News of the Cyber World

[kyonides]

Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover makes the left lose it: ‘It’s like the gates of hell opened’

Billionaire industrialist Elon Musk took over Twitter Thursday night and immediately fired several top executives, sending shockwaves throughout the social media platform.

CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal and head of legal policy, trust, and safety Vijaya Gadde were all fired after Musk had accused them of misleading him and investors over the number of fake accounts on the platform, a source with knowledge of the matter told FOX Business.

Editor-in-chief of The Federalist Mollie Hemingway described the firings as "An excellent start" to Musk's tenure in a tweet.

Co-Host of Breaking Points Saagar Enjeti posted emoji hands waving "bye" while retweeting a post of his from April where he had written that, "Vijaya Gadde, the top censorship advocate at Twitter who famously gaslit the world on Joe Rogan's podcast and censored the Hunter Biden laptop story, is very upset about the @elonmusk takeover."
...
Controversial tech columnist Taylor Lorenz tweeted, "It’s like the gates of hell opened on this site tonight."

Liberal academic and journalism professor Jeff Jarvis' reaction upon hearing the news was, "The sun is dark." Earlier in the day, he had warned, "This is an emergency! Twitter is to be taken over by the evil Sith lord."

Chinese influence operation seeks to sow political discord, 'aggressively' targets U.S. midterms

A pro-Chinese government information operation is “aggressively targeting the United States” across a variety of fronts, including by attempting to discredit the U.S. democratic process and “discourage Americans from voting in the 2022 U.S. midterm elections,” researchers said Wednesday.
...
The activity represents a continued escalation from the 2020 elections, when top U.S. intelligence officials assessed that China did not deploy interference efforts and had “considered but did not deploy influence efforts” in an attempt to shape the outcome of election.
...
“We have seen DRAGONBRIDGE criticize American society via narratives regarding racial strife and social injustice,” the researchers said. “However, its targeting of the U.S. political system through attempts to discourage Americans from voting shows a willingness to use increasingly aggressive rhetoric.”

Last month Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, removed a small Chinese influence operation that used fake personas posing as Americans and promoting politically conservative causes while criticizing President Biden.

The campaign exposed Wednesday also pushed nonpolitical narratives, such as attempting to label a prolific and prominent pro-China hacking group as actually American, and alleging that the U.S. was responsible for the Nord Stream gas pipeline explosions in October 2022, the researchers said, mirroring Russian President Putin’s claims.

Researchers uncover more than 167,000 stolen credit card numbers, primarily from the U.S.

Cybercriminals used a pair of point-of-sale malware variants to steal more than 167,000 payment records from 212 infected devices mostly in the U.S., according to researchers with Group-IB.
...
Researchers estimate the information could be worth more than $3.3 million, highlighting how malware designed to steal information from credit card payment terminals remains a troubling concern.

Nikolay Shelekhov...identified a poorly configured command and control server for point-of-sale, or POS, malware MajikPOS in April 2022, researchers said in a report shared exclusively with CyberScoop.
...
The server and discover that it hosted a separate command and control administrative panel for Treasure Hunter, a separate POS malware variant, which also collects compromised card data.

The researchers’ analysis revealed that since at least February 2021 through Sept. 8, 2022, the operators had managed to steal payment records. Shelekhov told CyberScoop the researchers identified 11 victim companies in the U.S.
...
MajikPOS has additional features, the researchers said, such as a more appealing control panel, an encrypted communication channel with a command-and-control function and more structured logs. Treasure Hunter, on the other hand, contains records about the processes running in an operating system of the device from which the data was stolen, along with their names.