Educational CyberPlayGround, Inc. @NetHappenings 4-26-19

Hacker Finds He Can Remotely Kill Car Engines After Breaking Into GPS Tracking Apps By Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/zmpx4x/hacker-monitor-cars-kill-engine-gps-tracking-apps

“I can absolutely make a big traffic problem all over the world,” the hacker said.
A hacker broke into thousands of accounts belonging to users of two GPS tracker apps, giving him the ability to monitor the locations of tens of thousands of vehicles and even turn off the engines for some of them while they were in motion, Motherboard has learned.
The hacker, who goes by the name L&M, told Motherboard he hacked into more than 7,000 iTrack accounts and more than 20,000 ProTrack accounts, two apps that companies use to monitor and manage fleets of vehicles through GPS tracking devices. The hacker was able to track vehicles in a handful of countries around the world, including South Africa, Morocco, India, and the Philippines. On some cars, the software has the capability of remotely turning off the engines of vehicles that are stopped or are traveling 12 miles per hour or slower, according to the manufacturer of certain GPS tracking devices.
By reverse engineering ProTrack and iTrack’s Android apps, L&M said he realized that all customers are given a default password of 123456 when they sign up. At that point, the hacker said he brute-forced “millions of usernames” via the apps’ API. Then, he said he wrote a script to attempt to login using those usernames and the default password. </>

Who would tap into the IFE to commandeer a plane?
https://www.wired.com/2015/05/feds-say-banned-researcher-commandeered-plane/
and
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/05/18/hacker-chris-roberts-told-fbi-he-took-control-of-united-plane-fbi-claims/

World Wide 
No one trusts evil bankers
No one trusts Wall Street
No one trusts the riches families in the world  to protect the environment
No one trusts technology monopolies to protect democracy
No one trust Politicians from either side
No one trusts the supreme court
No one trusts government that leaves people on the streets with no access to shelter, food, hygiene, etc., which is clearly inhumane.
No one trusts Wealthy people doing GoFundMe’s to stop shelters from being built.
No one trusts a country where $117,400 a year is considered low-income in San Francisco, where the median sale price of a two-bedroom is $1.3 million
No one trusts governance by  antitrust laws will protect democracy

‘The Next Backlash Is Going to Be Against Technology’
https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/04/25/the-next-backlash-is-going-to-be-against-technology-dani-rodrik-trade-interview/

Flash Crash Fears Haunt Traders Ahead of 10-Day Japan Break
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-25/margin-traders-in-japan-pile-into-yen-longs-as-golden-week-nears

Toward an Information Operations Kill Chain By Bruce Schneier
https://www.lawfareblog.com/toward-information-operations-kill-chain

Easier Than Robbing A Bank:’ City of Chicago Almost Lost More Than $1 Million In Phishing Scam
The City of Chicago’s Department of Aviation thought it was paying an approved vendor more than $1 million for services earlier this year.
But your tax dollars didn’t reach them. The money almost went to what appeared to be a phishing scam that police are now investigating as a business email compromise.
While the city recovered the money, the incident almost cost taxpayers seven figures and raises red flags about the integrity of Chicago’s cyber-security system.
https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2019/04/18/chicago-department-of-aviation-phishing-scam/

Why Won’t @Jack Twitter Treat White Supremacy Like ISIS? Because It Would Mean Banning Some Republican Politicians Too by Joseph Cox and Jason Koebler
A Twitter employee who works on machine learning believes that a proactive, algorithmic solution to white supremacy would also catch Republican politicians.
At a Twitter all-hands meeting on March 22, an employee asked a blunt question: Twitter has largely eradicated Islamic State propaganda off its platform. Why can’t it do the same for white supremacist content?
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/a3xgq5/why-wont-twitter-treat-white-supremacy-like-isis-because-it-would-mean-banning-some-republican-politicians-too

Fort Bragg cut power for thousands to test ‘real-world reactions’ to a cyber-attack By Mark Price
The Charlotte Observer
April 25, 2019
Fort Bragg in North Carolina says the Army base had a “blackout” for more than 12 hours overnight Wednesday as part of a cyber-attack military exercise that came as a complete surprise to its tens of thousands of residents.
The fort, which the Army says is the world’s largest military base, says it cut off the electricity “to identify shortcomings in our infrastructure, operations and security.”
“Fort Bragg has to train for any possible threats to the installation in order to remain mission capable,” said a post on Fort Bragg’s Facebook page just after 11 a.m.
“This exercise was not announced in order to replicate likely real-world reactions by everyone directly associated with the installation. In today’s world, cyber-attacks are very likely. This exercise is exactly what we needed to do to identify our vulnerabilities and work to improve our security and deployment posture.”
https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/local/article229662514.html

 

Co-Founder of Pro-Trump Campus Group CAUGHT impersonating a real lawyer.

