Twitter Troll Arrested For Allegedly Tweeting Seizure-Inducing Strobe GIF At Journalist

Kurt Eichenwald

Twitter

A Twitter troll who allegedly tried to cause Newsweek writer Kurt Eichenwald to have a seizure by tweeting a strobing graphic at him has been arrested by the FBI on federal charges, the journalist announced Friday.

The Dallas FBI office confirmed to the Verge that a suspect had been arrested. Eichenwald’s lawyer, Steven Lieberman, told Newsweek that agents arrested the suspect at his home in Salisbury, Maryland, on Friday morning.

The suspect, who was not immediately identified, is expected to appear in Baltimore federal court on Friday afternoon.

BuzzFeed News reached out to the FBI, which is expected to release more information on the case later in the day.

On Dec. 15, Twitter user @jew_goldstein tweeted at Eichenwald, who has previously written about being epileptic, a strobing GIF with text reading: “You deserve a seizure for your posts.”

The tweet has since been deleted and the @jew_goldstein account was suspended.

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Eichenwald’s wife responded on Twitter from his account that the strobing image had caused a seizure and they had alerted police.

In an interview with Good Morning America, Eichenwald said other Twitter users followed suit, sending him strobing GIFs.

“I can't look at my Twitter feed anymore,” Eichenwald said on GMA. “Apparently, a lot of people find this very funny. A lot of people who identify themselves as Trump supporters are loading up my feed with more strobes.”

On Friday, Eichenwald tweeted that more than 40 people tweeted strobing images at him after they learned they could induce seizures.

Quelle: <a href="Twitter Troll Arrested For Allegedly Tweeting Seizure-Inducing Strobe GIF At Journalist“>BuzzFeed

A Security Expert Warned Congress That T-Mobile's DC Cell Network Has Been Hacked

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Rep. Ted Lieu and a group of security researchers have been warning for a year that a vulnerability in the global communications network supporting cell service could offer hackers and foreign powers a way to exploit our phones. Now, according to a cybersecurity expert who contacted Rep. Lieu’s office, it seems hackers may have taken advantage of this security hole to infiltrate cell networks in Washington, DC.

The Washington Free Beacon reported Thursday that it had reviewed documents suggesting that hackers had stolen massive amounts of location data from phones in the DC area. The Free Beacon wrote that the Department of Homeland Security originally compiled the data while monitoring cell towers for suspicious activity.

A spokesperson for Rep. Lieu told BuzzFeed News that his office received a tip late last week from a cybersecurity expert that T-Mobile&#039;s wireless mobile network in Washington, DC may have been compromised by a hack. Rep. Lieu’s office could not substantiate the claims of the security expert (whom Lieu&039;s office did not name), but it notified the Department of Homeland Security of the warning. According to the spokesperson, Homeland Security did not provide any additional information since the supposed security breach may involve a private company. Homeland Security declined to answer BuzzFeed News’ questions about the alleged T-Mobile breach.

T-Mobile declined to comment.

Craig Young, the principal security researcher for the vulnerabilities and exposures research team at the cybersecurity firm Tripwire, told BuzzFeed News that the government should ensure that carriers are vigilant in monitoring what could be hugely invasive threats.

One of the most vulnerable points of telephone companies is the way they connect to one another. An exposed network known as SS7 could let an intruder secretly re-route calls so that a third party could listen in without the caller or their recipient knowing. “The end effect is that anybody can potentially go from having a phone number to intercepting your calls by exploiting SS7 weaknesses,” Young said.

Prompted in part by the claims of the cybersecurity expert, as well as broader concerns of the SS7 vulnerability, Rep. Lieu wrote a letter to Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly on Wednesday. Along with Sen. Ron Wyden, Rep. Lieu asked Kelly what resources Homeland Security had dedicated to addressing SS7-related threats. The lawmakers also asked Kelly whether wireless carriers had done enough to help law enforcement identify vulnerabilities in their mobile infrastructure or disclose previous attempts by foreign actors to use SS7 vulnerabilities to breach their networks.

