1.) A research published in the journal Nature Communications says that the 2016 US elections were influenced by fake news spread by 6% of Twitter Bots. The numbers from Facebook aren’t available now. But the study confirms that a lot of accounts (1 million Approx) which have been suspended in March this year by the Mark Zuckerberg led company was involved in spreading low credibility info on the web- misleading US voters to vote for the current 45th US President Donald Trump.
The results were published after analyzing 14 million messages and 400,000 articles shared on Twitter between May 2016 and March 2017.
Researchers from Indiana University were the ones who conducted the survey and identified that 31% of the misinformation prevailing during that time came from the 6% of Twitter bots.
2.) In other news related to a data breach, Amazon has admitted yesterday that a technical server glitch leaked out names and email addresses of its customers ahead of Black Friday. The company did not reveal how many customers were affected by the breach but said that it will contact all those affected via email by this weekend.
The online retailer has also disclosed to the world that the data leak did not take place due to a cyber attack and denied the cyber attack reports published in some renowned news resources as completely false.
Security experts say that Amazon customers should immediately change their passwords for the website login as a precautionary measure in order to avoid any untoward online incident in future.
3.) Coming to the third cyber incident, attackers are said to have gained access to the job portal owned by the Finnish Ministry. As a result of this cyber attack, the Finnish ministry chose to Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment Data for this month.
The website in the discussion is ‘The Toimiala Online’ which is known to publish employment data which includes ministry surveys and labor exchange reports.
KEHA Development and Administration Center is the agency which maintains the website. And as per an agency resource reporting on the condition of anonymity, the hack-in was discovered in Oct last week and was immediately curtailed with the website shut down. Data loss is reported to be zero. But the details on who was behind the attack are being kept under wraps.
4.) Despite repeated warnings from FBI not to pay ransom to hackers spreading ransomware, the officials from the City of Valdez, Alaska has admitted last week that they paid $26,623.97 to free up their encrypted data in July’18.
What’s more interesting in the incident is the fact that the ransom was negotiated by the police chief of the Valdez Police department and Virginia based cyber incident response firm. It’s reported that the officials from both sides played the role of negotiators between the hackers and the city officials and settled the amount to 4 BTC or $26,623.97 to decrypt the locked data on 27 servers and 170 computers.
