Tag: Russia

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Twitter blocks 50,000 bots linked to Russia

Bot tweet
Twitter says this is an example of high-engagement postings from accounts associated with Russia’s Internet Research Agency. (Twitter Photo)

Twitter says it has followed through on its commitment to Congress by identifying and suspending more than 50,000 automated accounts linked to Russian agents – and alerting 677,775 Twitter users in the U.S. who followed those accounts, or retweeted or liked their postings.

Thousands of those accounts have been found just in the past couple of months.

In today’s update, the company says it’ll enlist machine-learning tools to boost its ability to slap down fake accounts, coordinated tweet campaigns and bots.

The measures were taken to address concerns sparked by the 2016 presidential campaign, during which agents from Russia’s infamous Internet Research Agency and other Russia-linked entities mounted a propaganda effort that boosted GOP candidate Donald Trump.

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Russian launch goes awry; 19 satellites lost

Soyuz launch
A Soyuz rocket lifts off from the Vostochny Cosmodrome in the Russian Far East. (Roscosmos Photo)

Russia’s Meteor-M 2-1 weather satellite and 18 nanosatellites went missing today after their launch aboard a Soyuz rocket from the Vostochny Cosmodrome in the Russian Far East.

Among the lost spacecraft were 10 satellites that were supposed to be put in orbit for San Francisco-based Spire Global and become part of the company’s Lemur-2 Earth observation network. Two remote-sensing satellites from Astro Digital, a Silicon Valley space venture, were lost as well.

The launch failure is likely to raise new questions about the capabilities of the Russian space program and its controversial multibillion-dollar effort to create the Vostochny launch complex as an alternative to the decades-old Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

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Russia makes late cargo delivery to space station

Almost three tons of food, fuel and supplies were delivered to the International Space Station today aboard a robotic Russian Progress cargo spaceship. The spacecraft was launched on Saturday from Russia’s Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, two days after an initial countdown was scrubbed.

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Russia joins NASA to look into Deep Space Gateway

Boeing Deep Space Gateway concept
An artist’s conception from Boeing shows its Deep Space Gateway. (Boeing Illustration)

The space station band is getting back together again: Russia and NASA today signed a joint statement voicing support for a Deep Space Gateway in lunar orbit that’s designed to serve as a jumping-off point for beyond-Earth exploration.

To be fair, that’s what they once said about the International Space Station as well. But NASA envisions the gateway as taking advantage of other technologies more suited to deep-space exploration, including its Orion capsule and heavy-lift Space Launch System.

The current plan calls for the Earth-orbiting space station to wind down in the 2020s, at the same time that the SLS is delivering the first components of the Deep Space Gateway to a region between Earth and the moon known as cislunar space.

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Boeing is in the middle of NASA-Russia deal

Soyuz
A Russian Soyuz craft approaches the International Space Station. (Credit: NASA)

NASA is considering a convoluted arrangement to reserve five more seats on Russian Soyuz capsules heading to and from the International Space Station, with the Boeing Co. as the middleman.

The plan to reserve more trips to orbit would give NASA additional breathing room as it waits for Boeing and SpaceX to complete the development of their commercial space taxis.

The first crewed test flights of those space taxis aren’t scheduled to occur until 2018. And in a procurement notice issued today, NASA acknowledged that they are “not expected to begin fully operational flights to the ISS until 2019.”

NASA has made a limited number of reservations on Soyuz craft in 2018, at a cost of more than $80 million per seat. But there’s not much of a margin to deal with further delays in the commercial crew schedule.

By a strange set of circumstances, Boeing could help fill the gap, even if its own CST-100 Starliner spacecraft isn’t yet ready to fly.

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Trump says he’ll beef up ‘hacking defense’

Donald Trump
President-elect Donald Trump speaks at a news conference. (Pool Video via ABC News)

President-elect Donald Trump says he’ll turn to the tech industry leaders he met with last month to help his administration come up with better measures to guard against hackers in Russia and elsewhere.

During today’s first formal news conference since his surprise win since the presidential election, Trump referred to the summit that he had at Trump Tower in Manhattan with such luminaries as Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

He said that meeting attracted “some of the greatest computer minds” in the world.

