Unsupervised Learning: No. 100

For the best reading experience, I recommend you view this content natively at: Unsupervised Learning: No. 100.

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This is episode No. 100 of Unsupervised Learning—a weekly show where I curate 3-5 hours of reading in infosec, technology, and humans into a 30 minute summary. The goal is to catch you up on current events, tell you about the best content from the week, and hopefully give you something to think about as well…

This week’s topics: Russian IW memes, POTUS Twitter, Texas Attack, Silence Trojan, NotPetya Damages, tech news, human news, ideas, discovery, recommendations, aphorism, and more…

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Security news





We're finally seeing a clear picture of the various influence campaigns that Russia are using against the United States. Note that I said "are using", not "were using". This is ongoing. A number of researchers have identified the social media accounts being used and are tracking the memes that they're putting out. The content is brilliant in its ability to capture American identity politics, our various social pressure points, and then use that content to make us fight amongst ourselves. This is literally a state-funded attack against America designed to make us hate each other and destroy ourselves from within. Utter genius on their part. Link



The president's Twitter account was deactivated by a rogue employee as their last action before leaving the company. This raises a number of important questions about the ability for Twitter employees to change things within the platform, e.g., could they tweet as someone else? It's an interesting question when you have people like the president using the product, and there's an assumption that he's actually the one writing the tweets. Imagine reading "I've just declared war on North Korea.", from his account. Would it really be that unbelievable? And what response could the tweet product on its own? Link



A white, former Air Force man went into a church on Sunday near where he grew up and killed 26 people with an AR-15. When he left the church an armed citizen fired on and injured the attacker, who was found dead in his crashed vehicle later. There are myriad issues to discuss here, but the one I'll mention is that many will want to label this terrorism just like they did in the New York attack last week. The difference (so far in a developing story) is that in the New York attack there was a clear modus operandi linked to terror, and the proclaiming of Allahu Akbar during the attack, whereas with this situation we appear to simply have another mentally ill person with no obvious motive. Mental illness based violence is not terrorism because it has no political goal it's trying to achieve. Link



Researchers have discovered a new trojan called Silence in some banking institutions. The MO is to stay silent for some extended period of time to learn more about the network, and then to start stealing money once they believe they can do it successfully. Link



Merck told financial analysts last Friday that NotPetya cost them at least $310 million dollars in Q3, and likely that much again Q4. Maersk lost around $300 million as well, as did FedEx. This makes NotPetya probably the largest cybersecurity incident of its kind. Link



The Trump Organization appears to have been compromised by some Russian hackers in 2013. Multiple subdomains were registered under domains it owned, and many redirected to IP addresses in St. Petersburg, Russia. This could have simply been a Russian criminal group, however, and not anything state or politics related. Either way, it's not good. Link



A fake version of WhatsApp has been installed by over a million Android users. Link



Code signing of malware is evidently more common than we thought. Link



Patching: WordPress, Tor





Technology news





Bitcoin crossed $7,000. Link



HP is selling its main headquarters in Palo Alto and moving to Santa Clara, San Jose, and Milpitas. Not sure exactly what it means, but it definitely means change. Link



Cisco is bringing AI to its conference room meeting hardware. Link





Human news 





A massive new study of 600,000 people shows that long-term aspirin use significantly reduces many types of cancer risk. The reduction numbers are staggering: 47% for liver, 47% for esophageal, 35% for lung, 38% for gastric, etc. I really want to see this study get reproduced or otherwise validated. Link



You can now order CRISPR kits through the mail, and hack DNA at home for around $100. Experts say there are way easier ways to do harm to someone, and it'd be pretty hard to modify pathogens to become more dangerous. But my problem with this is that it only takes one. And there seems to be no shortage of people willing to harm thousands or millions. Link



China has opened 516 Confucious Institutes around the world, where they teach the world to speak Mandarin. They are in 142 countries, 42 of which are in Africa. Link



The New York Times is on pace to become a $900 million dollar digital business by 2020 thanks to a major surge in its subscribers in recent years. Much of the increase is being attributed to people being willing to pay for high quality news in a world where it's hard to tell good information from bad. They currently have around 2.5 million paid subscribers. Link





Ideas