Negli ultimi anni le truffe online hanno assunto forme sempre più sofisticate, sfruttando non solo tecniche di ingegneria sociale, ma anche la fiducia che milioni di persone ripongono in figure religiose, istituzionali o di forte carisma.

Un esempio emblematico è rappresentato da profili social falsi che utilizzano l’immagine di alti prelati o persino del Papa per attirare l’attenzione dei fedeli.

Questi profili, apparentemente innocui, spesso invitano le persone a contattarli su WhatsApp o su altre piattaforme di messaggistica, fornendo numeri di telefono internazionali.
Un profilo scam su Facebook

Come funziona la truffa

I criminali informatici creano un profilo fake, come in questo caso di Papa Leone XIV. Viene ovviamente utilizzata la foto reale dello stesso Pontefice per conferire credibilità al profilo. Poi si passa alla fidelizzazione dell’utente. Attraverso post a tema religioso, citazioni, immagini di croci o Bibbie, il truffatore crea un’aura di autorevolezza che induce le persone a fidarsi.

Nei post o nella descrizione del profilo, c’è un invito al contatto privato.
Nei post o nella biografia, appare spesso un numero di WhatsApp o un riferimento a canali diretti di comunicazione. Questo passaggio serve a spostare la conversazione in uno spazio meno controllato, lontano dagli occhi delle piattaforme social.

Una volta ottenuta l’attenzione, il truffatore può chiedere donazioni per “opere benefiche”, raccogliere dati personali, o persino convincere le vittime a compiere operazioni finanziarie rischiose.

Perché è pericoloso

Le persone più vulnerabili, spinte dalla fede o dalla fiducia verso la figura religiosa, sono più inclini a credere all’autenticità del profilo. La trappola della devozione: chi crede di parlare con un cardinale o con il Papa stesso potrebbe abbassare le difese.

I dati personali: anche solo condividere il proprio numero di telefono o dati bancari espone a ulteriori rischi di furti d’identità e frodi.

Come difendersi

Diffidare sempre di profili che chiedono di essere contattati su WhatsApp o altre app con numeri privati.

Ricordare che figure istituzionali di rilievo non comunicano mai direttamente tramite profili privati o numeri di telefono personali.

Segnalare subito alle piattaforme i profili sospetti.

Non inviare mai denaro o dati sensibili a sconosciuti, anche se si presentano come autorità religiose o pubbliche.

Conclusione

Gli scammer giocano con la fiducia delle persone, mascherandosi dietro figure religiose o istituzionali per legittimare le proprie richieste. È fondamentale mantenere alta l’attenzione e diffondere consapevolezza: la fede è un valore, ma non deve mai diventare una trappola per i truffatori digitali.

L'articolo Dal Vaticano a Facebook con furore! Il miracolo di uno Scam divino! proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

This Thursday, the Cambridge Pole & Conduit Commission will consider Flock’s requests to put up 15 to 20 surveillance cameras with Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) technologies around Cambridge. The Cambridge City Council, in a 6-3 vote on Feb. 3rd, approved Cambridge PD’s request to install these cameras. It was supposed to roll out to Central Square only, but it looks like Cambridge PD and Flock have asked to put up a camera at the corner of Rindge and Alewife Brook Parkway facing eastward. That is pretty far from Central Square.

Anyone living within 150 feet of the camera location should have been mailed letters from Flock telling them that the can attend the Pole & Conduit Commission meeting this Thursday at 9am and comment on Flock’s request. The Pole & Conduit Commission hasn’t posted its agenda or the requests it will consider on Thursday. If you got a letter or found out that you are near where Flock wants to install one of these cameras, please attend the meeting to speak against it and notify your neighbors.

The Cambridge Day, who recently published a story on us, reports that City Councilors Patty Nolan, Sumbul Siddiqui and Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler have called for reconsidering introducing more cameras to Cambridge. These cameras are paid for by the federal Urban Area Security Initiative grant program and the data they collect will be shared with the Boston Regional Information Center (BRIC) and from there to ICE, CBP and other agencies that are part of Trump’s new secret police already active in the Boston area.

