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Kevin Collier Profile
Kevin Collier

@kevincollier

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Reporter @nbcnews : cybers/disinfo/privacy/elections. From West Virginia. Tip me! kevin.collier @nbcuni .com. Also bsky, mast, thread.

NYC
Joined December 2011
Don't wanna be here? Send us removal request.
@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
3 years
The Onion yesterday vs reality today.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
2 years
I'm at the NFT NYC conference again in Times Square, and Snoop walked by, flanked by security. I grabbed his handler, said I'm a reporter, would love a few minutes. The guy said actually that's an impersonator, legally can't say it's him, they hired him to drum up excitement.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
2 years
This is as good as everybody says, really feels like the single most essential reading on today's big news.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
2 years
This case, where Facebook turned over chats of a Nebraska woman charged with giving her then-underaged daughter abortion pills, is exactly the kind that experts have warned we'd see in a post-Roe world.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
2 years
Seeing more calls today to delete your period-tracking apps. But experts say that if you look at how states have already brought evidence in abortion-related cases, the *much* bigger concern is unsecured, unencrypted communications & stored search history.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
2 years
Six writer bylines and the strong implication the IDF assassinated a journalist: I guarantee you this story has been vetted to hell and back by CNN's legal team.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
3 years
Don't yet know exactly what's behind the DNS issue that's knocked Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp offline, but it's really bad. Pretty much everything that runs through those three companies are inaccessible. Employees can't even enter conference rooms because they're IoT!
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
2 years
Yep this was the guy
@regiscake
chicken nugget ratio πŸ”»
2 years
Holy shit that name tag tho
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
2 years
I deeply, deeply regret to inform you that this is the rap video of the woman who was just arrested as part of an alleged husband-wife scheme that laundered some $3.6 billion in crypto.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
5 years
I don't like tweeting about my personal life or about shit like this. But feel this is necessary. Of the eight kids who grew up on my street as a kid, a third has died of an overdose. Plus plenty more I went to school with. The opioid epidemic in WV is very real, and ongoing.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
2 years
Feels like a metaphor
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
4 years
Some very good professional news: I've been freelancing for @NBCNews for a little while, but am coming on full time as of today.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
5 years
Extremely excited to announce I've joined CNN, where I'll cover the cyber, election integrity, etc.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
4 years
A fun fact about Republicans embracing the idiotic Crowdstrike conspiracy theory is that the RNSC and RNCC both use Crowdstrike. Have paid more than $175,000 since 2017, per FEC filings.
@thehill
The Hill
4 years
John Kennedy on Russia being responsible for DNC hack: 'β€œRight, but it could also be Ukraine"
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
5 years
Journalism protip: File your FOIAs with a personal email address. I don't care how much you love your employer or how stable your job is. It'll be months or years before you get a response, who knows where you'll be then?
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
1 year
Good reminder that corporate Slack accounts can let bosses read *everything* on any given employee slack account. Private messages, locked rooms β€” it's all visible to them, and in some cases they can and will use it against employees.
@skilldrick
Nick Morgan (parody)
1 year
My twitter account was protected at the time, so I can only assume this was for not showing 100% loyalty in slack. I’ve heard the same thing has happened to many others now.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
2 years
Countries abstain from using their nukes because everyone knows that an escalation quickly means we all lose. We've never seen cyber superpowers taking turns destructively hacking each other's infrastructure. Wholly uncharted waters.
@KenDilanianNBC
Ken Dilanian
2 years
Scoop: Biden has been presented with options for massive, unprecedented cyberattacks against Russia with @ckubeNBC
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
3 years
It is October 1, the first day of Cybersecurity Awareness Month. You are now aware of cybersecurity.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
4 years
It's October 1, which means it's National Cybersecurity Awareness Month. You are now aware of cybersecurity. Thank you.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
3 years
No pardons for Assange, Snowden, Ross Ulbricht, or uh...Kim Dotcom. Plenty for longtime GOP figures and white collar criminals. There's a particular type of extremely online person who only now has learned that Trump isn't their guy.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
3 years
Joint statement tonight from multiple federal agencies and representatives of all 50 states indirectly refutes Trump's multiple false fraud claims. "There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised."
