of boys, then, please, continue.
If you think I am just full of shit, then may the gods have mercy upon your souls for allowing this to happen by ignoring the blood curdeling screams of children, who were lucky enought not to be murdered, suicided or drugged to a life of incapacitation of being lab rats for major pharmaceutical corporations, billed to Medicaid, in the U.S. foster care and adoption system.
These operations of trafficking tiny humans fund political campaigns, all around the world, supporting political candidates, for the highest and lowest offices in a nation.
These operations are run this under the guise of the Clinton Foundation and Gates Foundation, UNICEF, USAID and Department of Defense.
The little girls are sold off through human trafficking to the U.S. and its other foreign natinoal strongholds around the world into a very short life of human servitude, which includes being forced to manufacture more tiny humans to traffic, more readily understood as "rape and harvest", or the acquisition of goods, where the money is typically laundered through NGOs.
Children are human captial to be financially leveraged and sold for profit, through the eyes of the tax exempt god because no one cares.
They call the operation of snatching the little girls' babies Child Protective Services, in the best interests of the child, because in international adoptions, the child fetches $13,400 a year in tax incentives, not to mention the tax exempt trust funds, but can fetch an even heartier price if the baby is sold for snuff films.
Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction: Child Sexual Assaultin Afghanistan: Implemtation of the Leahy Laws and Reports of Assaults by Afghan Security Forces
Online porn, mostly through Twitter, is an international marketing operation, left untouched by law enforcement because it is a private organization, with lots of legal barriers to make it stop.
Yes, this also happens in the U.S. because the Child Protective Services model originated in Michigan, right here in Detroit.
I will not mention to what happens to the other tiny humans at this time; I prefer to wait for the next DoD report.
Just remember, these Special Forces are privatized.
This is one of the first audits coming out of the Department of Defense and its child welfare
operations. The pdf is locked so you have to click here ===> Special Inspector General for AfghanistanReconstruction: Child Sexual Assault in Afghanistan: Implemtation of theLeahy Laws and Reports of Assaults by Afghan Security Forces.
If you have made it this far, and actually care to finally learn the truth about what the U.S. does to children in poverty, the very children they have intentionally made poor through sardonic, fraudulent policies, I have, also, provided links, directly below.
You Do Know The Department Of Defense Is Involved In Child Welfare Fraud, Right?
Department of Defense Shows Lack of Regulation in Child Welfare System
The CIA Origin Of Medicaid Fraud In Child Welfare
U.S Military Using THOUSANDS Of RADIOACTIVE Bombs
USAID Afghanistan Child Welfare System Failed, Just Like U.S.
Bill Schuette, Detroit Land Bank Authority, U.S. Department of Defense & Fraud: Part I
"Hey Trey, What Are They Doing With All That Money?"
Selling Little Afghanistan Boys: UNICEF, Clinton Foundation, USAID
#MeToo Can children use this, too?
To our brave men and women of the armed forces around the world and parents who crumbled into the tormented depths of an economic hell of being ridiculed as a social pariah, to those who lost their lives reporting and trying to stop the trafficking of tiny humans around the world and the parents who lost all hope in trying to save their children, and to the spirits of those who were slaughtered protecting the best interests of the future of humanity, I humbly bow to you, for I am the original source.
Before you are a man, you are a child.
Afghan Pedophiles Get Free Pass From U.S. Military, Report Says
Afghan Pedophiles Get Free Pass From U.S. Military, Report Says
A former Special Forces officer, Capt. Dan Quinn, was relieved of his command and pulled from Afghanistan after fighting with an Afghan militia commander for keeping a boy as a sex slave.
On 5,753 occasions from 2010 to 2016, the United States military reported accusations of “gross human rights abuses” by the Afghan military, including many examples of child sexual abuse. If true, American law required military aid to be cut off to the offending unit.
Not once did that happen.
That was among the findings in an investigation into child sexual abuse by the Afghan security forces and the supposed indifference of the American military to the problem, according to a report released on Monday by the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction, known as Sigar.
The report, commissioned under the Obama administration, was considered so explosive that it was originally marked “Secret/ No Foreign,” with the recommendation that it remain classified until June 9, 2042. The report was finished in June 2017, but it appears to have included data only through 2016, before the Trump administration took office.
The report released on Monday was heavily redacted, and at least in the public portions it did little to answer questions about how prevalent child sexual abuse was in the Afghan military and police, and how commonly the American military looked the other way at the widespread practice of bacha bazi, or “boy play,” in which some Afghan commanders keep underage boys as sex slaves.
“Although DOD and State have taken steps to identify and investigate child sexual assault incidents, the full extent of these incidences may never be known,” the report said, referring to the departments of Defense and State.