“We’re going to get those minds together, and we’re going to form a defense” against future computer intrusions, Trump said.

Later on, Trump gave a timetable: “Within 90 days, we will be coming up with a major report on hacking defense,” he said. “How do we stop this new phenomenon, this fairly new phenomenon, because the United States is hacked by everybody. That includes Russia, and China, and everybody.”

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Cyber sleuths lay out details of Russian hacking

A diagram that accompanies a report from the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI lays out the methods attributed to groups known as APT29 and APT28, a.k.a. Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear. (DHS / NCCIC / FBI Graphic)
A diagram that accompanies a report from the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI lays out the methods attributed to APT29 and APT28, a.k.a. Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear. (DHS / NCCIC / FBI Graphic)

Two groups of Russian hackers used a blend of spearphishing, booby-trapped websites and remote-access malware to worm their way into the Democratic National Committee’s computers and hurt the party’s prospects in last month’s presidential election, experts from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security say in a 13-page report.

The report, released today, also says yet another cyber attack that’s linked to actors “likely associated” with Russian intelligence agencies was launched just days after the election.

“This activity by Russian intelligence services is part of a decade-long campaign of cyber-enabled operations directed at the U.S. government and its citizens,” the agencies said in a news release.

The report comes as a follow-up to claims of Russian involvement made in October, and as evidence in support of today’s decision by the Obama administration to slap sanctions on Russia.

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Russian cargo shipment lost in space

Soyuz launch with Progress
A Russian Soyuz rocket rises from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, sending a robotic Progress cargo ship into space. The ship was lost minutes later. (Roscosmos Photo)

A robotic Russian Progress spaceship and its cargo were lost today, minutes after its launch to the International Space Station from Russia’s Baikonur Cosmodrome.

Russia’s Roscosmos space agency reported the failure of the mission’s Soyuz rocket and the fiery re-entry of the Progress craft over mountainous terrain in Russia’s republic of Tuva, in southern Siberia.

“Most of the fragments were burned in the dense layers of the atmosphere,” Roscosmos said, citing preliminary information. That suggests some of the debris fell to the ground, but no injuries were reported.

The uncrewed Progress was carrying more than two and a half tons of food, fuel and supplies for the space station. NASA said the rocket anomaly arose during third-stage separation, which apparently occurred earlier than scheduled. Russian space officials said the craft was operating normally until 383 seconds into the ascent, when it stopped transmitting data.

Roscomos said a commission has been set up to investigate the failure.

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U.S. accuses Russia of email meddling in politics

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The U.S. government links the Russian government to campaign email intrusions. (© Gajus via Fotolia)

The U.S. intelligence community is formally accusing the Russian government of playing a role in email hacks aimed at casting the Democratic Party in an embarrassing light and influencing the presidential election.

In a statement issued today, the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said this year’s email disclosures by DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks were consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts.

“We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities,” the agencies said.

The statement also noted that most of the recent attempts to probe state-level election systems have been traced to computer servers operated by a Russian company. “However, we are not now in a position to attribute this activity to the Russian government,” the federal agencies said.

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Was SETI signal from aliens? Russians say ‘nyet’

Image: RATAN-600 radio telescope
Detectors for the RATAN-600 telescope form a wide ring in this fisheye view. (Credit: SAO-RAS)

Russian astronomers acknowledge that they picked up an “interesting radio signal” in the course of their search for alien transmissions, but that the signal was most probably a case of terrestrial interference.

“It can be said with confidence that no sought-for signal has been detected yet,” astronomers from the Special Astrophysical Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences said in a statement issued Aug. 30.

The signal spike at 11 GHz was detected by the RATAN-600 radio telescope in the southern Russian republic of Karachay-Cherkessia in May 2015, during a campaign that’s part of the worldwide search for extraterrestrial intelligence (a.k.a. SETI).

The detection didn’t come to light until last weekend, but once news started circulating, it touched off parallel observations by the SETI Institute and the Breakthrough Listen Initiative. Those groups focused on the same area of the sky that was the target of the Russian observation: a sunlike star known as HD 164595 in the constellation Hercules.

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