Man Accused of Phony Lawyer Act Was Co-Founder of Pro-Trump Campus Group Before he allegedly posed as a lawyer.

Lambert was in college when he co-founded Students for Trump, and as a leader of the group, he appeared on TV and shared a stage with Milo Yiannopoulos.

A Tennessee man charged by New York prosecutors with pretending to be a Manhattan lawyer and taking thousands from would-be clients was the co-founder of Students for Trump, a national group that mobilized college campuses in the run-up to the 2016 election and plans to do so again in 2020.

It turns out that Lambert, who solicited legal work through the fake name “Eric Pope,” is the co-founder of Students For Trump, a campus conservative group.
https://www.law.com/newyorklawjournal/2019/04/23/man-accused-of-phony-lawyer-act-was-co-founder-of-pro-trump-campus-group/

Pro-Trump College Group Won’t Tell the Feds What the Hell It’s Doing The FEC has sent Students for Trump nine letters requesting info on who its donors are and what the group is funding. It has gotten no response.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/pro-trump-college-group-wont-tell-the-feds-what-the-hell-its-doing

Headquarters: Raleigh, NC
Ryan Fournier founder and chairman 2015 and John Lambert, students at Campbell University in North Carolina, United States.

Fournier has appeared on many news networks including Fox News, CNN and MSNBC to advocate his views.

The group enjoyed the backing of Guido Lombardi, an Italian real estate developer who served as the Trump campaign’s middleman with various prominent figures in right-wing political parties in Europe.

Students for Trump is a registered political committee, bound by FEC reporting requirements.

“The failure to timely file a complete report may result in civil money penalties, an audit or legal enforcement action,” the FEC notices warn.

THE FOUR WOMEN WHO ARE SAVING DEMOCRACY #Antitrust #Law #Fail

Lina Kahn, Dina Srinivasa, Shoshana Zuboff, Carole Cadwalla

THE FOUR WOMEN WHO ARE SAVING DEMOCRACY

#Antitrust #Law #Fail Kills Our Democracy

Antitrust law is failing to secure our freedom, our markets, our right to self-determination, our competition, and our fundamental rights.

Lina Kahn  Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox, which showed how Ronald Reagan’s antitrust policies, inspired by ideological extremists at the University of Chicago’s economics department, had created a space for abusive monopolists who could crush innovation, workers’ rights, and competition without ever falling afoul of orthodox antitrust law.

The Antitrust Case Against Facebook ~ Dina Srinivasan

Can Antitrust Law Rein in Facebook’s Data-Mining Profit Machine? ~ Dina Srinivasan

The Antitrust Case Against Facebook: a turning point in the debate over Big Tech and monopoly ~  CORY DOCTOROW

Shoshana Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism machine learning creates devastating behavior modification tools that allow tech companies to manipulate us so thoroughly that we’re in danger of losing our free will.

Srinivasan shows how Facebook came to dominate our online discourse through activities that would have been prohibited under pre-Reagan theories of antitrust, and how, prior to these monopolistic tactics, Facebook was not able to conduct surveillance on its users, having to contend with multiple, bruising PR disasters and user revolts when it tried to do so.

Moreover, Facebook’s monopoly has enabled a series of moves that worsened its impact on our democracy and our markets: once Facebook became the dominant means by which people learned about the news, media companies were forced to use Facebook to promote their work, and to put Facebook tracking beacons (AKA “Like buttons”) on every article, giving Facebook the power to build ever widening dossiers on 2.3 billion users.

And since Facebook also became the dominant means by which users discovered many kinds of products, merchants also put Like buttons and engaged in other surveillant integrations with Facebook, allowing Facebook to monopolize intelligence about ad performance — that is, when an click on a Facebook ad yielded up a sale, Facebook often knew about it — and this allowed the company to charge more for ads, and to tighten its grip over the ad marketplace.

Handmaidens to Authoritarism,  #Mercer, #Zuckerberg, #Sandberg, #Page, #Brinn, #Dorsey

https://cyberplayground.org/2019/04/22/mercer-zuckerberg-sandberg-page-brinn-dorsey-handmaidens-to-authoritarism/

How Facebook Broke Democracy

THEY INVITED THE FOX INTO THE HEN HOUSE

THEY ALL HER SPEAK AT THE TED TALK

In an unmissable talk, journalist Carole Cadwalla  digs into one of the most perplexing events in recent times: the UK’s super-close 2016 vote to leave the European Union.

Esteemed Reporter Pulitzer finalist Carole #Cadwalla

My TED talk: how I took on the tech titans in their lair

Mercer, Zuckerberg, Sandberg, Page, Brinn, Dorsey Handmaidens to Authoritarism