Sigar said it had opened an investigation into bacha bazi at the request of Congress and in response to a 2015 New York Times article that described the practice as “rampant.” The article said that American soldiers who complained had their careers ruined by their superiors, who had encouraged them to ignore the practice.
“DOD and State only began efforts to address this issue after it was raised by The New York Times,” said John F. Sopko, the special inspector general. “And even after that story, the sufficiency of policies they’ve put in place and the resources they’ve committed seem questionable. When Congress passed the Leahy laws they prioritized the issue of gross human rights violations. As our report clearly shows, both agencies failed to live up to that task.”
A former Special Forces officer, Capt. Dan Quinn, who beat up an Afghan commander for keeping a boy chained to his bed as a sex slave, said at the time that he had been relieved of his command as a result. “We were putting people into power who would do things that were worse than the Taliban did,” said Captain Quinn, who has left the military.
Sgt. First Class Charles Martland, a highly decorated Green Beret, was forced out of the military after beating up an Afghan local police commander in Kunduz who was a child rapist. Sergeant Martland became incensed after the Afghan commander abducted the boy, raped him, then beat up the boy’s mother when she tried to rescue him. Congressional inquiries apparently led to Sergeant Martland’s reinstatement.
Image
Gregory Buckley Sr., whose son Lance Cpl. Gregory Buckley Jr. was killed after complaining that an Afghan commander had a retinue of “bacha bazi” boys.Kirsten Luce for The New York Times
The Times article also cited the suspicious death of Lance Cpl. Gregory Buckley Jr., a United States Marine who was killed at a checkpoint where he was stationed with a notorious commander who had a retinue of bacha bazi boys. Corporal Buckley had complained about that commander and was killed, along with two other Marines, by one of the commander’s boys.
The Sigar report made no mention of the cases of Corporal Buckley, Captain Quinn or Sergeant Martland, and it appeared to have interviewed only three unnamed American soldiers who reported being aware of the practice, which many soldiers and Afghan officials have told journalists they know to be widespread.
As of Aug. 12, 2016, the Defense Department was investigating 75 instances of gross human rights violations, seven involving child sexual assault, but even Defense Department officials acknowledged that that was a small portion of the total, the Sigar report said.
Under the Leahy Law, United States military aid funds must be cut off to any foreign military unit implicated in gross human rights violations, which includes the practice of bacha bazi, with its enslavement and rape of young boys. But another provision of American law, called the “notwithstanding clause,” says that Afghan military aid should be available “notwithstanding any other provision of law.”
The Sigar report said that the “notwithstanding clause” had been used repeatedly to evade cutting off military aid to Afghan units.
“DOD’s continuing to provide assistance to units for which the department has credible information of a gross violation of human rights undermines efforts by U.S. government officials to engage with the Afghan government on the importance of respect for human rights and rule of law,” the report said. But it also said no evidence had been found that American soldiers were ordered to look the other way as a matter of policy, or that their commanders condoned the bacha bazi practice.
American military commanders in Afghanistan have repeatedly denied that there was any policy to condone child sexual abuse.
The Sigar report recommended restricting the use of that “notwithstanding clause” to evade the provisions of the Leahy Law, and a draft defense appropriations bill supports that recommendation.
The practice is so widespread that at least one of the 2014 Afghan presidential candidates was a onetime C.I.A.-backed warlord, Gul Agha Shirzai, who was widely accused of being a pedophile who keeps bacha bazi boys.
President Ashraf Ghani vowed to end the practice in a 2015 speech, but there have been few, if any, prosecutions by the Afghan authorities for bacha bazi practices. Mr. Shirzai is now the minister of border and tribal affairs in Mr. Ghani’s government.
Have a great day!
U.S. v Dyncorp International LLC False Claims Act Complaint 7-16-2016 by Beverly Tran on Scribd
Karim Baratov, a 22-year-old Kazakhstan-born Canadian citizen, has pleaded guilty to hacking charges over his involvement in massive 2014 Yahoo data breach that affected all three billion yahoo accounts.
In March, the US Justice Department announced charges against two Russian intelligence officers (Dmitry Dokuchaev and Igor Sushchin) from Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) and two hackers (Alexsey Belan and Karim Baratov) for breaking into yahoo servers in 2014.
While Karim Baratov (Kay, a.k.a Karim Taloverov, a.k.a Karim Akehmet Tokbergenov) was arrested in Toronto at his Ancaster home by the Toronto Police Department in March this year, Alexsey Belan and both FSB officers currently reside in Russia, unlikely to be extradited.
