Twitter Hack Highlights Security Concerns

This month the theme at Ethics Forum has been personal privacy and Big Tech. On Thursday, July 16, Twitter announced that 130 Twitter accounts were hacked in what constitutes one of the biggest security breaches of the social media platform.

The accounts that were hacked include high profile figures such as Barak Obama, Joe Biden, and Elon Musk.

Twitter reported, “For a small subset of these accounts, the attackers were able to gain control of the accounts and then send Tweets from those accounts.”

The first public signs of the intrusion came around 3 PM EDT on Wednesday, when the Twitter account for the cryptocurrency exchange Binance tweeted a message saying it had partnered with “CryptoForHealth” to give back 5000 bitcoin to the community, with a link where people could donate or send money.

The hack actually began on Tuesday night, when several verified Twitter accounts began tweeting out posts asking users to send them money through bitcoin. The hackers targeted employees with access to internal systems and tools in what the company described as a successful “coordinated social engineering attack.” The hackers raised the equivalent of over $115,000.

There is evidence that this attack was perpetrated by individuals who have specialized in hijacking social media accounts via “SIM swapping,” an increasingly rampant form of crime that involves bribing, hacking or coercing employees at mobile phone and social media companies into providing access to a target’s account.

KrebsOnSecurity reports a security source at one of the largest U.S.-based mobile carriers, who said the “j0e” and “dead” Instagram accounts are tied to a notorious SIM swapper who goes by the nickname “PlugWalkJoe.” Investigators have been tracking PlugWalkJoe because he is thought to have been involved in multiple SIM swapping attacks over the years that preceded high-dollar bitcoin heists.

Twitter has made this statement: "We have also been taking aggressive steps to secure our systems while our investigations are ongoing. We’re still in the process of assessing longer-term steps that we may take and will share more details as soon as we can."

Twitter removed any tweets across its platform that included screenshots of its internal tools, and in some cases temporarily suspended the ability of those accounts to tweet further.

Another Twitter account — @shinji — also was tweeting out screenshots of Twitter’s internal tools. Minutes before Twitter terminated the @shinji account, it was seen publishing a tweet saying “follow @6,” referring to the account hijacked from Lucky225.

Related reading: Twitter Says 130 Accounts Targeted; Twitter Hack: What Went Wrong; Regulation of Big Tech; Personal Privacy and Data Collection; Notre Dame-IBM Launch Tech Ethics Lab; Penalties for Prosecuted Cyber Crimes

Areas of Ethical Conversation

Philosophy 301 students will find this glossary of Ethics helpful.

Bioethics: concerns the ethical controversies brought about by advances in biology and medicine. Public attention was drawn to these questions by abuses of human subjects in biomedical experiments, especially during the Second World War, but with recent advances in bio-technology, bioethics has become a fast-growing academic and professional area of inquiry. Issues include consideration of cloning, stem cell research, transplant trade, genetically modified food, human genetic engineering, genomics, infertility treatment, etc.

Business Ethics: examines ethical principles and moral or ethical problems that can arise in a business environment. This includes Corporate Social Responsibility, a concept whereby organizations consider the interests of society by taking responsibility for the impact of their activities and operations on customers, employees, shareholders, communities and the environment, over and above the statutory obligation to comply with legislation.

Environmental Ethics: considers the ethical relationship between human beings and the natural environment. It addresses questions like "Should we continue to clear cut forests for the sake of human consumption?", :Should we continue to make gasoline powered vehicles, depleting fossil fuel resources while the technology exists to create zero-emission vehicles?", :What environmental obligations do we need to keep for future generations?", "Is it right for humans to knowingly cause the extinction of a species for the (perceived or real) convenience of humanity?"

Legal Ethics: an ethical code governing the conduct of people engaged in the practice of law. Model rules usually address the client-lawyer relationship, duties of a lawyer as advocate in adversary proceedings, dealings with persons other than clients, law firms and associations, public service, advertising and maintaining the integrity of the profession. Respect of client confidences, truthfulness in statements to others, and professional independence are some of the defining features of legal ethics.

Media Ethics: deals with the specific ethical principles and standards of media in general, including the ethical issues relating to journalism, advertising and marketing, and entertainment media.

Medical Ethics: the study of moral values and judgments as they apply to medicine. Historically, Western medical ethics may be traced to guidelines on the duty of physicians in antiquity, such as the Hippocratic Oath (at its simplest, "to practice and prescribe to the best of my ability for the good of my patients, and to try to avoid harming them"), and early rabbinic, Muslim and Christian teachings. Six of the values that commonly apply to medical ethics discussions are: Beneficence (a practitioner should act in the best interest of the patient, Non-maleficence ("first, do no harm"), Autonomy (the patient has the right to refuse or choose their treatment), Justice (concerning the distribution of scarce health resources, and the decision of who gets what treatment), Dignity (both the patient and the practitioner have the right to dignity), Honesty (truthfulness and respect for the concept of informed consent).

