APT10 hackers penetrated enterprise cloud services to steal intellectual property for years, YouTube is tackling its toxic recommendation system with new user controls
APT10 hackers penetrated enterprise cloud services to steal intellectual property
A major Reuters investigation has revealed evidence that the world’s biggest enterprise cloud service providers were penetrated by the Chinese government linked APT10 hacking group at least as far back as 2014. From there, the hackers were able to gain access to enterprise customers’ data, stealing confidential business strategies and intellectual property from firms including telecoms hardware specialist Ericsson and nuclear submarine builder Huntington Ingalls Industries.
Enterprise cloud providers affected by the Cloud Hopper hacking operation include Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), IBM, Fujitsu, Tata Consultancy Services, NTT Data, Dimension Data, Computer Sciences Corporation and HPE spin-off DXC Technology.
YouTube is tackling its toxic recommendation system with new user controls
YouTube’s video recommendation engine is both a key source of its success and a critical problem that’s been implicated in everything from promoting neo-Nazi content to gamers tp serving up videos of young girls to paedophiles (The Verge).
Now, YouTube is tacking on its own recommendations by giving users new tools to control what content they’re shown and see why recommendations are made. These include a “don’t recommend channel” to completely remove unwanted channels from your recommendations, which is likely to at least help caregivers avoid distressing content aimed at children.
June temperature records are breaking across Europe
The European continental heatwave is continuing, with record June temperatures reported in Germany, Poland and Czechia (BBC News). Today, temperatures in parts of France and Spain are anticipated to rise above 40 degrees Celsius, with associated health and forest fire warning being issued by their governments. Climate change has made extreme European temperatures more likely and is impacting atmospheric circulation patterns: Europe’s hottest five summers on record have all taken place within the last 19 years.
Online racism reflects US hate crime levels
Researchers from New York University have found that the US cities whose residents post the largest number of racist comments on Twitter are also likely to experience high levels of racially motivated hate crimes (The Register). Research of this kind may help with efforts to explore whether there are any causative links and improve tools to monitor online discrimination; it certainly provides more evidence, if needed, that the online world is by no means an isolated bubble.
A series of security flaws left millions of EA Origin users exposed
Player accounts on EA’s Origin gaming platform could have been snooped on without hackers needing to crack their passwords thanks to lazy subdomain hygiene, according to researchers at Check Point and Cyberint (WIRED). Origin is the platform used by EA’s 300 million members to buy and play PC and mobile games including FIFA, Madden NFL, Medal of Honor and The Sims, among others. The researchers found that abandoned subdomains associated with EA’s cloud services could be hijacked and used to steal authentication tokens, leaving gamers at risk of account takeover and identity theft.
Source:wired.co.uk