In the federal district court in San Francisco on Tuesday, Baratov admitted to helping the Russian spies and pleaded guilty to a total of nine counts which includes:
One count of conspiring to violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by stealing information from protected computers and causing damage to protected computers.
Eight counts of aggravated identity theft.
Prosecutors believe that FSB officers directed the Yahoo hack and contracted Baratov when their targets—which included journalists, government officials, and technology company employees—used email accounts outside of Yahoo's system.
"Baratov's role in the charged conspiracy was to hack webmail accounts of individuals of interest to the FSB and send those accounts' passwords to Dokuchaev in exchange for money," his plea agreement reads.
However, according to Baratov's lawyers, at the time of the crime, Baratov had no idea he was working with Russian FSB agents.
Baratov gained unauthorized access to at least 80 non-Yahoo email accounts, including at least 50 Google accounts by obtaining their credentials through "spear phishing" attacks.
Baratov's sentencing hearing will be held on 20th February next year in federal district court in San Francisco, where he could face 70 to 87 months in jail for the first charge and 24 months for the identity theft charges.
"The illegal hacking of private communications is a global problem that transcends political boundaries. Cybercrime is not only a grave threat to personal privacy and security, but causes great financial harm to individuals who are hacked and costs the world economy hundreds of billions of dollars every year," US Attorney Brian Stretch said.
"These threats are even more insidious when cybercriminals such as Baratov are employed by foreign government agencies acting outside the rule of law."
Besides any prison sentence, Baratov has also agreed to pay compensation to the Yahoo victims and a fine up to $2,250,000 (at $250,000 per count).
Baratov's arrest is the only one in this investigation. The three other men, including two FSB officers and one criminal hacker, currently reside in Russia, with whom the United States has no extradition treaty.
CYBER ATTACKS : Cybercriminals, including state-sponsored hackers, have started actively exploiting a newly discovered Microsoft Office vulnerability that Microsoft does not consider as a security issue and has already denied to patch it.
Last month, we reported how hackers could leverage a built-in feature of Microsoft Office feature, called Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE), to perform code execution on the targeted device without requiring Macros enabled or memory corruption.
DDE protocol is one of the several methods that Microsoft uses to allow two running applications to share the same data.
The protocol is being used by thousands of apps, including MS Excel, MS Word, Quattro Pro, and Visual Basic for one-time data transfers and for continuous exchanges for sending updates to one another.
Soon after the details of DDE attack went public, several reports emerged about various widespread attack campaigns abusing this technique in the wild to target several organisations with malware.
Now, for the first time, this DDE attack technique has been found leveraging by an Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) hacking group—APT28, which is well known as Fancy Bear and is widely believed to be backed by the Russian government.
Russian Hackers Using New York Terror Attack to Lure Victims
While analyzing a new spear phishing campaign, security researchers discovered that the Fancy Bear hackers have been leveraging the DDE vulnerability since late October, according to a recent report published Tuesday by McAfee researchers.
The campaign involved documents referencing the recent terrorist attack in New York City in an attempt to trick victims into clicking on the malicious documents, which eventually infects their systems with malware.
Since DDE is a Microsoft's legitimate feature, most antivirus solutions don't flag any warning or block the documents with DDE fields.
Therefore, anyone who clicks on the malicious attachment (with names like SabreGuard2017.docx or IsisAttackInNewYork.docx) inadvertently runs malicious code on his/her computer without any restriction or detection.
Once opened, the document runs contacts a command-and-control server to install the first stage of the malware called Seduploader on victims' machines using PowerShell commands.
Seduploader then profiles prospective victims by pulling basic host information from the infected system to the hackers. If the system is of interest, the attackers later install a more fully featured piece of spyware—X-Agent and Sedreco.
"APT28 is a resourceful threat actor that not only capitalizes on recent events to trick potential victims into infections but can also rapidly incorporate new exploitation techniques to increase its success," Mcafee researchers concluded.
"Given the publicity the Cy Con U.S campaign received in the press, it is possible APT28 actors moved away from using the VBA script employed in past actions and chose to incorporate the DDE technique to bypass network defenses."
This is not first malware campaign that has been spotted abusing the DDE attack technique.
Soon after the details of DDE attack technique went public, Cisco's Talos threat research group uncovered an attack campaign that was actively exploiting this attack technique to target several organisations with a fileless remote access trojan called DNSMessenger.
Late last month, researchers discovered a campaign that spread Locky ransomware and TrickBot banking trojan via Word documents that leveraged the DDE technique.
Another separate malware spam campaign discovered by security researchers also found distributing Hancitor malware (also known as Chanitor and Tordal) using Microsoft Office DDE exploit.