“We suspect that most Americans simply have no idea how easy it is for a relatively sophisticated adversary to track their movements, tap their calls, and hack their smartphones,” Lieu and Wyden wrote. “We are also concerned that the government has not adequately considered the counterintelligence threat posed by SS7-enabled surveillance.”

A spokesperson for Sen. Wyden told BuzzFeed News that his office had contacted Homeland Security “regarding reports of anomalous cellular network activity, which may involve the SS7 system.”

Since early last year Rep. Lieu has been urging his colleagues on Capitol Hill to investigate the SS7 vulnerability, which poses an array of startling risks. “The applications for this vulnerability are seemingly limitless, from criminals monitoring individual targets to foreign entities conducting economic espionage on American companies to nation states monitoring U.S. government officials,” he said in a letter to the chair and ranking member of the House Government Oversight Committee last April.

It&039;s unclear if the alleged T-Mobile intrusion began through an attack on T-Mobile itself through spearfishing, an intruder posing as a legitimate wireless carrier, or through hardware that spoofs mobile phones into connecting with false cell towers.

Blake Montgomery contributed reporting for this story.

Quelle: <a href="A Security Expert Warned Congress That T-Mobile&039;s DC Cell Network Has Been Hacked“>BuzzFeed

Two Russian Spies Have Been Charged In The Massive Yahoo Email Hack

Dado Ruvic / Reuters

The Justice Department charged four men — two of whom are Russian Federal Security Service, or FSB, officers — Wednesday for stealing the personal information of at least 500 million Yahoo customers in a massive breach that rocked the company&#039;s reputation and slashed hundreds of millions of dollars off its sale to Verizon.

The two non-FSB defendants were criminal hackers hired by the Russian officials to breach Yahoo&039;s network. The stolen account information was used to gain additional content from customers&039; Yahoo accounts and accounts tied to other email providers, including Google.

Both Russian journalists and American diplomatic officials were then targeted using the data stolen in the hack. The charges for what was one of the largest computer intrusions in American history included conspiracy, economic espionage, wire fraud, and aggravated identity theft.

In a move that Acting Assistant Attorney General Mary McCord described as “beyond the pale,” the FSB officials behind the hack were members of a Russian unit that serves as the FBI&039;s liaison on cybercrime in Moscow. “These are the very people that we are supposed to work with cooperatively,” she said during a press conference Wednesday. “They turned against that type of work.”

One of the defendants, Alexsey Alexseyevich Belan, had been on the FBI&039;s most-wanted list for more than three years for cybercrime, McCord said. Another defendant, Karim Baratov, was arrested for the Yahoo breach yesterday in Canada. The US government will ask Russian law enforcement officials to extradite the remaining three defendants, who reside in Russia, said Paul Abbate, the executive assistant director of the FBI&039;s cyber branch.

“The indictment unequivocally shows the attacks on Yahoo were state-sponsored,” said Chris Madsen, Yahoo&039;s assistant general counsel and head of global law enforcement. “We’re committed to keeping our users and our platforms secure and will continue to engage with law enforcement to combat cybercrime.”

In December, Yahoo first revealed that hackers had stolen customer information from 1 billion Yahoo accounts in an attack dating back to 2013. The colossal breach was separate from the major intrusion that the Russian officials were charged with. That data breach was announced in September, when Yahoo said 500 million accounts had been compromised by a state-sponsored hacker in 2014. In both cases Yahoo said users&039; email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, and passwords were likely stolen.

News of the attacks came just months after Verizon announced plans to buy Yahoo for $4.83 billion last summer. The embarrassing disclosures prompted Verizon to seek a nearly 20% discount of Yahoo&039;s sale price, totaling $925 million. But the two companies instead agreed to slash $395 million off the deal price because of the damage from the breaches.

Following the company&039;s review of the 2014 breach, Yahoo said CEO Marissa Mayer would not receive her 2016 annual bonus. Mayer also said she would forgo her 2017 equity award. Together, the pay cut appears to amount to a personal loss of $14 million, but Mayer will still receive a $23 million “golden parachute” once Verizon&039;s purchase of Yahoo is completed later this year.