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
3 years
New and developing: An enormous supply-chain ransomware attack, potentially the single largest criminal ransomware spree in history, is happening now at the start of the 4th of July weekend
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
5 years
This is a really clever idea by the AP. Essentially writing up all the interesting revelations from all of the SCO's filings into a single cohesive narrative.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
2 years
NEW: Somebody hacked the school messaging service Seesaw this morning, forcing accounts to post goatse in parent-teacher group chats across the country:
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
4 years
I don't see anything categorically new in the content, but here's four agency heads doing a nine-minute PSA on what the government's doing for election security. They don't normally address the public like this. Nine minutes!
@FBI
FBI
4 years
The right to vote in a free and fair election is one of the foundations of American democracy. The leaders of the #FBI , @CISAgov , @NCSCgov , and @NSAgov want you to know how their organizations work together to protect your voiceβ€”no matter how you cast your vote. #Protect2020
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
4 years
In DOJ press conference right now, AG Barr and FBI director Wray each blamed "antifa" for some of the violence at protests. Neither named any right-wing extremists, like the three "boogaloo"-tied men that DOJ charged with conspiracy last night.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
5 years
Scoop: The criminal investigation into to stolen identities used to file anti-net neutrality comments with the FCC is far bigger than previously thought. The FBI is delivering subpoenas and at least three state attorneys general offices also investigating.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
4 years
There are a lot of holes to poke in the Post's But His Emails story, but this is the most fundamental one to me. We literally cannot verify any of this. At least in 2016 Russia was releasing actual Dem files.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
2 years
I've seen multiple reports of Russian websites being offline when they're actually just geoblocked and still accessible if you visit with a VPN to bounce through Russia. Fellow reporters: check that before you make an incorrect claim!
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
2 years
Sign of the times: CISA sees no major foreign cyber threats to the election, but has released a training video for election workers on how they can deescalate potentially violent people and situations on election day.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
3 years
If this makes you uncomfortable, remember that Slack doesn't encrypt your messages, can store them indefinitely even if you don't have access to them, and that in many cases your employer can read and search for everything you've posted, even DMs.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
6 years
This, from yesterday is the president making a claim of seeing something that obviously never happened. I just got a response back from ICE on whether they had shown him their liberation of an MS-13 controlled town. They declined to comment, saying it was a White House issue.
@realDonaldTrump
Donald J. Trump
6 years
The Democrats are making a strong push to abolish ICE, one of the smartest, toughest and most spirited law enforcement groups of men and women that I have ever seen. I have watched ICE liberate towns from the grasp of MS-13 & clean out the toughest of situations. They are great!
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
3 years
A weekend read: I wrote about many of the Capitol arrests so far stemming from the insurrectionists having the worst opsec imaginable
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
2 years
Seems like Politico did a good job protecting their source.