Protection Against DDE Malware Attacks
Since Microsoft does not provide any protection against such attacks, you can easily prevent yourself from falling victim to any malicious document abusing the Microsoft's DDE feature by disabling it entirely.
If you use Microsoft Word 2016 or Microsoft Excel 2016, go to Options → Advanced, and then remove the checkmark from "Update automatic links at open" which is listed under the general group on the page.
In MS Excel, you can also consider checking "Ignore other applications that use Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE)."
Moreover, Disable DDEAuto is a Registry file maintained on GitHub that disables the "update links" as well as "embedded files" functionality in MS Office documents when run.
You can detect Office documents abusing the DDE feature via a set of YARA rules in Office Open XML files published by the researchers at NVISO Labs.
However, the best way to protect yourself from such malware attacks is always to be suspicious of uninvited documents sent via emails and never click on links inside those documents unless adequately verifying the source.
CYBER ATTACKS : A massive data breach has seen the customer data of more than 46 million mobile subscribers in Malaysia leaked on to the dark web.
The leaked information includes mobile numbers, unique phone serial numbers, as well as home addresses.
Personal information from multiple Malaysian public sector and commercial websites was also stolen.
The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) is now investigating.
The data breach was first discovered by Malaysian technology news website Lowyat.net.
The website was informed that someone was trying to sell huge databases of personal details for an undisclosed amount of Bitcoin on its forums.
Stolen data
The individual was trying to sell a huge amount of private customer information from at least 12 Malaysian mobile operators:
Maxis
DiGi
Altel
Celcom
Enabling Asia
Friendimobile
MerchantTradeAsia
PLDT
RedTone
TuneTalk
Umobile
XOX
A huge amount of personal data was also stolen from Jobstreet.com and the:
Malaysian Medical Council
Malaysian Medical Association
Academy of Medicine Malaysia
Malaysian Housing Loan Applications
Malaysian Dental Association
National Specialist Register of Malaysia
Lowyat.net says it reported the incident to Malaysia's communications watchdog on 18 October, and that the MCMC initially made the website take its story down.
However, the MCMC confirmed the data breach a day later in a press statement released on Facebook, and then on Monday confirmed that 46.2 million mobile subscribers were affected by the data breach.
Entire country affected
It is believed that the entire country - Malaysia has a population of 32 million - might have been affected by the breach, as well as foreigners who were on temporary pre-paid mobile phone numbers.
Under Malaysian law, service providers are required to keep customers' personal data secure, so there will probably be legal repercussions.
Dr Mazlan Ismail, the chief operating officer of the MCMC, told the Malay Mail Online that it had met with all of the country's telecommunications companies to work out how the data breach had occurred.
"This is to ensure that they understand what is happening now, especially when the police, through the Commercial Crime Investigation Department, visit them to investigate," said Dr Ismail.
"Communications services cannot escape the security aspects, [service providers] must work together, and safety features are important to gain the trust of consumers."
CYBER ATTACKS : A new widespread ransomware attack is spreading like wildfire around Europe and has already affected over 200 major organisations, primarily in Russia, Ukraine, Turkey and Germany, in the past few hours.
Dubbed "Bad Rabbit," is reportedly a new Petya-like targeted ransomware attack against corporate networks, demanding 0.05 bitcoin (~ $285) as ransom from victims to unlock their systems.
According to an initial analysis provided by the Kaspersky, the ransomware was distributed via drive-by download attacks, using fake Adobe Flash players installer to lure victims' in to install malware unwittingly.
"No exploits were used, so the victim would have to manually execute the malware dropper, which pretends to be an Adobe Flash installer. We’ve detected a number of compromised websites, all of which were news or media websites." Kaspersky Lab said.
However, security researchers at ESET have detected Bad Rabbit malware as 'Win32/Diskcoder.D' — a new variant of Petya ransomware, also known as Petrwrap, NotPetya, exPetr and GoldenEye.
Bad Rabbit ransomware uses DiskCryptor, an open source full drive encryption software, to encrypt files on infected computers with RSA 2048 keys.
ESET believes the new wave of ransomware attack is not using EternalBlue exploit — the leaked SMB vulnerability which was used by WannaCry and Petya ransomware to spread through networks.
Instead it first scans internal network for open SMB shares, tries a hardcoded list of commonly used credentials to drop malware, and also uses Mimikatz post-exploitation tool to extract credentials from the affected systems.
The ransom note, shown above, asks victims to log into a Tor onion website to make the payment, which displays a countdown of 40 hours before the price of decryption goes up.
The affected organisations include Russian news agencies Interfax and Fontanka, payment systems on the Kiev Metro, Odessa International Airport and the Ministry of Infrastructure of Ukraine.