Information Ethics: investigates the ethical issues arising from the development and application of computers and information technologies. It is concerned with issues like the privacy of information, whether artificial agents may be moral, cyber ethics, how to behave in the infosphere, and ownership and copyright problems arising from the creation, collection, recording, distribution, processing, etc, of information.

Virtue Ethics (or Virtue Theory) is an approach to Ethics that emphasizes an individual's character as the key element of ethical thinking, rather than rules about the acts themselves (Deontology) or their consequences (Consequentialism).

Information Ethics

What is information ethics?  Basically, information ethics pertains to collection, distribution and use of information obtained by individuals, corporations, or governments. Information ethics is related to computer ethics and the philosophy of information.

It considers moral issues surrounding informational privacy, how agents should behave in the infosphere, problems arising from creation, collection, recording, distribution, and processing of information, intellectual property and copyright, digital divide, and digital rights.
Dilemmas regarding the life of information are becoming increasingly important in a society that is defined as "the information society". Information transmission and literacy are essential concerns in establishing an ethical foundation that promotes fair, equitable, and responsible practices. Information ethics broadly examines issues related to ownership, access, privacy, security, and community.

Many of these issues are difficult to resolve due to fundamental tensions between Western ideas of morality with emphasis on the individual and Eastern ideas of morality with greater emphasis on the community as a whole. The dispute between Google and the government of the People's Republic of China reflects such a cultural tension.

Ten Commandments of Computer Ethics

The ethical values as defined in 1992 by the Computer Ethics Institute; a nonprofit organization whose mission is to advance technology by ethical means, lists these rules as a guide to computer ethics:

1. Thou shalt not use a computer to harm other people.
2. Thou shalt not interfere with other people's computer work.
3. Thou shalt not snoop around in other people's computer files.
4. Thou shalt not use a computer to steal.
5. Thou shalt not use a computer to bear false witness.
6. Thou shalt not copy or use proprietary software for which you have not paid.
7. Thou shalt not use other people's computer resources without authorization or proper compensation.
8. Thou shalt not appropriate other people's intellectual output.
9. Thou shalt think about the social consequences of the program you are writing or the system you are designing.
10. Thou shalt always use a computer in ways that ensure consideration and respect for your fellow humans (Computer Ethics Institute, 1992).

Related reading: UNESCO Handbook of Information Ethics; Microsoft's Cyberspace 2025: Today's Decision, Tomorrow's Terrain

RSF Urges Mirrors of Endangered News Sites

(RSF/IFEX) - 8 February 2012 - Filtering, denial of service attacks, withdrawal of content - censors use many different methods to silence news websites. In addition to drawing attention to these acts of censorship and providing the victims with legal, material and financial help, Reporters Without Borders has now decided to provide them with technical assistance as well.

So that independent news websites that are targeted by cyber-attacks and government blocking can continue posting information online, Reporters Without Borders is going to start mirroring sites. The first sites to be mirrored are those of the Chechen magazine Dosh and the Sri Lankan online newspaper Lanka-e News. We urge Internet users all over the world to create more mirrors of these sites in an act of solidarity.

If a cyber-attack renders Doshdu.ru inaccessible again, as it was during last December's parliamentary elections in Russia, Internet users will be able to access the exact copy created by Reporters Without Borders, http://dosh.rsf.org . The mirror will be regularly and automatically updated.

Mirror sites can also be used to circumvent blocking by governments. For example, the Lanka-e-News site, http://lankaenews.com , has been blocked in Sri Lanka since October (by blocking the site domain name or the hosting server's IP address), but Internet users in Sri Lanka will be able to access the Reporters Without Borders mirror site, http://lankaenews.rsf.org , which is hosted on another server with another domain name.

If the mirror is itself later also blocked, the creation of further mirror sites together with a regularly updated list of these mirrors will continue to render the blocking ineffective in a Streisand effect.

Reporters Without Borders will soon create other mirrors and urges Internet users who want to help combat censorship and have the ability to host a site on a web server to follow suit. A list of the mirror sites will be updated on this page. If you want to participate, send the URL of the mirror site you have created to wefightcensorship [at] rsf.org. We will add it to the list below. The next mirroring operations launched by Reporters Without Borders will be reported on the @RSF_RWB and @RSFNet Twitter accounts with the #RSFmirror hashtag.

List of sites mirrored by Reporters Without Borders

doshdu.ru
Dosh, which covers politics and current affairs throughout the Russian Caucasus, received the Reporters Without Borders press freedom prize in 2009 for the courage and quality of its reporting. Despite frequent attempts to intimidate its staff, it is one of the very few independent sources of news about Chechnya, Ingushetia and Dagestan, the victims of a low intensity civil war. Its website is often the target of DDoS attacks, the latest of which was during Russia's disputed parliamentary elections on 4 December 2011. The site's content and all of its files were completed deleted in 2010.

Mirror 1 : http://dosh.rsf.org/


lankaenews.com
Lanka-e-News is one of the few independent news outlets in Sri Lanka, where a government licence is needed to publish news online. As Lanka-e-News does not have a licence, the site has been blocked since October 2011. Its headquarters in a Colombo suburb were badly damaged by an arson attack in January 2011.