@razhael
Raphael Satter
2 years
The document's metadata provides no solid hints as to its provenance. The copy that's currently linked in the story appears to have been created seven minutes before the Politico story hit the website.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
6 years
President Trump is indicating he just a few minutes ago learned about NSA self-reporting data deletion, which the agency publicly announced five days ago. He would have had access to a private and far more comprehensive briefing far earlier.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
4 years
Almost two weeks ago, I experienced mild flu-like symptoms (aches, chills). On Thursday, after they passed, I called @kingscountyhosp , which said I could come down for a COVID-19 test. Yesterday it came back positive.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
3 years
I'm a reporter assigned to look for cyber issues on Election Day. It's been really boring so far.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
3 years
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger just sent out a press release titled "BREAKING: Stacey Abrams Funded Group that Pushed Voting Machine Disinformation in Georgia." It links to a "report" that's actually a misleading story from the Ben Shapiro's site the Daily Wire.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
5 years
@realDonaldTrump @MELANIATRUMP help me I'm being cyberbullied
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
1 year
DOJ's complaint against the two men accused of attacking four Washington substations says law enforcement identified them because β€” wait for it β€”Β their phones were the only phones that were pinging towers near each site at the time of each attack.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
2 years
I don't think I've ever seen anything like this: an intelligence agency just doxing hundreds of counterparts at a foreign rival, by name, on its website for anybody to see.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
1 year
Laid off Twitter engineers all over this app saying how much they loved their teams and what they'd built, new Twitter is in a best case scenario in an ugly rebuild, and lots of users are clamoring for an alternative that does not exist. Seems like an opportunity
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
5 years
This is the only proper framing for this story. Kemp has a history of falsely claiming his perceived political opponents tried to hack him.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
3 years
Congrats to William Shatner for becoming the oldest person to block me on Twitter and then go to space.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
4 years
I feel completely fine, and would be isolating regardless. Many even my age aren't so lucky. Two notes: my sense of smell disappeared completely and is only now slowly coming back. And this illustrates how easy it is to be a carrier with only mild symptoms. Please stay home.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
2 years
In that vein, the most effective opsec steps that the average person can adopt in response to Roe being overturned: normalize using encrypted and secure chat apps with friends and family. Normalize using DuckDuckGo or incognito mode when searching anything remotely sensitive.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
2 years
Her website might be more cursed.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
6 months
New and big: The feds, spooked by the GOP, have completely stopped their election information outreach to tech companies. CISA doesn't talk to them. The FBI quit briefing them about foreign propagandaΒ ops.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
3 years
I don't think any serious person bought the story of where Hunter's emails came from in the first place, but tabloids are running the gotcha that his password was Hunter02. Anybody in infosec would recognize that as an old meme about how easy it is to hack the gullible.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
7 months
EU tells me its 24 ultimatum to X/Twitter tonight centers on its failure to regulate Hamas content on the site, as it's a designated terror group.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
2 years
Setting up a fake news website with mostly harmless innocuous articles, then once in a while throwing in stories ideologically aligned with your client, is exactly how a lot of state-sponsored influence operations work. We've seen Iran, China, and Russia all do this.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
1 year
Twitter has suspended Wired reporter Dell Cameron for tweeting this story, saying it violated the company's rules against distributing hacked materials. In other news, it's really dang easy to search for some of the Pentagon Leaks docs on this site.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
4 years
I've been invited to cyber reporter briefings at both NSA and FBI in the past six weeks and both agencies asked me to plaintext email them my SSN first.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
3 years
For the last time, I'm going to commemorate the journalists who had been tasked with following Trump's every tweet and had notifications turned on for him. One of the most mentally taxing beats in American journalism, and it's finally complete. Pour one out on a Friday night.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
3 years
Raffensperger has received a lot of well-deserved praise for standing up to Trump's insistence he throw the election to him, but this is a partisan, deliberately misleading, blatant abuse of his office.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
3 years
Good time to recall that the US still has no CISA director, and hasn't for the past 8 months. Biden has at least nominated one, but the Senate's on break. @SenRickScott has twice blocked a vote on her nomination bc he wanted @VP to visit the border first.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
2 years
Lincoln College, chartered in 1865 and one of only a handful of Predominantly Black Institutions in rural America, will on Friday become the first US college to shut down largely due to a ransomware attack
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
4 years
Most remarkable thing in the GRU indictment isn't the accusations, but the simple fact of the indictment itself. Naming six officers (allegedly) responsible for election meddling and destruction two weeks before the election seems a pretty clear sign.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
3 years
NEW: Ransomware hackers believed tied to a sanctioned Russian criminal organization claim to have hacked the NRA, and published several recent files from the org as proof:
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
4 years
I think coverage of political action against tech "censorship" of conservative views rarely adequately addresses the big picture: it just doesn't meaningfully exist. It's propped up only by misunderstanding the platforms, bad faith arguments, and shoddy reporting. That's it.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
3 years
Cloudflare went to admirable lengths to simplify what happened at Facebook/WhatsApp/Insta today, though it's still a fairly technical read. But I think you should be required to at least try this before sharing conspiracy theories about today.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
5 years
It's October 1, which means it's National Cybersecurity Awareness Month. You are now aware of cybersecurity. Thank you.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
5 years
FBI investigating alleged hacker who went after WV blockchain voting app during midterms. I can't stress this enough: More to come on this story.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
4 years
We in the tech press found metadata showing how the DNC files were laundered by native Russian speakers about five minutes after we first received them. So maybe there's a strategy from ol Rudy that isn't centered purely on getting the truth out.