Researchers are still analyzing Bad Rabbit ransomware to check if there is a way to decrypt computers without paying ransomware and how to stop it from spreading further.
How to Protect Yourself from Ransomware Attacks?
Kaspersky suggest to disable WMI service to prevent the malware from spreading over your network.
Most ransomware spread through phishing emails, malicious adverts on websites, and third-party apps and programs.
So, you should always exercise caution when opening uninvited documents sent over an email and clicking on links inside those documents unless verifying the source to safeguard against such ransomware infection.
Also, never download any app from third-party sources, and read reviews even before installing apps from official stores.
To always have a tight grip on your valuable data, keep a good backup routine in place that makes their copies to an external storage device that isn't always connected to your PC.
Make sure that you run a good and effective anti-virus security suite on your system, and keep it up-to-date.
CYBER ATTACKS : It was not just Yahoo among "Fortune 500" companies who tried to keep a major data breach incident secret. Reportedly, Microsoft had also suffered a data breach four and a half years ago (in 2013), when a "highly sophisticated hacking group" breached its bug-reporting and patch-tracking database, but the hack was never made public until today.
According to five former employees of the company, interviewed separately by Reuters, revealed that the breached database had been "poorly protected with access possible via little more than a password."
This incident is believed to be the second known breach of such a corporate database after a critical zero-day vulnerability was discovered in Mozilla's Bugzilla bug-tracking software in 2014.
As its name suggests, the bug-reporting and patch-tracking database for Windows contained information on critical and unpatched vulnerabilities in some of the most widely used software in the world, including Microsoft's own Windows operating system.
The hack was believed to be carried out by a highly-skilled corporate espionage hacking group known by various names, including Morpho, Butterfly and Wild Neutron, who exploited a JAVA zero-day vulnerability to hack into Apple Mac computers of the Microsoft employees, "and then move to company networks."
With such a database in hands, the so-called highly sophisticated hacking group could have developed zero-day exploits and other hacking tools to target systems worldwide.
There's no better example than WannaCry ransomware attack to explain what a single zero-day vulnerability can do.
"Bad guys with inside access to that information would literally have a ‘skeleton key’ for hundreds of millions of computers around the world," said Eric Rosenbach, who was American deputy assistant secretary of defence for cyber at the time of the breach.
When Microsoft discovered the compromised database in earlier 2013, an alarm spread inside the company.
Following the concerns that hackers were using stolen vulnerabilities to conduct new attacks, the tech giant conducted a study to compare the timing of breaches with when the bugs had entered the database and when they were patched.
Although the study found that the flaws in the stolen database were used in cyber attacks, Microsoft argued the hackers could have obtained the information elsewhere, and that there's "no evidence that the stolen information had been used in those breaches."
Former employees also confirmed that the tech giant tightened up its security after the 2013 hacking incident and added multiple authentication layers to protect its bug-reporting system.
However, three of the employees believes the study conducted by Microsoft did not rule out stolen vulnerabilities being used in future cyber attacks, and neither the tech giant conducted a thorough investigation into the incident.
On being contacted, Microsoft declined to speak about the incident, beyond saying: "Our security teams actively monitor cyber threats to help us prioritise and take appropriate action to keep customers protected."
Remember NotPetya? CYBER ATTACKS : The Ransomware that shut down thousands of businesses, organisations and banks in Ukraine as well as different parts of Europe in June this year.
Now, Ukrainian government authorities are once again warning its citizens to brace themselves for next wave of "large-scale" NotPetya-like cyber attack.
According to a press release published Thursday by the Secret Service of Ukraine (SBU), the next major cyber attack could take place between October 13 and 17 when Ukraine celebrates Defender of Ukraine Day (in Ukrainian: День захисника України, Den' zakhysnyka Ukrayiny).
Authorities warn the cyber attack can once again be conducted through a malicious software update against state government institutions and private companies.
The attackers of the NotPetya ransomware also used the same tactic—compromising the update mechanism for Ukrainian financial software provider called MeDoc and swapping in a dodgy update including the NotPetya computer virus.
The virus then knocked computers in Ukrainian government agencies and businesses offline before spreading rapidly via corporate networks of multinational companies with operations or suppliers in eastern Europe.
Presentation by Alexander Adamov, CEO at NioGuard Security Lab
The country blamed Russia for the NotPetya attacks, while Russia denied any involvement.
Not just ransomware and wiper malware, Ukraine has previously been a victim of power grid attacks that knocked its residents out of electricity for hours on two different occasions.
The latest warning by the Ukrainian secret service told government and businesses to make sure their computers and networks were protected against any intrusion.
