Welcome to the CyberCure Bi-Weekly podcast transcript.
This podcast will give you a summary of the latest news related to cyber intelligence and proactive cyber security in only a few minutes.
The podcast is aimed at professionals who are short on time, or for anyone who would like to know a bit more about what is REALLY happening out there in the cyber world.
The focus of this podcast will be on the latest cyber events for non-technical people; anyone can listen and understand.
Telegram is in the news again after it suffered a major cyber-attack that appeared to originate from China, The attack was linked it to the ongoing political unrest in Hong Kong.
Many protesters in the city have used Telegram to evade electronic surveillance and coordinate their demonstrations against a controversial Beijing plan that would allow extraditions more easily.
Telegram announced late Wednesday that it was suffering a “powerful” Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, which involves hackers overwhelming a target’s servers by making a massive number of junk requests.
Telegram warned users in many regions may face connection issues and also predicted that like with other political associated DDoS attacks it is expected to be over when the protests will end.
If you still wonder what DDoS attack means this is how Telegram chose to explain the attack in simple terms:
“Imagine that an army of lemmings just jumped the queue at McDonald’s in front of you -– and each is ordering a whopper (which is a product of Burger King),”.
“The server is busy telling the whopper lemmings they came to the wrong place -– but there are so many of them that the server can’t even see you to try and take your order.”
that was the way telegram chose to explain what are DDoS attacks and explains why they are complicated to stop.
China’s foreign ministry and cyberspace administration did not immediately respond for comment about Telegram blames.
Hong Kong is not behind China’s Great Firewall, which heavily restricts internet access in the mainland and where Telegram is blocked. The city’s special status under its handover agreement allows freedoms unseen in mainland China, but many fear they are under threat as Beijing exerts increasing influence on Hong Kong.
The Indian WhatsApp lynchings are a spate of mob-related violence and killings following the spread of rumours, primarily relating to child-abduction and organ harvesting, via the WhatsApp message service. there having been terrifying incidents evolving WhatsApp users spreading rumors which caused mob to perform violence related acts against innocent people.
As part of the fight against this terrible phenomena The Indian government
wants WhatsApp to allow it to snoop on its encrypted messaging platform. The reason being cited by the government is that it wants to check the spread of misinformation that has led to several lynchings in the country over the last year. WhatsApp, for now, has refused to fall in line and has declined to track messages stating that they are end-to-end encrypted.
WhatsApp has been asked by the Indian government to digitally fingerprint every message sent on its messaging platform, Digital fingerprints will allow WhatsApp to keep a track of the sent and receive messages without breaking the encryption. The government said that it just wants to find the originator of the message and the people who have read and forwarded the message.
Usually governments wants to remove encryption to fight terrorism or freedom, in this case the government less care about the content of the messages and more about who is sending them , so if whatsapp will be implementing the government request, they will be able to follow spread of mass messages and find its original authors and distributors. As a reminder, Telegram app and the russian government had big issues for couple of years as the Russian government required access to part of the encryption keys so they can stop cyber attacks and terrorists.
Telegram refused for a long time until during 2019 they reached an agreement with the Russian government to give provide them with the information they want under some conditions.
In this case the Indian government requests whatsapp to perform changes in the code which is new demand we haven’t seen so far from a government.
We will keep tracking this issue hoping that a good solution will be achieved as no one wants to see this terrible lynchs happening anywhere in the world.
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That’s it for this podcast, stay safe and see you in the next podcast.
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