Late breaking yesterday: I saw the story about slavery text messages directed at young Black folks on social and mainstream media before I went to bed last night. Although the content of the messages is silly, the disired result was clearly to create confusion and fear. Over the past few days, I’ve also noticed an uptick in spam messages directed to me through the email-to-SMS system. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if I received one of those silly slavery messages and just deleted it. As a former government employee, I receive many spam messages every day.
Here’s what I’m thinking about this:
This could be the result of one of the recent breaches. Some of the messages included names and other Personal Identifying Information (PII). AI can be leveraged to generate customized messages for each of the recipients.
This type of attack doesn’t require a large team of bad actors. And they don’t have to be MAGAts; they could be foreign actors attempting to create more confusion. 🤔
This is a terrorist attack, and I notice that most of the articles give numbers and contact numbers for the FBI. Notifying the FBI may be effective now, but what happens after MAGA is in the white house? Will the FBI be effective at investigating these attacks or will they be preoccupied or shut down.
We need to (I need to) reduce our “attack surface.” Here are some suggestions. How about some Surveillance Self-Defense? And don’t forget to check to see if you’ve been pwned.
I’ve also received an increased number of generally directed, vaguely worded cyberattack warnings from clients, insurance, and banks. The confusion in the US is apparently a great cover for other pwnage and cyberattacks.