"SBU notifies about preparing for a new wave of large-scale attack against the state institutions and private companies. The basic aim—to violate normal operation of information systems, that may destabilize the situation in the country," the press release reads.
"The SBU experts received data that the attack can be conducted with the use of software updating, including public applied software. The mechanism of its realization will be similar to cyber-attack of June 2017."
To protect themselves against the next large-scale cyber attack, the SBU advised businesses to follow some recommendations, which includes:
Updating signatures of virus protection software on the server and in the workstation computers.
Conducting redundancy of information, which is processed on the computer equipment.
Providing daily updating of system software, including Windows operating system of all versions.
Since the supply chain attacks are not easy to detect and prevent, users are strongly advised to keep regular backups of their important files on a separate drive or storage that are only temporarily connected for worst case scenarios.
Most importantly, always keep a good antivirus on your system that can detect and block any malware intrusion before it can infect your device, and keep it up-to-date for latest infection-detection.
CYBER ATTACKS : If you receive a message from any of your Facebook Friends asking for urgent help to recover their Facebook account, since they've added you as one of their 'Trusted Contacts'—just don’t blindly believe it.
Researchers have detected a new Facebook phishing scam that can even trick an experienced technical user into falling victim to the scam, helping an attacker gain access to your Facebook account.
This latest social media scam is abusing "Trusted Contact"—a Facebook account recovery feature that sends secret access codes to a few of your close friends in order to help you regain access to your Facebook account in case you forget your password or lost access to your account.
According to a public security alert published by AccessNow, the attack initiates by an already compromised account of one of your friends, asking for urgent help to get back into his/her Facebook account.
The attacker explains that you are listed as one of his/her Trusted Contacts on Facebook and asks you to check your email for a recovery code and share with the attacker (who's hiding behind the identity of your friend).
However, in actual, the code you received is not the key to unlock your friend's account, but instead, the attacker initiated "Forgot my password" request for your account in an attempt to hijack your Facebook account.
Knowing that a friend is in trouble, apparently one would share the code without giving a second thought.
"The new attack targets people using Facebook, and it relies on your lack of knowledge about the platform's Trusted Contacts feature," Access Now warns.
You should know Facebook's Trusted Contacts feature doesn't work the way this phishing attack suggests. To understand how this feature works, you can head on to this Facebook post.
The Access Now says, "So far we're seeing the majority of reports [falling victims to this new Facebook phishing scam] from human right defenders and activists from the Middle East and North Africa."
Although this latest Facebook scam is initiated using a compromised Facebook account of one of your friends, any of your Facebook friend can also intentionally trick you into handing over your Facebook account to them (looking at the way how people accept friend requests sent by anyone on the social media platform).
The best way to protect yourself is always to be vigilant to every recovery emails you receive, and read the recovery message or email carefully, even if it is sent by one of your actual friends.Stay Safe!
CYBER ATTACKS : Facebook and Google could be forced to uphold the same standards as newspapers and other publications as part of a Government crackdown, it has emerged.
Ministers are looking at whether to classify social media giants as publications instead of communication platforms, which would bind them to strict rules and make them responsible for everything they host.
It came as the Culture Secretary announced new rules to protect children online, including an industry-wide levy - potentially millions of pounds per company - to be spent on education.
New plans revealed by Karen Bradley also include compulsory internet safety lessons to teach children about the dangers of posting naked photos or sending them to people they meet online.
The measures are part of a crackdown on internet giants amid fears young people are increasingly at risk when using the internet.
Twitter
Twitter CREDIT: REUTERS
Under current rules sites like Facebook cannot be sued for the content posted on their sites because it is published by an individual or group, unlike newspapers and other publishers which are held fully responsible.
Campaigners have long been calling for a change in the law as they believe it would force social media companies to take racist, sexist, terrorist material and child pornography posted on their platforms more seriously.
A spokesman for Theresa May confirmed that ministers are looking at a change in the law in a bid to address concerns.
It came after the chairman of media regulator Ofcom said businesses such as Google should be classed as publishers and lamented her inability to properly police their platforms.
Karen Bradley takes over as Culture Secretary Karen Bradley takes over as Culture Secretary
00:27
The Number 10 spokesman said: "We are looking at the role Google and Facebook play in the news environment as part of the digital charter.
"We will look carefully at the roles, responsibilities and legal status of the major internet platforms."
Appearing at the digital, culture, media and sport committee of MPs in Parliament yesterday, Dame Patricia Hodgson said: "Those particular distribution systems [Facebook, etc] are not within Ofcom’s responsibility but we feel very strongly about the integrity of news in this country and we are totally supportive of steps that should and need to be taken to improve matters.