We urge you to attend this meeting at 9am on Thursday and speak against the camera nearest you, if you received a letter or know that the camera will be within 150 feet of your residence. You can register in advance and the earlier you register, the earlier you will be able to speak. Issues you can bring up:

• A Texas sheriff recently searched ALPR data to identify the location of a Texas woman who sought an out-of-state abortion. We will see more efforts like this as conservative state legislatures criminalize abortion and attempt to force their views on us;
• The Cambridge Police Department has stated in a public hearing that they use license plate readers to monitor traffic in the vicinity of protests. People exercising their 1st Amendment right to peaceful protest should not fear that they will end up in a local, commonwealth or federal database because their car was near a protest;
• Last year, Boston shared its ALPR data 37 times with federal agencies and state police in other states. The Flock ALPR database is available nationaly and Flock has a pilot contract with Customs and Border Patrol to send them ALPR data directly;
• In the past, ALPR companies have not done a good job keeping their data secure. In Boston, there was a leak of ALPR data on 68,924 scans of 45,020 unique vehicles which caused the Boston Police Department to suspend ALPR data collection in 2013.

We urge affected Cambridge residents to speak at Thursday’s hearing at 9am. If you plan to attend or can put up flyers in your area about the cameras, please email us at info@masspirates.org.

masspirates.org/blog/2025/09/1…

404 Media

2025-08-25 20:56:35

CBP Had Access to More than 80,000 Flock AI Cameras Nationwide

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) regularly searched more than 80,000 Flock automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras, according to data released by three police departments. The data shows that CBP’s access to Flock’s network is far more robust and widespread than has been previously reported. One of the police departments 404 Media spoke to said it did not know or understand that it was sharing data with CBP, and Flock told 404 Media Monday that it has “paused all federal pilots.”

In May, 404 Media reported that local police were performing lookups across Flock on behalf of ICE, because that part of the Department of Homeland Security did not have its own direct access. Now, the newly obtained data and local media reporting reveals that CBP had the ability to perform Flock lookups by itself.

Last week, 9 News in Colorado reported that CBP has direct access to Flock’s ALPR backend “through a pilot program.” In that article, 9 News revealed that the Loveland, Colorado police department was sharing access to its Flock cameras directly with CBP. At the time, Flock said that this was through what 9 News described as a “one-to-one” data sharing agreement through that pilot program, making it sound like these agreements were rare and limited:

“The company now acknowledges the connection exists through a previously publicly undisclosed program that allows Border Patrol access to a Flock account to send invitations to police departments nationwide for one-to-one data sharing, and that Loveland accepted the invitation,” 9 News wrote. “A spokesperson for Flock said agencies across the country have been approached and have agreed to the invitation. The spokesperson added that U.S. Border Patrol is not on the nationwide Flock sharing network, comprised of local law enforcement agencies across the country. Loveland Police says it is on the national network.”

New data obtained using three separate public records requests from three different police departments gives some insight into how widespread these “one-to-one” data sharing agreements actually are. The data shows that in most cases, CBP had access to more Flock cameras than the average police department, that it is regularly using that access, and that, functionally, there is no difference between Flock’s “nationwide network” and the network of cameras that CBP has access to.

According to data obtained from the Boulder, Colorado Police Department by William Freeman, the creator of a crowdsourced map of Flock devices called DeFlock, CBP ran at least 118 Flock network searches between May 13 and June 13 of this year. Each of these searches encompassed at least 6,315 individual Flock networks (a “network” is a specific police department or city’s cameras) and at least 82,000 individual Flock devices. Data obtained in separate requests from the Prosser Police Department and Chehalis Police Department, both in Washington state, also show CBP searching a huge number of networks and devices.

A spokesperson for the Boulder Police Department told 404 Media that “Boulder Police Department does not have any agreement with U.S. Border Patrol for Flock searches. We were not aware of these specific searches at the time they occurred. Prior to June 2025, the Boulder Police Department had Flock's national look-up feature enabled, which allowed other agencies from across the U.S. who also had contracts with Flock to search our data if they could articulate a legitimate law enforcement purpose. We do not currently share data with U.S. Border Patrol. In June 2025, we deactivated the national look-up feature specifically to maintain tighter control over Boulder Police Department data access. You can learn more about how we share Flock information on our FAQ page.”

A Flock spokesperson told 404 Media Monday that it sent an email to all of its customers clarifying how information is shared from agencies to other agencies. It said this is an excerpt from that email about its sharing options:

“The Flock platform provides flexible options for sharing:

National sharing

1. Opt into Flock’s national sharing network. Access via the national lookup tool is limited—users can only see results if they perform a full plate search and a positive match exists within the network of participating, opt-in agencies. This ensures data privacy while enabling broader collaboration when needed.
2. Share with agencies in specific states only
   
   1. Share with agencies with similar laws (for example, regarding immigration enforcement and data)

   
   

3. Share within your state only or within a certain distance
   
   1. You can share information with communities within a specified mile radius, with the entire state, or a combination of both—for example, sharing with cities within 150 miles of Kansas City (which would include cities in Missouri and neighboring states) and / or all communities statewide simultaneously.

