News of the Cyber World

[kyonides]

Amazon Shuts Down Man’s Entire Smart Home After Delivery Worker Claims Racism

Earlier this month, Amazon locked a man out of his account, disrupting his extensive smart home system. The suspension was driven by a delivery driver who claimed the man used a racial slur through his automated doorbell system. The only problem is that the man captured the entire interaction on his security system — the communication to the worker was an automated greeting of, “Excuse me, can I help you?”
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“On Wednesday, May 31, 2023, I finally regained access to my Amazon account after an unexpected and unwarranted lockout that lasted nearly a week,” Jackson shared. “This incident left me with a house full of unresponsive devices, a silent Alexa, and a lot of questions.”

Jackson’s smart home system primarily uses Alexa to communicate with Amazon Echo gadgets. This system was hampered by the lockout, making the devices unusable. Jackson was still able to use Siri and locally hosted services to control his smart home system in spite of the lockout.

The lockout was caused by a report made by an Amazon delivery driver. The driver allegedly mistook an automated message from Jackson’s doorbell for a racist remark. Jackson provided video proof to contradict the claim, but Amazon did not respond right away, and the account remained locked for almost a week.

“I reviewed the footage and confirmed that no such comments had been made. Instead, the doorbell had issued an automated response: ‘Excuse me, can I help you?’ The driver, who was walking away and wearing headphones, must have misinterpreted the message,” Jackson explained. The confused homeowner apparently does not believe that the Amazon employee would engage in a hate hoax.

 I still remember an article on a family in Texas that felt they could die due to the extreme weather conditions thanks to an automated system that didn't allow them to cool their homes properly. Now we see how Amazon's system try to that man out of his own smart home. What if he had no alternate way to manage all those devices?
Seriously,  automated systems suck.

Mom Loses $100K 401(K) to Tinder Scammer in ‘Pig Butchering’ Trick

The recently divorced mother said the man she met on the app convinced her to invest in fake cryptocurrency schemes just after she left her second marriage, the Daily Mail reported Sunday.
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Rebecca Holloway reportedly lost over $100,000 to a group pretending to be a French entrepreneur that described himself as Fred who claimed he lived in Philadelphia and had a daughter.

“She is the third victim to come forward in recent months about a cruel scam known as ‘pig butchering’ — whereby victims are effectively ‘fattened up’ with a fake romantic relationship before being ‘butchered’ by fraudulent investment advice,” the Mail report said.

In October, the “pig butchery” scam resulted in a warning from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, according to the New York Post.

Satnam Narang, a senior research engineer at cyber exposure management company Tenable, told the outlet the scam artists are using the “long con” by spending weeks targeting one person.

They also use social media and apps such as Tinder for their schemes to connect with their victims, later swindling them for large amounts of money through crypto investments.

Military Monitors Social Media for Mean Posts About Generals

The U.S. Army’s Protective Services Battalion (PSB), the Department of Defense’s equivalent of the Secret Service, now monitors social media to see if anyone has posted negative comments about the country’s highest-ranking officers.

Per a report by the Intercept, the PSB’s remit includes protecting officers from “embarrassment,” in addition to more pressing threats like kidnapping and assassination.

An Army procurement document from 2022 obtained by the Intercept reveals that the PSB now monitors social media for “negative sentiment” about the officers under its protection, as well as for “direct, indirect, and veiled” threats.
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Per the report, the Army intends not just to monitor platforms for “negative sentiment,” but also to pinpoint the location of posters.

The Army’s new toolkit goes far beyond social media surveillance of the type offered by private contractors like Dataminr, which helps police and military agencies detect perceived threats by scraping social media timelines and chatrooms for various keywords. Instead, Army Protective Services Battalion investigators would seemingly combine social media data with a broad variety of public and nonpublic information, all accessible through a “universal search selector.”

These sources of information include “signal-rich discussions from illicit threat-actor communities and access to around-the-clock conversations within threat-actor channels,” public research, CCTV feeds, radio stations, news outlets, personal records, hacked information, webcams, and — perhaps most invasive — cellular location data.

 Why does a term like dystopia come to my mind right now?