"My personal view is that they are publishers but that is only my personal view, that is not an Ofcom view. As I said Ofcom is simply concerned about the integrity of news and very supportive of the debate and the steps that are being taken.”
CYBER ATTACKS : The cyber attack that broke many of the world's biggest companies was intent only on destruction.
Experts say that initial suggestions that the software was being used to make money may have been a distraction. The software might instead be part of a plan simply to cripple as many systems, companies and countries as possible, they said.
The software itself suggested it was ransomware – when it was loaded up and had taken over users' computers, it asked for money to get the files back. But actually paying that money wasn't possible, and so it generated a tiny amount of cash.
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Instead that ransom might have been a way of hiding the true motives of the people behind the malware.
"It is clear that this was targeted indiscriminately at Ukrainian businesses, and the Ukrainian government," Jake Williams, president of the security firm Rendition Infosec and a former member of the U.S. National Security Agency's elite cyberwarfare group, told The Associated Press in an online chat. "The 'ransomware' component is just a smokescreen (and a bad one)."
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'Petya' cyber attack: List of affected companies shows scale of hack
The attack started in Ukraine before making its way quickly and indiscriminately across the world. But the country took most of the brunt of the attack, with banks and other important infrastructure having their systems taken offline and so being unable to function.
"There is still a lot of damage, especially in banks," said Victor Zhora, CEO of the Kiev cybersecurity firm InfoSafe. "ATMs are working (again) but some bank operations are still limited." He estimated damage in "the millions of dollars, perhaps tens of millions."
And that's just in Ukraine. Microsoft said the malware hit at least 64 nations, including Russia, Germany and the United States. "I expect that we will see additional fallout from this is the coming days," said Williams.
The ransom system appeared to have been set up very badly, if attackers were aiming to make money. They asked victims to send proof that they had handed over cash to one specific email address – but that address was frozen by the provider within hours, taking it offline, and leaving the attackers making only $10,000.
Some security researchers said that the people behind the attack wouldn't even have been able to unlock encrypted computers, even if they wanted to.
Researchers have said that it's possible the attack came from Russia, and perhaps within the Russian state. Clues include the timing – the attack came the same day as the assassination of a senior Ukrainian military intelligence officer and a day before a national holiday celebrating the new Ukrainian constitution signed after the breakup of the Soviet Union
"Everything being said so far does point to Russia being a leading candidate for a suspect in this attack," said Robert M. Lee, CEO of Dragos Inc. an expert who has studied the attacks on Ukraine's power grid.
What's most worrisome and reprehensible, said Lee, is that whoever was behind the attack was unconcerned about the indiscriminate, collateral damage it caused — much of it within Russia itself. That's highly unusual behaviour for nation-states.
CYBER ATTACKS : Researchers from cybersecurity firm Proofpoint have recently discovered a large-scale malvertising campaign that exposed millions of Internet users in the United States, Canada, the UK, and Australia to malware infections.
Active for more than a year and still ongoing, the malware campaign is being conducted by a hacking group called KovCoreG, which is well known for distributing Kovter ad fraud malware that was used in 2015 malicious ad campaigns, and most recently earlier in 2017.
The KovCoreG hacking group initially took advantage of P0rnHub—one of the world's most visited adult websites—to distribute fake browser updates that worked on all three major Windows web browsers, including Chrome, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge/Internet Explorer.
According to the Proofpoint researchers, the infections in this campaign first appeared on P0rnHub web pages via a legitimate advertising network called Traffic Junky, which tricked users into installing the Kovtar malware onto their systems.
Among other malicious things, the Kovter malware is known for its unique persistence mechanism, allowing the malware to load itself after every reboot of the infected host.
The Traffic Junky advertising network redirected users to a malicious website, where Chrome and Firefox users were shown a fake browser update window, while Internet Explorer and Edge users got a fake Flash update.
p0rnhub-malware-attack
"The [infection] chain begins with a malicious redirect hosted on avertizingms[.]com, which inserts a call hosted behind KeyCDN, a major content delivery network," Proofpoint writes.
The attackers used a number of filters and fingerprinting of "the timezone, screen dimension, language (user/browser) history length of the current browser windows, and unique id creation via Mumour," in an effort to target users and evade analysis.
Researchers said Chrome users were infected with a JavaScript which beaconed back to the server controlled by the attackers, preventing security analysts working through the infection chain if their IP had not "checked in."
"This makes it extremely unlikely that the JavaScript can be run alone and provide the payload in a sandbox environment," Proofpoint writes. "This is most likely why this component of the chain has not been documented previously."
In this case, the attackers limited their campaign to click fraud to generate illicit revenue, but Proofpoint researchers believed the malware could easily be modified to spread ransomware, information stealing Trojans or any other malware.
