A new report sponsored by the European Commission has found that social media has played a key role in the spread of Russian-backed disinformation campaigns since their war with Ukraine began.

“Over the course of 2022, the audience and reach of Kremlin-aligned social media accounts increased substantially all over Europe,” the researchers stated in the report, “Digital Services Act: Application of the Risk Management Framework to Russian disinformation campaigns.”

Here you can see various recruitment lures to join Russia’s cyber army who call themselves “Cyber Front Z” and are looking for help on Telegram to post content across networks, up- and down-vote posts, and hound opponents with derogatory comments. The photo shown in the screenshot above is one such target, a pro-Ukraine politician.

The work was done by the nonprofit group Reset and published last week. The group examined these campaigns across 10 languages and over a year. It can serve as useful guidance for U.S. regulators and for how businesses should moderate their own social media content. You can read my analysis for SiliconANGLE here.

• Microsoft revokes the certificates that were once VeriSign’s, now owned by DigiCert. Lots of confusion ensues.
• Lazarus Group strikes again, this time leveraging open source frameworks and more lethal tools. This criminal group — an arm of the North Korean government — has been active for years spreading all sorts of trouble via ransomware and other attacks.
• Pam Baker’s new book, ChatGPT for Dummies, is useful in a variety of situations, even if you think you already know a lot about the service and AI.
• The life and hard times of phishing-as-a-service malware groups, how they ply their criminal trade and how they work.

Since virtual private networks were invented nearly 30 years ago as a way to extend a corporate network across the work, they’ve gone through a complete role reversal, even as they’ve continued to evolve to help protect business users’ data and communications. Today’s VPN is now the linchpin for a series of edge business security technologies, taking center stage thanks to a few trends: the popularity of hybrid working conditions brought on by the COVID pandemic, the movement to the cloud away from on-premises servers, and the acceptance of software-as-a-service tools that made it easier to deploy and manage these clouds.

You can read my analysis for SiliconANGLE here.

 News items that I wrote this week include:

1. Google adds new security features to its Workspace. The features cover aspects of implementing zero-trust security, data loss prevention or DLP, and data privacy controls. Many involve a series of automated improvements that will continuously monitor data placed in Google Drive, using its AI engine.

2. Proton adds new business-oriented VPN packaging to its services. The features build upon existing adware blockers, a smart protocol called Stealth that automatically chooses the best-performing connection, and support for both WireGuard and OpenVPN protocols.

3. Malvertising trends: The malware exploits known as malware-infected ads, or malvertising, have been around for decades, but new reports point to a steady rise in lethality. The technique continues to be profitable, because the malware ads are masquerading as normal ads in the ad networks and using the network as a distribution and funds collection system.:

The European Commission enacted its Digital Services Act last November as another step in its efforts to regulate online services and platforms. Most of these regulations take effect next February, but some will require many European businesses — and others that have customers on the continent — to meet the first deadlines next week. Once again, Europe is moving further ahead of the U.S. in terms of privacy protection and forcing online businesses to be more transparent. This began with the General Data Protection Regulation five years ago and continues with the implementation of the DSA. More about this set of new regs in my latest post for SiliconANGLE here.

Two new analysis blogs for SiliconANGLE this week:

1. Preventing MFA Fatigue.There is a new wave of infections spreading throughout the world that has nothing to do with COVID or, for that matter, any other physical disease. Called multifactor authentication fatigue, it’s highly contagious and spreads through the deception of determined hackers who want to steal users’ account details. But here is the irony: The more MFA a company uses, the greater the chance that a potential MFA fatigue attack will succeed.
2. Codesys IoT vulnerability discoveredMicrosoft security researcher Vladimir Tokarev demonstrated an interesting attack on the industrial internet of things automation software called Codesys. Tokarev, who showed the exploit last week at the annual BlackHat security conference in Las Vegas, used a miniature elevator model to demonstrate how the attack could crash its cab. The software – and more importantly, its software development kit — is widely used in millions of programmable logic controller or PLC chips that run everything from traffic lights and water treatment plants to commercial building operations automation and energy pipelines.

Two new reports on phishing trends show a rise in attacks, and they’re taking more complex paths through the internet to connect victims with malware-laced websites. The trends are highlighted in Cloudflare Inc.’s annual phishing trends report released today, as well as the latest compendium of phishing trends by the Interisle Consulting Group. I go into details about both of them, and what the implications are for defenders and users, in my latest analysis for SiliconANGLE.

The names Downfall, Inception, Meltdown and Spectre might evoke the names of Bond villains, but they describe something almost as insidious: They are all central processing unit-based security vulnerabilities that have been uncovered in the past several years.

Each of them — the first two most recently and the last two harking back to 2018 — involves very specific attacks on hardware-level commands of various chips made or designed by Intel Corp., Arm Ltd. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. All have required or will require patching with operating system updates and chip firmware updates. My story for SiliconANGLE goes into the details of each one and how they can be mitigated.