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Fake news ‘as a service’ booming among cybercrooks

theregister.co.uk

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Re: Fake news ‘as a service’ booming among cybercrooks

#91

Post by [deleted] »

PeanutNore wrote: post #49
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #4

ok but what is the quality control like on all these tools to help do you illegal stuff? Better or worse than normal software. Is there any open source tools to help you do illegal stuff? Because if you can't see the source I think a good illegal tool moneymaking scheme would be to sell the tools to do illegal stuff and then blackmail the people who did illegal stuff for a part of the money. but that might also be da…

Almost all of the tools used to do legal stuff can also be used to do illegal stuff. You think scam websites are deep down built on Linux and Apache like everything else?

[deleted]

Re: Fake news ‘as a service’ booming among cybercrooks

#92

Post by social_quotient »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #23
burtonator wrote: post #12

I've been working on some algorithms I think can identify fake news easily and reliably. The key part is you have to have a massive dataset of historical information. With Datastreamer (my company) we have about 1PB of news, blogs, and social media from the last 4-5 years. I'm curious if it would make sense to ship an open/public API that would allow people both to report AND check on whether something is fake news.…

What would make more sense is to build a certificate system around this that news organizations can use to declare an article is Fake News Free. Might be a nice business to start riding the Fake News Boom.

Taking this idea. What would be the hypothetical flow for the recent Bloomberg chip article? I’m sure it would have been published with the cert since it’s from Bloomberg but later when it turns out to be less than true or more inflammatory than intended. Do they lose their cert? Or maybe just the article has to persist with the cert rating?

I love the idea, just curious how it works logistically.

Re: Fake news ‘as a service’ booming among cybercrooks

#93

Post by soundwave106 »

olivermarks wrote: post #31

The term 'fake news' is unhelpful. Yellow journalism, deliberately confusing and deflecting writing and scams are as old as printing

Agree that the term wasn't helpful overall (it unfortunately is politically loaded).

But looking at the original paper (already posted but re-linked here -- http://info.digitalshadows.com/rs/457-XEY-671/images/Digital...) I guess the author was trying to link a "current news event" with various other disinformation that is more relevant from a business perspective -- black hat SEO strategies, site / brand spoofing, social media spamming, and the like.

I'm not sure how helpful the high-level overview is either :) but from what I can tell the intended audience was non-technical. One that, say, might not even be familiar with any of the above terms in the first place, yet is vaguely familiar with the concept that cyber threats exist, and might be looking at purchasing something from a digital security company (like, um, Digital Shadows) to help this. Businesses absolutely would be concerned about brand protection and preventing any malice (digital or otherwise) that could damage the business.

Re: Fake news ‘as a service’ booming among cybercrooks

#94

Post by tyingq »

jsonne wrote: post #6

I gave a talk at Denver startup week last year about the underlying profit incentives tied to fake news and how industry reforms in the way media companies do business could not only benefit the advertisers but also stop Fake news. At the end of the talk I had 3 people ask how they could make fake news to promote their startups. That this has turned into a booming industry surprises me 0%, though it is depressing.

It's been pretty pervasive in certain niches for a long time. Homeopathic health products, for example. You can find lots of ads disguised as news reports that are more than a decade old. Dr Oz has been slinging crap for a similar time period.

Re: Fake news ‘as a service’ booming among cybercrooks

#95

Post by whyaduck »

paulddraper wrote: post #76
whyaduck wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lockheed's involved in the maintenance (and previously, manufacture) of thermonuclear weapons. I'm pretty comfortable with my comparison.

Thermonuclear weapons also have been the single most effective peacekeeping tool in the history of the world.

That's a remarkably confident statement that's completely unprovable.

I could just as easily posit easy international travel, world trade, mass media, democracy, and many other things as more effective than h-bombs for bringing about the relative peace of the late 20th/early 21st century.

Those particular things have the added benefit that they generally don't risk the side-effect of world annihilation.

Re: Fake news ‘as a service’ booming among cybercrooks

#96

Post by kradroy »

jsonne wrote: post #6

I gave a talk at Denver startup week last year about the underlying profit incentives tied to fake news and how industry reforms in the way media companies do business could not only benefit the advertisers but also stop Fake news. At the end of the talk I had 3 people ask how they could make fake news to promote their startups. That this has turned into a booming industry surprises me 0%, though it is depressing.