Both P0rnHub and Traffic Junky, according to the researchers, "acted swiftly to remediate this threat upon notification."
Although this particular infection chain was successfully shut down after the site operator and ad network got notified, the malware campaign is still ongoing elsewhere.
![Facebook and Google could be forced to uphold the same standards as newspapers and other publications as part of a Government crackdown, it has emerged. Ministers are looking at whether to classify social media giants as publications instead of communication platforms, which would bind them to strict rules and make them responsible for everything they host. It came as the Culture Secretary announced new rules to protect children online, including an industry-wide levy - potentially millions of pounds per company - to be spent on education. New plans revealed by Karen Bradley also include compulsory internet safety lessons to teach children about the dangers of posting naked photos or sending them to people they meet online. The measures are part of a crackdown on internet giants amid fears young people are increasingly at risk when using the internet. Twitter Twitter CREDIT: REUTERS Under current rules sites like Facebook cannot be sued for the content posted on their sites because it is published by an individual or group, unlike newspapers and other publishers which are held fully responsible. Campaigners have long been calling for a change in the law as they believe it would force social media companies to take racist, sexist, terrorist material and child pornography posted on their platforms more seriously. A spokesman for Theresa May confirmed that ministers are looking at a change in the law in a bid to address concerns. It came after the chairman of media regulator Ofcom said businesses such as Google should be classed as publishers and lamented her inability to properly police their platforms. Karen Bradley takes over as Culture Secretary Karen Bradley takes over as Culture Secretary 00:27 The Number 10 spokesman said: "We are looking at the role Google and Facebook play in the news environment as part of the digital charter. "We will look carefully at the roles, responsibilities and legal status of the major internet platforms." Appearing at the digital, culture, media and sport committee of MPs in Parliament yesterday, Dame Patricia Hodgson said: "Those particular distribution systems [Facebook, etc] are not within Ofcom’s responsibility but we feel very strongly about the integrity of news in this country and we are totally supportive of steps that should and need to be taken to improve matters. "My personal view is that they are publishers but that is only my personal view, that is not an Ofcom view. As I said Ofcom is simply concerned about the integrity of news and very supportive of the debate and the steps that are being taken.”](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVatDg8PGLLwI4NZ7F6xppsjqvWf5SwSDdtpClHAB3BEOzjbxeiv7YHNPeVj1Va5JBhkuhGyEI9rSlnRqhuFmJkiGfHxQPSFsYzwTj4avBc8J4H_OXh98h1_5n7wwytKLhLquVsENXyfV0/s1600/Google+and+Facebook+could+be+forced+to+take+responsibility+for+everything+posted+on+their+sites+as+Government+considers+crackdown.jpeg "Facebook and Google could be forced to uphold the same standards as newspapers and other publications as part of a Government crackdown, it has emerged. Ministers are looking at whether to classify social media giants as publications instead of communication platforms, which would bind them to strict rules and make them responsible for everything they host. It came as the Culture Secretary announced new rules to protect children online, including an industry-wide levy - potentially millions of pounds per company - to be spent on education. New plans revealed by Karen Bradley also include compulsory internet safety lessons to teach children about the dangers of posting naked photos or sending them to people they meet online. The measures are part of a crackdown on internet giants amid fears young people are increasingly at risk when using the internet. Twitter Twitter CREDIT: REUTERS Under current rules sites like Facebook cannot be sued for the content posted on their sites because it is published by an individual or group, unlike newspapers and other publishers which are held fully responsible. Campaigners have long been calling for a change in the law as they believe it would force social media companies to take racist, sexist, terrorist material and child pornography posted on their platforms more seriously. A spokesman for Theresa May confirmed that ministers are looking at a change in the law in a bid to address concerns. It came after the chairman of media regulator Ofcom said businesses such as Google should be classed as publishers and lamented her inability to properly police their platforms. Karen Bradley takes over as Culture Secretary Karen Bradley takes over as Culture Secretary 00:27 The Number 10 spokesman said: \"We are looking at the role Google and Facebook play in the news environment as part of the digital charter. \"We will look carefully at the roles, responsibilities and legal status of the major internet platforms.\" Appearing at the digital, culture, media and sport committee of MPs in Parliament yesterday, Dame Patricia Hodgson said: \"Those particular distribution systems [Facebook, etc] are not within Ofcom’s responsibility but we feel very strongly about the integrity of news in this country and we are totally supportive of steps that should and need to be taken to improve matters. \"My personal view is that they are publishers but that is only my personal view, that is not an Ofcom view. As I said Ofcom is simply concerned about the integrity of news and very supportive of the debate and the steps that are being taken.”")
