Special Interest Groups’ Use of Social Media as a Weapon

There are hundreds of special interest groups involved in a wide variety of interests ranging from commerce, health, or art, to community development or religion. There are also groups that are involved in political and social causes. This excerpt from Social Media Warfare: Equal Weapons for All examines well-established special interest groups and the various types of special interest groups, as well as issues related to these groups: health care; guns, hate, and social media warfare; abortion debates and violent acts of extremists; environmentalists and eco-terrorists; lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual (LGBT) rights and social media warfare; and religious bias and discrimination in social media warfare.

Top 10 Rock and Roll Cybersecurity Predictions for 2017

It's that time of year again. Time for information security predictions for 2017. This year, we have an interesting twist on predictions by tying them to classic rock lyrics. It's interesting how prescient the lyrics are.

The Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology (ICIT) Releases the Encyclopedia of the Most Prominent Hacktivists, Nation State, and Mercenary Hackers

The Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology, a leading cybersecurity think tank, has published its most recent research report entitled Know Your Enemies 2.0: A Primer on Advanced Persistent Threat Groups. The report is an encyclopedia of bad actors stemming from the nation state, mercenary, and hacktivist arenas and details the characteristics and intricacies of the world’s most prolific threat groups.

Authors James Scott (ICIT Co-Founder and Senior Fellow) and Drew Spaniel (Visiting Scholar) cover threat groups not by use of a particular ranking system, rather by the dominant players categorized by geography, including China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Zero days, malware, tool kits, exploit techniques, digital foot prints and targets are covered in-depth. The report covers 40 bad actors including: Blue Termite, the Elderwood Platform, Deep Panda APT 30, APT 2, Tarh Andishan, Ajax, Dark Hotel, Bureau 121, Energetic Bear, Uroburos, Sofacy Group, the “Duke” family, Carbanak, SEA, Animal Farm, Hellsing. and Shrouded.