8 years ago I used NLP to generate fake user profile bios for a social media company (not one you've heard of). The SEO/marketing guys went nuts over it and started using it for everything. It was super effective and they had the money to scale it. Eventually Panda came out and hosed the rankings on the blogs/domains they used it for.

Around the same time I discovered https://narrativescience.com/ and read about how they accomplished the same task. It was essentially similar to what I had done - write tons of templates, like Mad Libs, and then algorithmically fill in the blanks. Mine sometimes generated nonsense (e.g. "I love Mozart! I saw him in concert last year."). But for our purposes, or rather the purposes the marketing people came up with, it didn't matter much.

I saw the list of Narrative Science's investors and noted that In-Q-Tel was on there. Then I asked myself why the CIA's R&D funding arm would want that. The answer was obvious - to generate misinformation to spread to adversary orgs/states. Drown the real message in a sea of lies and your foes will waste more resources trying to find the truth.

Re: Fake news ‘as a service’ booming among cybercrooks

#98

Post by whyaduck »

forapurpose wrote: post #72
whyaduck wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My thought experiment for considering the moral limits of capitalism: If producing Soylent Green were legal and profitable, would there be actors willing to produce and sell it? If you answer no, see: Philip Morris, Lockheed, Beretta, etc.

Like other commenters, I think this thought experiment goes much too far. On the other hand, many companies worked with the Nazis, work with the Saudis, Russians, and many others today, and sell all sorts of things to oppressive governments including the tools of oppression (such as those selling censorship and hacking tools to various dictatorships[0]). If the U.S. became an authoritarian dictatorship, I don't doubt…

Capitalism is capitalism. It's limited by laws and culture. In the US, that means it's limited by laws - Wall Street doesn't care about culture.

Re: Fake news ‘as a service’ booming among cybercrooks

#99

Post by tareqak »

whyaduck wrote: post #52
NeedMoreTea wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're being downvoted for some reason, but the point on morality and capitalism is sound. For examples you might have been better choosing cases where the production rather than use by customers is problematic. Radium paint and dials, asbestos, prior to 20th century regulations food and medicine fraud and adulteration so endemic that finding just the correct product was almost impossible. Which is what led those reg…

Allowing businesses to divorce themselves from responsibility for the effects of what they produce, regardless of consumer choice, is too easy. I have no idea what the equivalent of "Saturday morning cartoons" is today, but 20 years ago, that slot was filled with commercials for sugary foods, targeted at children. Now we have payday loans, "buy here pay here" and a host of other services that capitalize on unsophisti…

What if my business is the one of informing people of the possible risks their neighbors or other inhabitants of their nations pose to them?

Re: Fake news ‘as a service’ booming among cybercrooks

#100

Post by freehunter »

duxup wrote: post #67
jsonne wrote: post #6

I gave a talk at Denver startup week last year about the underlying profit incentives tied to fake news and how industry reforms in the way media companies do business could not only benefit the advertisers but also stop Fake news. At the end of the talk I had 3 people ask how they could make fake news to promote their startups. That this has turned into a booming industry surprises me 0%, though it is depressing.

I went to a local tech event. A few folks gave talks about their products / services and their marketing. A few included people straight up talking about paying "influencers" or pod casters, or youtubers, to mention their product or service and so forth. Nobody seemed to note anything about disclosing that it was an advertisement or not. I liked to think that maybe they just assumed the influencer was going to mentio…

I'm a local "influencer" [1] and am part of a local group of other influencers for the city I live in and marking a promotion as such just goes without saying. The FTC even has rules on influencer promotions [2]. I see a lot of sponsored posts from other bloggers and influencers I'm friends with and they're all marked as "#ad" or "#sponsored" or something along those lines.

No one is saying "I'm running an AdSense campaign but forgot to tell Google that they need to mark it as an advertisement!" It goes without saying. These people are professionals same as anyone else and know the rules of their trade same as anyone else.

[1] "influencer" meaning someone with a significant presence on social media, blogs, podcasts, YouTube, etc.

[2] https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/ftc...

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