FBI starts three probes in suspected Russian hacking of U.S presidential elections

Image Credit: Venture Beat

  19 Feb 2017 , 11:11

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation is pursuing at least three separate probes relating to alleged Russian hacking of the U.S. presidential elections, according to five current and former government officials with direct knowledge of the situation. While the fact that the FBI is investigating had been reported previously by the New York Times and other media, these officials shed new light on both the precise number of inquires and their focus.

The FBI’s Pittsburgh field office, which runs many cyber security investigations, is trying to identify the people behind breaches of the Democratic National Committee’s computer systems, the officials said. Those breaches, in 2015 and the first half of 2016, exposed the internal communications of party officials as the Democratic nominating convention got underway and helped undermine support for Hillary Clinton.

The Pittsburgh case has progressed furthest, but Justice Department officials in Washington believe there is not enough clear evidence yet for an indictment, two of the sources said. Meanwhile the bureau’s San Francisco office is trying to identify the people who called themselves “Guccifer 2” and posted emails stolen from Clinton campaign manager John Podesta’s account, the sources said. Those emails contained details about fundraising by the Clinton Foundation and other topics.

Beyond the two FBI field offices, FBI counterintelligence agents based in Washington are pursuing leads from informants and foreign communications intercepts, two of the people said. This counterintelligence inquiry includes but is not limited to examination of financial transactions by Russian individuals and companies who are believed to have links to Trump associates. The transactions under scrutiny involve investments by Russians in overseas entities that appear to have been undertaken through middlemen and front companies, two people briefed on the probe said.

Reuters could not confirm which entities and individuals were under scrutiny. Scott Smith, the FBI’s new assistant director for cyber crime, declined to comment this week on which FBI offices were doing what or how far they had progressed. The White House had no comment on Friday on the Russian hacking investigations. A spokesman pointed to a comment Trump made during the campaign, in which he said: “As far as hacking, I think it was Russia, but I think we also get hacked by other countries and other people.”

During a news conference Thursday, President Donald Trump said he had no business connections to Russia. The people who spoke to Reuters also corroborated a Tuesday New York Times report that Americans with ties to Trump or his campaign had repeated contacts with current and former Russian intelligence officers before the November election. Those alleged contacts are among the topics of the FBI counterintelligence investigation.

Reuters

Fake news: Facebook is rolling out new tools to identify and report stories

Image: Which.co.uk

By tech2 News Staff /  16 Dec 2016 , 10:13

Facebook has announced the rollout of new tools that will help the company fight the menace of ‘Fake News.’ This comes right after the company came under fire from US President Barak Obama and governments across the world to accountability for the inaccurate or fake news that is shared on the platform.

Facebook has pointed out that the tools will allow users to quickly report any fake news story using the ‘Report’ feature already present for the posts on Facebook. The company has added a new “It’s a fake news story” in the options and allows the users to mark the story as Fake and message the person who posted the story to notify about the story. Apart from relying on crowdsourcing to report the potential ‘Fake news stories,’ the company has also announced a partnership with third-party fact-checking companies.

Facebook detailed that it is working with five companies about the fact-checking organisations which include ABC News, AP, FactCheck.org, Snopes and Politifact as reported by The Guardian. All the third-party fact-checking websites are signatories of Poynter’s International Fact Checking Code of Principles.  If a news story is pointed out as inaccurate, the post will include “Disputed by 3rd Party Fact-Checkers” providing a link to the article refuting the original news article.

One interesting thing to note is that both the features, Third-Party Fact Checkers and Crowd-sourcing to report articles do not work in isolation. The news articles are sent to the face checking websites after the original article has been reported as ‘Fake Story’ by sufficient amount of users. People sharing the disputed articles will get a warning sign informing them about the disputed status of the article.

According to the company, the ‘Disputed’ articles will figure lower on the newsfeed and the publisher or the person who posted the article can not promote the article. The company announced that it had removed the ability to spoof domain names to stop confusion caused by such domains.