Read the indictment here:

Quelle: <a href="Two Russian Spies Have Been Charged In The Massive Yahoo Email Hack“>BuzzFeed

Internal Metrics Show How Often Uber’s Self-Driving Cars Need Human Help

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Human drivers were forced to take control of Uber&#039;s self driving cars about once per mile driven in early March during testing in Arizona, according to an internal performance report obtained by BuzzFeed News. The report reveals for the first time how Uber’s self-driving car program is performing, using a key metric for evaluating progress toward fully autonomous vehicles.

Human drivers take manual control of autonomous vehicles during testing for a number of reasons, for example, to address a technical issue or avoid a traffic violation or collision. The self-driving car industry refers to such events as “disengagements,” though Uber uses the term “intervention” in the performance report reviewed by BuzzFeed News. During a series of autonomous tests the week of March 5, Uber saw disengagement rates greater than those publicly reported by some of its rivals in the self-driving car space.

When regulatory issues in December 2016 forced Uber to suspend a self-driving pilot program in San Francisco, the company sent some of its cars to Arizona. Since then, Uber has been testing its autonomous cars along two routes in the state. The first is a multi-lane street called Scottsdale Road — a straight, 24-mile stretch that runs through the city of the same name. According to Uber&039;s performance report on tests for the week of March 5, the company&039;s self-driving cars were able to travel an average of 0.67 miles on Scottsdale Road without human intervention and an average of 2 miles without a “bad experience” — Uber’s classification for incidents in which a car brakes too hard, jerks forcefully or behaves in a way that might startle passengers. Uber described the overall passenger experience for this particular week as “not great,” but noted improvement compared to the prior week&039;s tests, which included one “harmful” incident — and event that might have caused human injury.

Uber has also been testing its autonomous vehicles on a “loop” at Arizona State University. According to the performance report reviewed by BuzzFeed News, self-driving cars used on the ASU loop saw “strong improvement” during the week of March 5, traveling a total of 449 miles in autonomous mode without a “critical” intervention (a case where the system kicked control back to the driver, or the driver regained control to prevent a likely collision). The vehicles were able to drive an average of 7 miles without a “bad experience” that might cause passenger discomfort (a 22% improvement over the week prior) and an average of 1.3 miles without any human intervention (a 15% improvement over the week prior). The cars made 128 trips with passengers, compared to 81 the prior week.

Uber told BuzzFeed its disengagements could also include instances in which awhere the system kicks back control to a driver, and when the car returns control to a human driver toward the end of a trip. The company declined to comment on the internal metrics obtained by BuzzFeed News and its disengagement rate compared to those of competitors. Uber also declined to say how many miles and hours the vehicles in Arizona drove in total the week of March 5.

“To take out the safety drivers, you would want far better performance than these numbers suggest.”

Bryant Walker Smith, a University of South Carolina law professor and a member of member of the US Department of Transportation&039;s Advisory Committee on Automation in Transportation said it’s difficult to draw conclusions about the progress of Uber’s self-driving car program based on just one week of disengagement metrics, adding that the figures suggest that safety drivers appear to intervene regularly out of caution – even in cases where an accident may not be imminent.

“To take out the safety drivers, you would want far better performance than these numbers suggest, and you’d want that to be consistently better performance,” Walker Smith said. “If these are actual bad experiences for someone inside the vehicle, then that probably doesn’t compare very favorably to human driving. How often do people go 10 miles or 10 minutes and have a viscerally bad experience?”

Uber’s internal metrics are specific to its vehicles in Arizona. The state does not require companies testing there to release data on how their self-driving cars perform. California is the only state that requires companies that test self-driving cars on public roads to submit annual reports detailing how many times they “disengage” autonomous mode. Because Uber only returned some self-driving vehicles to San Francisco’s roads this month, after its trials were shut down in the state for not obtaining the proper permits December, it has not yet submitted a public report. But reports submitted by other companies to the California DMV do offer a point of comparison.

