It knows what youвЂ™re interested in, it knows what kind of content people click on and, with that, it has new impact potential. вЂњItвЂ™s now data-driven, which means it is targeted and it knows a lot of things about you. вЂњI think propaganda online is so much more dangerous and impactful than it has ever been before,вЂќ she says. So it is only natural, says Neudert, that propaganda eventually emerged on the world wide web. In the 20th century, people such as Stalin in the Soviet Union, Goebbels in Nazi Germany and Disney in the US turned propaganda into something approaching an art form using new design techniques, photo-manipulation, radio broadcasts, movies and cartoons.

Then the invention of the printing press spurred new evolution as a more literate society seized on pamphlets and newspapers. Over the years, word-of-mouth propaganda morphed into chants, hymns and sermons used for social control in the medieval church. Its invention is commonly credited to Alexander the Great, who, according to legend, had what amounted to a personal PR team following him around to tell the people about his great deeds and acts of heroism. So what is propaganda? Nothing new, of course. And for Lisa-Maria Neudert, a doctoral candidate at the University of OxfordвЂ™s Oxford Internet Institute (OII), this is just another step in the evolution of propaganda вЂ“ and for her, not an unexpected one. The lawsuit doesn't say how many people were tricked into handing over their personal information.These include photo-sharing application Instagram, video platform TikTok, and encrypted messenger channels such as WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram. Meta alleges in the lawsuit that the defendants violated the social network's terms of service, California's Anti-Phishing Act and a federal law that prohibits trademark infringement. Unfortunately, bad actors have used this capability to launch spamming, spoofing, and phishing attacks which we detect and stop using a multi-pronged approach combining automatic detection of suspicious activities, human moderation, and external reporting,' Shreve said. 'At its core, Ngrok allows millions of developers to easily and securely connect anything to the internet. Ngrok founder and CEO Alan Shreve said the company works with Meta and other firms to 'detect, limit, and eliminate the impact of malicious actors across each of our systems.' Some of the fake websites were in English and Italian. The lawsuit included screenshots of login pages that looked identical to the login pages for Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp but used Ngrok URLs. The unnamed defendants used services from San Diego-based tech company Ngrok to conceal their identities and 'relay internet traffic to their phishing websites in a manner that obfuscated where their websites were hosted,' the 21-page lawsuit says. Phishing attacks have doubled from 2020, according to the group's report. In July, the Anti-Phishing Working Group said it logged 260,642 phishing attacks, the highest monthly total in the group's reporting history. 'Reports of phishing attacks have been on the rise across the industry and we are taking this action to uncover the identities of the people behind the attack and stop their harmful conduct,' Jessica Romero, Meta's director of platform and litigation, said in a blog post. The move underscores how the world's largest social network is trying to combat phishing, a practice in which attackers will create fake websites or emails to try to dupe people into providing their personal information. Meta doesn't know who is behind the attack but says it's part of an effort to trick its users into entering their usernames and passwords.

The lawsuit, filed in a federal court in Northern California, says that since 2019 more than 39,000 websites have been created that impersonated the login pages for Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp. Meta, formerly known as Facebook, said Monday it's suing people who are behind a phishing scheme to steal usernames and passwords from its platforms.

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