Mirror 1: http://lankaenews.rsf.org/


How to create a mirror site

To mirror one of the sites on the above list, you can:

Either install website copying software on your server and run it at regular intervals in order to have an updated version of the mirrored site (we recommend copying the content of the existing mirror rather than the original site in order not to overload the original)

Or download a compressed file of the mirrored site (available for all the Reporters Without Borders mirrors at http://mirroradress/archive.tar ), decompress it and use ftp to transfer all the files to your server.


For more information:

Reporters Without Borders
47, rue Vivienne
75002 Paris
France
rsf (@) rsf.org
Phone: +33 1 44 83 84 84
Fax: +33 1 45 23 11 51
http://www.rsf.org/

Stop SOPA and PIPA and Piracy?

Wikipedia and Google joined hundreds of other websites on Wednesday in a sprawling online protest against legislation in the US Congress intended to crack down on Internet piracy.

Wikipedia shut down the English version of its online encyclopaedia for 24 hours to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa) introduced in the House of Representatives and the Senate version, the Protect IP Act (Pipa).

Google blotted out the celebrated logo on its US home page with a black banner and published an exhortation to users to “Tell Congress: Please don’t censor the Web!”

Like Wikipedia, social news site reddit also went dark, urging visitors to call their lawmaker or sign a petition opposing the House and Senate bills. “These bills provide overly broad mechanisms for enforcement of copyright which would restrict innovation and threaten the existence of websites with user-submitted content,” reddit said.

Culture and technology blog Boing Boing also took itself offline to protest what it called “legislation that would certainly kill us forever”.

Reporters Without Borders shut down its English-language website for 24 hours warning that the bills “would sacrifice online freedom of expression in the name of combating piracy”.

Blogging platform WordPress.com covered its home page with black banners with the word ‘censored’ as did technology magazine Wired.

The popular Cheezburger humour network posted messages of opposition to the bills on all of its 58 sites, which include icanhascheezburger.com, FAIL Blog and The Daily What.

The draft legislation has won the backing of Hollywood, the music industry, the National Association of Manufacturers and other groups.—AFP

Deputy Secretary of Defense on Cyber Threat

Report from Paris, outlining 3 "avenues of action." Read it here at GlobalSecurity.org

FCC Rules on "Network Neutrality"

(ARTICLE 19/IFEX) - London 22.12.10 - The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted 3-2 for a new rule on "network neutrality" to ensure that internet service providers do not discriminate against internet sites and services. The net neutrality rules, which came out on 21 December, set broad principles but provide limited protection to users and providers of information or services.

"The Federal Communications Commission reaffirmation of the need for an open internet to promote freedom of expression is a welcome move," said Dr Agnès Callamard, executive director of ARTICLE 19. "However, the rules adopted are weak and do not provide for adequate safeguards against discrimination, especially in relation to mobile broadband," continued Callamard.

The FCC network neutrality rule adopts three basic principles for all internet service providers (ISPs) including cable, telephone and mobile companies: 1) ISPs must be transparent in their network practices to consumers and content and service providers; 2) ISPs are prohibited from blocking lawful sites and services; and 3) ISPs are prohibited from "unreasonable" discrimination of content and services.

However, under the new rules, mobile communications are not as stringently protected as landline communications. While websites and other applications which compete with mobile ISPs services cannot be blocked, the rules do not directly prohibit other services from being restricted. All ISPs are also allowed to restrict access to content and services for reasonable network management. More positively, consumers and providers may file complaints about unlawful limits which will be heard by the FCC on a fast track basis.

ARTICLE 19 believes that network neutrality is essential to allow individuals to "seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers" as protected under international human rights law. In particular, the following principles should be adopted to protect freedom of expression on line:

• The Internet should remain open so that everyone is able to send and receive the content, use the services and run the applications of their choice, on the device of their choice, within the law;
• There should be no discrimination in the treatment of Internet traffic, based on the device, content, author, or the origin and/or destination of the content, service or application;
• Meaningful information about any traffic management practices must be made available to all stakeholders, end users and businesses that rely on broadband infrastructure to reach their customers.

Network neutrality is currently being debated in countries and international bodies around the world, including at the European Union. Earlier this month, ARTICLE 19 joined with 18 internet companies and groups including Skype, Ebay, and Consumer Focus in writing to UK Culture Minister Ed Vaizey calling on the UK government to adopt stronger rules on network neutrality.

Click on the following link to read an FCC news release regarding the decision:
fcc_acts_to_preserve_internet_freedom_and_openness.doc (60 KB)

Click here to read the letter to Minister Ed Vaizey


For more information:
ARTICLE 19: Global Campaign for Free Expression
Free Word Centre
60 Farringdon Road
London
EC1R 3GA
United Kingdom
info (@) article19.org
Phone: +44 20 7324 2517
Fax: +44 20 7490 0566
http://www.article19.org/