Alphabet’s Waymo said in a Jan. 5 report filed with the CA DMV that during the 636,000 miles its self-driving vehicles drove on public roads in California from December 2016 through November 2016, human drivers were forced to take control of their self-driving vehicles 124 times. That’s a rate of 0.2 disengagements per thousand miles — or 0.0002 interventions per mile, compared to Uber’s 0.67 and 1.3 rates on Scottsdale Road and the ASU loop, respectively. But Google’s report also notes that its figures don’t include all disengagements: “As part of testing, our cars switch in and out of autonomous mode many times a day. These disengagements number in the many thousands on an annual basis though the vast majority are considered routine and not related to safety.”

(Here are the CA DMV reports to compare Uber’s testing the week of March 5th in Arizona to the other companies that test on public roads in California and reported their statistics to the DMV for December 2015 through November 2016.)

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has called self-driving cars “existential threat” to his ride-hail business. (If a competitor were to develop autonomous vehicles and run an Uber-like service that did not require giving a cut to drivers, the rides would be cheaper.) In February 2015, Uber poached dozens of top roboticists from Carnegie Mellon University to jump start a self-driving car program. Eighteen months later, Uber launched a pilot program in Pittsburgh that put passengers in the backseats of cars manned by a safety driver and a “copilot” riding shotgun. “Your self-driving Uber is arriving now,” the company wrote on its website. Headlines called it a “landmark” trial, and “the week self-driving cars became real.”

Uber’s self-driving program is quarterbacked by Anthony Levandowski, who helped build the first self-driving Google (now called Waymo) car before leaving to create his own startup, Otto. The ride-hail giant’s self-driving program is embroiled in a lawsuit from Alphabet over allegations that Levandowski stole a crucial part of Waymo’s self-driving technology before leaving. Uber acquired Otto in August, about three months after Levandowski launched the company out of stealth mode.

Levandowski became the self-driving program’s fourth leader in less than two years. Uber CEO Travis Kalanick described their relationship as “brothers from another mother,” saying the pair shared a desire to move autonomous technology from the research phase to the market. A few weeks after the Pittsburgh pilot launched, Levandowski set a new, ambitious goal for Uber’s engineers, according to an internal planning document viewed by BuzzFeed News: Prepare self-driving cars to run with no humans behind the wheel in San Francisco by January 2017.

In the end, in response to concerns raised by engineers who worried the goal was too aggressive, Uber did something far less ambitious. In December 2016, it launched a trial in San Francisco that mirrored its Pittsburgh pilot program: a human safety driver, accompanied by a copilot,” would man each self-driving Volvo on the road in San Francisco. On its first day, one of the vehicles was caught running a red light. Uber attributed the traffic violation to human error, but the New York Times reported in February that “the self-driving car was, in fact, driving itself when it barreled through the red light.”

“When they let us know they were doing the test, we kind of had to play catch-up because nobody had ever asked us that question before.”

Meanwhile, Uber’s self-driving truck division Otto has been working toward its own goals. In October, Ottomade headlines for completing the first publicly known self-driving truck delivery – a 120-mile beer haul along a public highway in Colorado for Anheuser-Busch, with the driver in the back seat.

“When they let us know they were doing the test, we kind of had to play catch-up because nobody had ever asked us that question before,” Mark Savage, deputy chief for the Colorado State Patrol, told BuzzFeed News. “We did put together a protocol that we had them walk through in order to determine whether the test was done safely and it was pretty involved.”

For one month ahead of the demo, the company performed trials along that route for 16 hours a day with human safety drivers behind the wheel, according to a Colorado state planning document obtained by BuzzFeed News. A video showed the truck driver crawling into the sleeper berth for the duration of the ride.

After completing five consecutive tests – a total of 625 miles – that did not necessitate human intervention, Otto embarked on a fully driverless demo at midnight on Oct. 20, with the state patrol “packaging” the truck with troopers during the event much like a motorcade, according to the planning document. The truck included two emergency stop buttons: one near the steering wheel, and one in the sleeper berth, where the driver sat during the ride, Uber told BuzzFeed. The company added the second button specifically for the delivery; In all other tests, Otto drivers remain behind the wheel.

Steven Shladover, chair of the federal Transportation Research Board’s vehicle highway automation committee, said Otto’s testing before the demonstration “tells nothing about whether the system is safe.” He said crashes occur when “some other driver happens to do something stupid. You’re not going to run into those circumstances by driving a few hundred hours.”