@oneunderscore__
Ben Collins
4 years
Reminder for your uncle: the press can’t cover β€œHunter’s hard drive” because... we don’t have access to it. This isn’t a Wikileaks thing. One guy has access to it, he wouldn’t give it to us, now he’s in quasi-hiding because he got caught in a hotel room with Borat’s daughter.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
3 years
Congrats to the Space Force for winning the Space Achievement Award from the Space Foundation at the Space Symposium.
@SpaceForceDoD
United States Space Force
3 years
The #SpaceForce received the 2021 Space Achievement Award from the @SpaceFoundation at the 36th #SpaceSymposium . #TeamSpace #36Space
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
5 years
New: A British think tank that analyzes Russian info ops has been hacked, had its files leaked in multiple batches by "Anonymous," and while RT and Sputnik have gone wild with it, nobody else has noticed. A real πŸ€”πŸ€”πŸ€” for 2019:
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
5 years
I have never seen such an amazing example of how absolutely insane cryptocurrency media is than the fact that MULTIPLE outlets have written articles based solely on misunderstanding @WilliamTurton referencing NSA cryptography in a single tweet.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
3 years
Remember when Mic News was a thing? Then three years ago they pivoted to video, laid off a ton of staff, and you never saw a Mic story again? This is the same person.
@maxwelltani
Max Tani
3 years
Vice chief digital officer Cory Haik's email to staff today announcing "organizational changes" following layoffs at the company
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
2 months
Has anybody finally had enough and quit Google search because of how bad it's gotten recently? Are you finding another search better?
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
2 years
Reporting the FSB's announcement that it had arrested REvil members is an unnerving experience. It's huge cyber news we cannot ignore. But it also appears so blatantly calculated to engineer goodwill for Russia at a time when it's acting so badly.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
2 years
Wild. Patreon confirms the layoffs in emailed statement to me, says it's ok, they're using third-party security.
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@wbm312
Whitney Merrill
2 years
Whoa @Patreon laid off their ENTIRE security team. Wouldn’t trust my data there. Also there’s some amazing talent to scoop up.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
2 years
And they say the American dream is dead
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
4 years
Gonna be That Guy and point out that the right-wing militia that allegedly planned to kidnap Michigan's governor switched between multiple encrypted apps. That didn't hinder the investigation, because the FBI had confidential sources & undercover agents:
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
2 years
Lawsuits against small news outlets by people tied to immense wealth remains one of the biggest threats to the US free press. This country desperately needs a federal anti-SLAPP law.
@kellymakena
Makena Kelly
2 years
Peter Thiel associate and Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters is threatening to sue the @ArizonaMirror over critical coverage, invoking the Thiel-funded Hulk Hogan-Gawker lawsuit.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
11 months
Fox News really doesn't have many gotta-hand-it-to-em moments but they got an indicted former president to sit for an interview and seemingly double down on an indignant confession.
@Acyn
Acyn
11 months
Trump: I have every right to have those boxes
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
2 years
@TaylorLorenz Please don't put it in Times Square that I'm mad.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
3 years
It's like everybody else bought expensive cribs and strollers for the baby shower and Amazon showed up with Doritos.
