News filtered out last night that Elon Musk is going to make a trip to Israel. Here’s the details as we know them:
Mr Musk will meet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Isaac Herzog, and travel to the settlements that were attacked during last month’s Hamas invasion, according to local reports.
Sound like he’s on a bit of an apology tour to try and show that he’s not an antisemitic jerk. Despite the fact that he’s endorsed antisemitic conspiracy theories. Why has he decided to do this? I am going to guess that it has something to do with this:
X, the social media company formerly known as Twitter, could lose as much as $75 million in advertising revenue by the end of the year as dozens of major brands pause their marketing campaigns after its owner, Elon Musk, endorsed an antisemitic conspiracy theory this month.
Internal documents viewed by The New York Times this week show that the company is in a more difficult position than previously known and that concerns about Mr. Musk and the platform have spread far beyond companies including IBM, Apple and Disney, which paused their advertising campaigns on X last week. The documents list more than 200 ad units of companies from the likes of Airbnb, Amazon, Coca-Cola and Microsoft, many of which have halted or are considering pausing their ads on the social network.
The documents come from X’s sales team and are meant to track the impact of all the advertising lapses this month, including those by companies that have already paused and others that may be at risk of doing so. They list how much ad revenue X employees fear the company could lose through the end of the year if advertisers do not return.
On Friday, X said in a statement that $11 million in revenue was at risk and that the exact figure fluctuated as some advertisers returned to the platform and others increased spending. The company said the numbers viewed by The Times were either outdated or represented an internal exercise to evaluate total risk.
The advertising freezes come during the final three months of the year, which is traditionally the social media company’s strongest quarter as brands run holiday promotions for events such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday. In the last three months of 2021 — the last year the company reported fourth-quarter earnings before Mr. Musk took over — the company recorded $1.57 billion in revenue, of which nearly 90 percent came from advertising.
In other words, he’s hurting for cash and needs to make this go away as quickly as possible if he can. The fact is that nobody should be fooled by this apology tour. Elon isn’t going to change who he is. And we’ll be talking about some other Elon related controversy soon enough.
The best things that we can all do is to first, ignore Elon when he makes this trip. Second, we should ignore Twitter as it’s a dying platform which is a cesspool of hate and misinformation.
Microsoft Discovers Diamond Sleet’s Supply Chain Attack
Posted in Commentary with tags Microsoft on November 25, 2023 by itnerdThe North Koreans are up to no good again. Microsoft is reporting that they have discover a supply chain attack by a group of threat actors named Diamond Sleet who are using a malicious variant of a legitimate CyberLink application installer that has been modified to include malicious code that downloads, decrypts, and loads a second-stage payload:
Microsoft Threat Intelligence has uncovered a supply chain attack by the North Korea-based threat actor Diamond Sleet (ZINC) involving a malicious variant of an application developed by CyberLink Corp., a software company that develops multimedia software products. This malicious file is a legitimate CyberLink application installer that has been modified to include malicious code that downloads, decrypts, and loads a second-stage payload. The file, which was signed using a valid certificate issued to CyberLink Corp., is hosted on legitimate update infrastructure owned by CyberLink and includes checks to limit the time window for execution and evade detection by security products. Thus far, the malicious activity has impacted over 100 devices in multiple countries, including Japan, Taiwan, Canada, and the United States.
Microsoft attributes this activity with high confidence to Diamond Sleet, a North Korean threat actor. The second-stage payload observed in this campaign communicates with infrastructure that has been previously compromised by Diamond Sleet. More recently, Microsoft has observed Diamond Sleet utilizing trojanized open-source and proprietary software to target organizations in information technology, defense, and media.
Ken Westin, Field CISO, Panther Labs had this to say:
North Korean APT groups continue to target the software supply chain because it’s proven to be successful repeatedly, instead of targeting individual systems, they infect software upstream giving them potential access to a larger number of systems. They continue to increase the level of sophistication in these attacks with strong knowledge of the tooling and techniques of modern DevOps teams. Most organizations are not monitoring their DevOps processes for these types of attacks and lack mechanisms to detect when code may be compromised. I predict more threat groups will follow this approach to infect a larger number of systems downstream as well as improve methods to bypass rudimentary security measures.
I encourage you to read the full report as it has a lot of detail as to what you can do to protect yourself from this threat actor. Because this group of North Koreans clearly mean business.
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