   
   

4. Share 1:1
   
   1. Share only with specific agencies you have selected

   
   

5. Don’t share at all”

In a blog post Monday, Flock CEO Garrett Langley said Flock has paused all federal pilots.

“While it is true that Flock does not presently have a contractual relationship with any U.S. Department of Homeland Security agencies, we have engaged in limited pilots with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), to assist those agencies in combatting human trafficking and fentanyl distribution,” Langley wrote. “We clearly communicated poorly. We also didn’t create distinct permissions and protocols in the Flock system to ensure local compliance for federal agency users […] All federal customers will be designated within Flock as a distinct ‘Federal’ user category in the system. This distinction will give local agencies better information to determine their sharing settings.”

A Flock employee who does not agree with the way Flock allows for widespread data sharing told 404 Media that Flock has defended itself internally by saying it tries to follow the law. 404 Media granted the source anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the press.

“They will defend it as they have been by saying Flock follows the law and if these officials are doing law abiding official work then Flock will allow it,” they said. “However Flock will also say that they advise customers to ensure they have their sharing settings set appropriately to prevent them from sharing data they didn’t intend to. The question more in my mind is the fact that law in America is arguably changing, so will Flock just go along with whatever the customers want?”

The data shows that CBP has tapped directly into Flock’s huge network of license plate reading cameras, which passively scan the license plate, color, and model of vehicles that drive by them, then make a timestamped record of where that car was spotted. These cameras were marketed to cities and towns as a way of finding stolen cars or solving property crime locally, but over time, individual cities’ cameras have been connected to Flock’s national network to create a huge surveillance apparatus spanning the entire country that is being used to investigate all sorts of crimes and is now being used for immigration enforcement. As we reported in May, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been gaining access to this network through a side door, by asking local police who have access to the cameras to run searches for them.

9 News’s reporting and the newly released audit reports shared with 404 Media show that CBP now has direct access to much of Flock’s system and does not have to ask local police to run searches. It also shows that CBP had access to at least one other police department system in Colorado, in this case Boulder, which is a state whose laws forbid sharing license plate reader data with the federal government for immigration enforcement. Boulder’s Flock settings also state that it is not supposed to be used for immigration enforcement.

This story and our earlier stories, including another about a Texas official who searched nationwide for a woman who self-administered an abortion, were reported using Flock “Network Audits” released by police departments who have bought Flock cameras and have access to Flock’s network. They are essentially a huge spreadsheet of every time that the department’s camera data was searched; it shows which officer searched the data, what law enforcement department ran the search, the number of networks and cameras included in the search, the time and date of the search, the license plate, and a “reason” for the search. These audit logs allow us to see who has access to Flock’s systems, how wide their access is, how often they are searching the system, and what they are searching for.

The audit logs show that whatever system Flock is using to enroll local police departments’ cameras into the network that CBP is searching does not have any meaningful pushback, because the data shows that CBP has access to as many or more cameras as any other police department. Freeman analyzed the searches done by CBP on June 13 compared to searches done by other police departments on that same day, and found that CBP had a higher number of average cameras searched than local police departments.

“The average number of organizations searched by any agency per query is 6,049, with a max of 7,090,” Freeman told 404 Media. “That average includes small numbers like statewide searches. When I filter by searches by Border Patrol for the same date, their average number of networks searched is 6,429, with a max of 6,438. The reason for the maximum being larger than the national network is likely because some agencies have access to more cameras than just the national network (in-state cameras). Despite this, we still see that the count of networks searched by Border Patrol outnumbers that of all agencies, so if it’s not the national network, then this ‘pilot program’ must have opted everyone in the nation in by default.”

CBP did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A Texas Cop Searched License Plate Cameras Nationwide for a Woman Who Got an Abortion

The sheriff said the woman self-administered the abortion and her family were concerned for her safety, so authorities searched through Flock cameras.

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

Modern retrocomputing tricks often push old hardware and systems further than any of the back-in-the-day developers could have ever dreamed. How about a neural network on an original Mac? [KenDesigns] does just this with a classic handwritten digit identification network running with an entire custom SDK!

Getting such a piece of hardware running what is effectively multiple decades of machine learning is as hard as most could imagine. (The MNIST dataset used wasn’t even put together until the 90s.) Due to floating-point limitations on the original Mac, there are a variety of issues with attempting to run machine learning models. One of the several hoops to jump through required quantization of the model. This also allows the model to be squeezed into the limited RAM of the Mac.

