Election Security | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Google on Wednesday revealed that it suspended over 39.2 million advertiser accounts in 2024, with a majority of them identified and blocked by its systems before it could serve harmful ads to users. In all, the tech giant said it stopped 5.1 billion bad ads, restricted 9.1 billion ads, and blocked or restricted ads on 1.3 billion pages last year. It also suspended over 5 million accounts for scam-related violations. In comparison, Google suspended over 12.7 million advertiser accounts, stopped 5.5 billion bad ads, restricted 6.9 billion ads, and blocked or restricted ads on 2.1 billion pages in 2023. The top six ad policy violations included ad network abuse (793.1 million), trademark misuse (503.1 million), personalized ads (491.3 million), legal requirements (280.3 million), financial services (193.7 million), and misrepresentation (146.9 million), among others. Most of the pages on which its ads were blocked or restricted include sexual content, dangerous or derogatory con...

U.S. federal prosecutors on Friday unsealed criminal charges against three Iranian nationals who are allegedly employed with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) for their targeting of current and former officials to steal sensitive data. The Department of Justice (DoJ) accused Masoud Jalili, 36, Seyyed Ali Aghamiri, 34, and Yasar (Yaser) Balaghi, 37, of participating in a conspiracy with other known and unknown actors to undermine the U.S. electoral process . They are alleged to have hacked into accounts of current and former U.S. officials, members of the media, nongovernmental organizations, and individuals associated with U.S. political campaigns. None of the three operatives, said to be members of the Basij Resistance Force, have been arrested. "The activity was part of Iran's continuing efforts to stoke discord, erode confidence in the U.S. electoral process, and unlawfully acquire information relating to current and former U.S. officials that could be us...

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) on Wednesday announced the seizure of 32 internet domains used by a pro-Russian propaganda operation called Doppelganger as part of a sweeping set of actions. Accusing the Russian government-directed foreign malign influence campaign of violating U.S. money laundering and criminal trademark laws, the agency called out companies Social Design Agency (SDA), Structura National Technology (Structura), and ANO Dialog for working at the behest of the Russian Presidential Administration. The goal, it said , is to "covertly spread Russian government propaganda with the aim of reducing international support for Ukraine, bolstering pro-Russian policies and interests, and influencing voters in U.S. and foreign elections, including the U.S. 2024 Presidential Election." Among the methods Doppelganger used to drive viewership to the cybersquatted media domains encompassed the deployment of "influencers" worldwide, paid social media ads, a...

Meta Platforms on Friday became the latest company after Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI to expose the activities of an Iranian state-sponsored threat actor, who it said used a set of WhatsApp accounts that attempted to target individuals in Israel, Palestine, Iran, the U.K., and the U.S. The activity cluster, which originated from Iran, "appeared to have focused on political and diplomatic officials, and other public figures, including some associated with administrations of President Biden and former President Trump," Meta said . The social media giant attributed it to a nation-state actor tracked as APT42, which is also known as Charming Kitten, Damselfly, Mint Sandstorm (formerly Phosphorus), TA453, and Yellow Garuda. It's assessed to be linked to Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The adversarial collective is well-known for its use of sophisticated social engineering lures to spear-phish targets of interest with malware and steal their credenti...

Google's  Gemini  large language model (LLM) is susceptible to security threats that could cause it to divulge system prompts, generate harmful content, and carry out indirect injection attacks. The findings come from HiddenLayer, which said the issues impact consumers using Gemini Advanced with Google Workspace as well as companies using the LLM API. The first vulnerability involves getting around security guardrails to leak the system prompts (or a system message), which are designed to set conversation-wide instructions to the LLM to help it generate more useful responses, by asking the model to output its "foundational instructions" in a markdown block. "A system message can be used to inform the LLM about the context," Microsoft  notes  in its documentation about LLM prompt engineering. "The context may be the type of conversation it is engaging in, or the function it is supposed to perform. It helps the LLM generate more appropriate responses....