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China wants to become the world's leading digital power. President Xi Jingping wants nothing less than to create his own Internet. An Internet in which Western values such as freedom and privacy do not exist. What is in store for us? Today, Westerners take it for granted that national borders are meaningless on the Internet and that we can inform ourselves freely. By contrast, we traditionally look with a mixture of pity and incomprehension at countries like China, where the Internet is supposedly lagging behind our development. We underestimate the fact that China wants to go its own way and is actively shaping its own Internet according to the ideas of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The goal is to create its own Chinese-dominated worldwide Internet, but separate from the West. To this end, the "Golden Shield" project was launched back in 1998. Under the direction of the Ministry of State Security of the People's Republic, it was put into operation for the first ...

The infamous Pegasus spy program has been found on several phones of French cabinet members, according to media reports. The devices are said to have been infected in 2019 and 2020. French media have published new findings in the espionage affair involving the Israeli company NSO Group. According to the report, the phones of at least five French cabinet members have been infected with the Pegasus Trojan, which is being developed by the controversial company. Two representatives involved in the case, who did not want to be named, confirmed to the AFP news agency on Friday a corresponding report by the Mediapart news portal . An investigation by the IT security authority revealed that the 2019 and 2020 phones had been infected with Pegasus, Mediapart reported. Among those affected are Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer and Housing Secretary Emmanuelle Wargon. The phone of a diplomat at the Élysée Palace was also affected, the report said. Secretary of State changes phone "My ph...

Only three weeks ago, unknown persons had paralyzed the website of the Federal Election Commissioner. It had collapsed under the data load after a large number of calls from the Internet and was temporarily no longer accessible. Last week, a spokesperson assured that servers important for the federal election had not been affected, however. According to information from "Business Insider", another hacker attack apparently occurred this Wednesday. According to the report, the Federal Information Technology Center (ITZBund), the central IT service provider of the federal administration, classifies the event as a "major incident", i.e. a serious security event. According to Business Insider, software (web shell) was apparently installed on a so-called Confluence program of the Federal Statistical Office, whose head is also the Federal Election Commissioner. This enables external access to servers and file systems. How exactly this happened and whether data was leaked i...

According to research by the Wall Street Journal, 5.8 million accounts were on an internal Facebook list that was subject to special rules. Now, the company's own auditors are getting involved. The accusations are serious: Facebook is said to have systematically protected prominent users from consequences when they posted false information, insults or even nude pictures of third parties. Following a series of articles in the Wall Street Journal, the Oversight Board, the company's formally independent review body, has now become involved. Among other things, the members want to clarify whether they were adequately informed by Facebook on the issue. Facebook must become more transparent when deciding whether content should remain on the platform or be deleted, the panel stressed in a blog entry on Tuesday . The newspaper had published a whole series of accusations in a series of articles after analyzing internal emails from the social media company. These include the system cal...

 After the attack on the IT company Kaseya in July 2021, the master key for the locked data came from the FBI - but with a delay. Several hundred companies are affected in July 2021 when the hacker group Revil exploits a vulnerability of the IT service provider Kaseya: Using malware, data on the hard drives of numerous customers is encrypted. The extent of the attack is particularly obvious in Sweden, where almost all branches of the supermarket chain Coop have to be temporarily closed. The attackers' ransom demand for decrypting the locked data: 70 million US dollars (about 59 million euros) in the digital currency Bitcoin. Kaseya attack: FBI waited almost 3 weeks to hand over keys A few weeks after the attack, a "trusted third party" plays a master key to Kaseya; whether the company had to pay for it, and if so, what sums, remains open. Now it should be clear who that third party was and why hacked customers had to wait nearly three weeks for redemption from their threa...

A few weeks ago, it became known that the German Federal Criminal Police Office is one of the customers of the Israeli NSO Group and uses its Pegasus Trojan. The Society for Civil Liberties sees this as a violation of fundamental rights - and is calling for a review by the Federal Data Protection Commissioner. The Society for Civil Liberties (GFF) has filed a complaint with the Federal Data Protection Commissioner Ulrich Kelber against the use of the Pegasus spying software in Germany. At the beginning of September, it had become known that the Federal Criminal Police Office had also procured the spying software from the Israeli company NSO Group and has been using Pegasus since the beginning of the year. The BKA states that this is a heavily scaled-down version of the spying software. But even this version violates current regulations, according to GFF. "By using the Trojan, a private, foreign company, which presumably also spies on journalists and human rights activists on behal...

There is a lack of clarity in many companies regarding the number of cloud services used and the amount of data stored. The risks of ransomware attacks and data loss have exploded as a result of the pandemic-driven IT transformation: In the Corona crisis, many companies switched to home offices - but protecting the new IT infrastructure implemented for this purpose was not a high priority. The resulting gaps and vulnerabilities are having a massive impact on the future: According to the study, companies in Germany will have to spend an additional average of almost two million euros and hire 24 new IT employees to cover the new technologies and the new vulnerabilities. What's more, companies will have to reckon with a higher risk of ransomware attacks and data loss for the next two years. These are the key findings of the "Vulnerability Lag Report" recently conducted by U.S. data solutions specialist Veritas Technologies. Cloud environments are most vulnerable to vulnerabi...

This should not suit Mark Zuckerberg at all: In the "Facebook Files," the Wall Street Journal reveals explosive documents from the company. How social is the network really? Six journalists have spent the past few weeks analyzing the leaked documents: including internal memos, PowerPoint presentations and discussions from Facebook's internal company chat channel. "We show that these are not isolated cases of failure that caught the company by surprise. Rather, there is widespread acceptance here," says Jeff Horwitz. He is the lead author of the "Facebook Files" series of articles in the "Wall Street Journal" and Silicon Valley reporter for the business newspaper. "Facebook doesn't care much. It only takes action when a case generates public attention." Exemption rules for millions of celebrities In the latest article, the Wall Street Journal quotes from an internal protocol. According to this, a Facebook manager is said to have ...

Microsoft discovers a criminal network that makes gigantic profits with a phishing service. The masterminds behind "BulletProofLink" are probably responsible for many of the current phishing attacks with email spam and are cashing in big time. Email spam is not only incredibly annoying, it is also dangerous. This is because the fake messages are used by gangsters to try to capture sensitive data from users, such as passwords or account information. Companies are often the target of phishing attacks in order to blackmail or spy on them. One criminal group is currently apparently responsible for a particularly large number of attacks on companies, offering a thriving phishing service under the name "BulletProofLink". Microsoft's security department has analyzed how far this goes and what methods the gangsters use. In principle, the group acts like a clever legal service provider. It offers construction kits, email templates, hosting and automated services. Among o...