Impressively, one of the most important features of [KenDesigns] setup is the custom SDK, allowing for the lack of macOS. This allows for incredibly nitty-gritty adjustments, but also requires an entire custom installation. Not all for nothing, though, as after some training manipulation, the model runs with some clear proficiency.

If you want to see it go, check out the video embedded below. Or if you just want to run it on your ancient Mac, you’ll find a disk image here. Emulators have even been tested to work for those without the original hardware. Newer hardware traditionally proves to be easier and more compact to use than these older toys; however, it doesn’t make it any less impressive to run a neural network on a calculator!

youtube.com/embed/TM4Spec7Eaw?…

hackaday.com/2025/09/15/origin…

I ricercatori di IBM X-Force hanno scoperto nuove operazioni del gruppo cinese Hive0154, meglio noto come Mustang Panda. Gli esperti hanno documentato l’uso simultaneo di una versione avanzata della backdoor Toneshell e di un nuovo worm USB chiamato SnakeDisk, che prende di mira specificamente i dispositivi in Thailandia. Questo approccio dimostra uno sforzo mirato per penetrare anche nelle reti governative isolate della regione.

La nuova versione del malware, denominata Toneshell9, rappresenta un notevole passo avanti rispetto alle versioni precedenti, grazie a meccanismi integrati per operare attraverso server proxy aziendali, consentendo al traffico dannoso di mascherarsi da connessioni di rete legittime.

L’arsenale di Toneshell9 comprende una reverse shell duale per l’esecuzione di comandi paralleli, algoritmi di crittografia unici basati su generatori di numeri casuali modificati e tecniche di occultamento mediante l’inserimento di codice spazzatura con stringhe generate da reti neurali.

Per mantenere la presenza sulla macchina infetta, viene utilizzato il DLL Sideloading e la comunicazione con i nodi di controllo è mascherata da pacchetti di dati applicativi TLS 1.2. Il design del client consente la gestione simultanea di più server, proxy e set di chiavi. Di particolare rilievo è la capacità di leggere le impostazioni proxy dal registro di Windows, che indica una profonda conoscenza delle architetture di rete.

Allo stesso tempo, gli specialisti IBM hanno identificato un worm USB completamente nuovo, SnakeDisk. Si attiva solo quando vengono rilevati indirizzi IP in Thailandia, il che indica il targeting strategico della campagna. Le attività di SnakeDisk includono l’autopropagazione tramite supporti rimovibili, l’occultamento di file legittimi su unità flash e l’installazione della backdoor Yokai , precedentemente utilizzata negli attacchi contro funzionari thailandesi alla fine del 2024.

Questo metodo consente agli aggressori di bypassare gli air gap e penetrare in sistemi critici fisicamente separati da Internet. La tempistica della campagna coincide con l’escalation dei conflitti di confine tra Thailandia e Cambogia nel 2025, il che aggiunge ulteriore contesto politico all’attacco.

Secondo gli analisti, Hive0154 utilizza attivamente tecniche di ingegneria sociale: documenti falsificati per conto del Ministero degli Esteri del Myanmar sono stati utilizzati per distribuire archivi infetti, distribuiti tramite i servizi cloud Box e Google Drive. File dannosi scaricati da Singapore e Thailandia confermano la mirata diffusione degli attacchi nei paesi del Sud-est asiatico. Il gruppo dispone di bootloader, backdoor e famiglie di worm USB proprietari, il che ne sottolinea l’elevato livello di sviluppo.

IBM X-Force sottolinea che le azioni di Hive0154 rientrano negli interessi strategici della Cina, dove la Cambogia è un alleato chiave e la pressione sulla Thailandia sta diventando uno strumento di politica regionale. La selettività geografica di SnakeDisk dimostra che non si tratta di un’infezione di massa, ma piuttosto di una ricognizione mirata e di una raccolta di informazioni in condizioni di crescente instabilità.

Gli esperti consigliano alle organizzazioni a rischio di rafforzare le proprie difese: monitorare l’attività dei supporti rimovibili, analizzare il traffico TLS senza handshake e controllare attentamente i documenti scaricati dai servizi cloud, anche se sembrano ufficiali. Mustang Panda continua a evolversi e i suoi strumenti più recenti dimostrano che la minaccia per gli stati della regione rimane seria e in crescita.

L'articolo Mustang Panda, nuovo attacco informatico con SnakeDisk: obiettivo la Thailandia proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

Ciao, sto facendo esperimenti su come l'AI potrebbe sostituire posti di lavoro:

it.m.wikibooks.org/wiki/Creare…