I JUST HAD TO POST THIS...

[Roger]

I saw this article on Wired, through one of the Science news links, so I just had to post part of the article.

The Most Dangerous People on the Internet in 2020

This year saw plenty of destructive hacking and disinformation campaigns—but amid a pandemic and a historic election, the consequences have never been graver.

FOR MANY OF us, 2020 has been a very dangerous year. Alongside the usual headline grabbers like wars, violent crime, and terrorism, we also faced more insidious, creeping threats: a pandemic that has claimed more than 300,000 American lives, and the lives of 1.5 million people worldwide, thanks in part to waves of viral lies dismissing Covid-19's deathly serious effects. Hackers who have spied on, attacked, and extorted countless companies and government institutions—including even hospitals—during a global health crisis. And a US president who has sought to fundamentally undermine both the response to the Covid-19 pandemic and democracy itself with nakedly self-serving, corrosive misinformation.

In a locked-down and socially distanced year that for many of us was spent more online than off, the presence of those dangers on the internet has never felt more real. Digital threats and information warfare were, in 2020, some of the most harmful forces in our society. Every year, WIRED assembles a list of the most dangerous people on the internet. In some respects, the actions of this year's candidates resemble those of years past, from destructive hacking to sowing disinformation. But in a year where human society seemed more fragile than ever, the consequences of those actions have never been more grave.

Donald Trump
For the sixth year in a row, Donald Trump tops our list. As his presidential term comes to an end, he remains the world's single most powerful source of disinformation and the internet's most toxic cyberbully. Trump has used his massive Twitter presence to downplay fears of Covid-19 and confuse public understanding since the virus's earliest days, at a time when an organized response might have saved thousands of lives. He went on to promote unproven and eventually discredited treatments for the disease, like the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine. He demanded the "liberation" of states whose governors instituted restrictions on businesses to stop the spread of Covid-19, and helped refashion the choice to wear a mask into a partisan political issue. In the wake of the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, he railed against the Black Lives Matter protestors in cities across the US, painting them exclusively as rioters and fanning the flames of violence with online declarations like "when the looting starts, the shooting starts." And he spent the last months of his presidency in a shameful, deranged attempt to convince his followers that the results of an election he squarely lost to Joe Biden were rigged, an assertion that even his own administration officials have stated has no basis in reality. The damage Trump has inflicted with social media alone will resonate through history. And as he reportedly lays the groundwork for a 2024 run, that damage will continue.

Mark Zuckerberg
For years, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has watched as his social network amplified misinformation and was repeatedly exploited as a mouthpiece for government-created troll accounts. His failure to respond to those problems was widely blamed for contributing to the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Even now, when the election put the same spotlight on Facebook four years later, Zuckerberg proved unwilling to risk any fraction of his company's growth and dominance to curb the flow of false information. While Facebook has made changes to its newsfeed algorithms and added fact-checking addenda to President Trump's claims of a stolen election, those changes came largely after the election, when he'd already been sowing the seeds of doubt about the electoral system for months. Facebook has also been one of the greatest sources of Covid-19 disinformation and anti-vaccination myths that will haunt the world in the months to come. And as one whistleblower pointed out, it still fails to stop governments around the world from flooding the platform with propaganda posted by troll accounts. Other platforms have spread misinformation, too, including Twitter and YouTube, but the scale and global reach of Facebook set it apart. So does Zuckerberg's attitude towards the problem: He remains defiant, maintaining that Facebook should not be an "arbiter of truth." Until he changes that stance, his creation will remain a megaphone for lies.

UNC2452
For well over a year, a single group of hackers—known by the placeholder name UNC2452, but widely believed to be working on behalf of Russia's SVR foreign intelligence agency—has breached countless government agencies and companies, all via the hijacked software updates of a single product: the IT management tool Orion, distributed by tech firm SolarWinds. Every available clue since the breaches were revealed in mid-December indicates that only a small fraction of the thousands of companies that downloaded the backdoored software were actual targets of the operation, and that the hacking of those targets was focused solely on espionage. But those targets nonetheless included federal agencies like the US State Department, the National Institute of Health, and the Department of Energy, among many others. Rarely, if ever before in history have so many high-value victims been compromised by such a singular, insidious hacking technique. The SolarWinds operation and the mysterious hackers behind it have no doubt inflicted serious damage to US national security with their data theft. They've also demonstrated the ability to do far more harm if they had decided—or still decide in the future—to use their supply chain hijacking techniques for more destructive purposes.

To read the rest go to https://www.wired.com/story/2020-most-d ... -internet/