“Just the fact that they have however many hundred hours of driving doesn’t prove safety,” Shladover told BuzzFeed. “Putting together a show like that is nice for marketing purposes, but it doesn’t prove anything about the readiness of the technology to be put into public use.”

Quelle: <a href="Internal Metrics Show How Often Uber’s Self-Driving Cars Need Human Help“>BuzzFeed

How To De-Authorize All Of Those Twitter Apps You Forgot About

Hundreds of Twitter accounts were hacked with a swastika through a third party app, which means it&#8217;s probably time to check on your Twitter apps.

Earlier this morning, hackers took over hundreds of Twitter accounts and posted a message in Turkish that included swastikas and a “NaziHolland” hashtag. BBC North America, Reuters Japan, Nike Spain, and Duke University&#039;s Twitter accounts were some of the targets.

A statement from Twitter revealed that the source of the hack was a third party app. The company claims users don&039;t need to take any action, but now might be a good time to review which apps you&039;ve authenticated with your Twitter login details and revoke apps that you no longer use.

bravotv.com / Via realitytvgifs.tumblr.com

It’s *very* simple. Go to twitter.com/settings/applications and review all of the apps you’ve authorized.

Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed News

Then, click “Revoke access” (obvs).

Nicole Nguyen / BuzzFeed News / Emoji One

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Quelle: <a href="How To De-Authorize All Of Those Twitter Apps You Forgot About“>BuzzFeed

This Vibrator Maker Was Secretly Tracking Its Customers' Sexual Activity

We-Vibe

Yes, even your vibrator might be spying on you.

A sex toy company has agreed to pay $3.75 million for secretly collecting customers&#039; data while they were using its vibrators.

Under the agreement, We-Vibe will set aside about $3 million for people who downloaded and used an app that accompanied the vibrator and about $750,000 to customers who just bought its “smart vibrator” before Sept. 26, 2016. Those who controlled the toy with the We-Connect app will get up to $10,000 each, while those who just it will get up to $199.

However, people will probably receive much less due to fees, administration costs, and the number of claims submitted.

The amount of the actual payment to Class members will depend on the number of claims submitted and the total amount available in the respective settlement funds after applicable notice and administration costs, the incentive award, and attorney fees have been paid..

The high-end vibrators are designed for couples, enabling partners to text and video chat on the app, as well as adjust and control the toy through Bluetooth. But what they didn&039;t know was that the Canadian company was tracking how they used their devices, including intimate details like the time and date, the vibration intensity, temperature, and pattern, court documents show.

We-Vibe&039;s app, We-Connect

We-Vibe

The company, which has denied wrongdoing and liability, said it will destroy most of the information it collected.

A woman from Chicago, identified as N.P., sued Standard Innovation Corp., which owns We-Vibe, company back in September. She bought a Rave vibrator for $130 last May and frequently used the app, but said she was never notified We-Vibe was monitoring her. Another woman joined the complaint last month. They both claimed that the “highly offensive” secret data collection caused embarrassment and anxiety.

The women also say We-Vibe violated the Federal Wire Tap Act, privacy law, and made money at their expense.

“(N.P.) would never have purchased a We-Vibe had she known that in order to use its full functionality, (Standard Innovation) would monitor, collect and transmit her usage information through We-Connect,” the claim states.

About 300,000 people purchased We-Vibe devices covered by the settlement, and about 100,000 downloaded and used the app, according to court documents.

We-Vibe said in a statement to BuzzFeed News that it collected “certain analytical information to help us improve our products and the quality” of its app and that users could opt-out of this.

The company has now agreed to clarify and be more transparent about its privacy notices and data collecting practices.

Going forward, customers no longer have to register, create an account, or share their personal information. They can also opt out of sharing anonymous app usage data, the company said, noting that they now have a “new plain language privacy notices” that outlines “how we collect and use data for the app to function and improve We-Vibe products.”

Quelle: <a href="This Vibrator Maker Was Secretly Tracking Its Customers&039; Sexual Activity“>BuzzFeed