@ericgeller
Eric Geller
3 years
Embargo has lifted on WH cyber meeting announcements. * Microsoft: offering $150m worth of security help to govt agencies * Google: donating $100m to help orgs that secure open-source software * Amazon: free security tokens for AWS users * IBM: cyber training for 150k people
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
3 years
This is legitimately great context nobody else has.
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@riskybusiness
Patrick Gray
3 years
Best cybersecurity coverage this week is from Beef Central. Not even joking.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
3 years
Happy ruined long weekend to everyone in and adjacent to cybersecurity.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
4 years
Remember how the pre-pandemic discussion on voting in 2020 was getting everybody to use paper ballots, because you can audit those? A nice feature of mailed ballots is they're paper. You can audit them, check the signature, compare them w voter rolls.
@realDonaldTrump
Donald J. Trump
4 years
RIGGED 2020 ELECTION: MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WILL BE PRINTED BY FOREIGN COUNTRIES, AND OTHERS. IT WILL BE THE SCANDAL OF OUR TIMES!
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
4 years
Michigan Department of State says no, their voter rolls weren't hacked, this stuff is publicly available by FOIA, stop freaking out. Statement:
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
3 years
Amazing, unbelievable incompetence by Russia's official internet censor. They intended to block Twitter's link shortener. Instead, they accidentally blocked every single .com site that ends with a "T."
@DougMadory
Doug Madory
3 years
Today's outages in Russia appears to have been caused by a bad substring match by @roscomnadzor . Intending to block Twitter's link shortener t[.]co, Russia blocked all domains containing t[.]co, for example Microsoft[.]com and Reddit[.]com. (H/T @GregoryKhodyrev )
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
6 years
Can confirm this is a reference to the Illinois state voter registration database. The state has been very open about the breach it suffered in 2016.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
9 months
I think it's probably not a coincidence that Georgia is the state that has organized the most robustly against historic suppression of Black voters, that it was the big surprise Dem victory in 2020, and that it produced Freeman and Moss.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
2 years
Mudge β€” one of the most accomplished and likely the most beloved person in cybersecurity β€” started his Senate testimony with his mic off. So don't you ever feel self-conscious about doing that on a work call ever again.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
2 years
A lot of cyber folks have been predicting that state-sponsored hackers would exploit log4j, and last night attributions started dropping. Mandiant seeing China and Iran using it; Microsoft seeing those plus North Korea and Turkey.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
2 years
Think of the threat model. Data from a period-tracking app at best can show that a person likely became pregnant and then no longer was. But miscarriages aren't illegal. Prosecutors would want evidence that someone wanted to and did willingly terminate a pregnancy.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
3 years
It also occurs to me how similar NSO's and Facebook's recent defenses are. Both say they can't be responsible for abuse of their product, point to a couple safeguards, refuse to give a complete picture of how it's used, and yell at those who ask for followups or accountability.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
1 year
@verified
Verified
1 year
On April 1st, we will begin winding down our legacy verified program and removing legacy verified checkmarks. To keep your blue checkmark on Twitter, individuals can sign up for Twitter Blue here: Organizations can sign up for …
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
9 months
Def Con is over and nobody hacked the giant Las Vegas sphere. Four days of the biggest hacker conference set next to a giant LED globe and it didn't do anything against its programming except maybe turn off briefly. Somebody's getting old.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
2 years
Here's an OCR'd version of the unsealed charges that allege two Chinese intelligence officers tried to bribe a US official into impeding the investigation into a company that sounds an awful lot like Huawei.
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
4 years
I'm gonna take this comment to remind media Twitter that I'm a reporter with extensive experience covering cyber- and election security, and that I'm looking for a job.
@dnvolz
Dustin Volz
4 years
*shouts into void* the media is not ready for 2020 election security reporting and it is as real a threat as foreign interference or disinformation
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@kevincollier
Kevin Collier
2 years
Police didn't start their investigation with a sweeping subpoena for pregnancy metadata. They got a tip, then proceeded to get a warrant for six smartphones and seven computers. Knowing the two chatted on Facebook, cops got a warrant for that too.
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