Posted on 05/30/2023 4:49:44 PM PDT by yesthatjallen
That anonymous internet persona with an anime cartoon avatar in your Discord chat might actually be a contractor sent to spy on you.
Enter the world of “threat intelligence.”
It’s the term of art for a growing set of surveillance and security firms that create fake online personas to infiltrate and scrape data from private corners of the internet. The industry provides corporate and government clients with insight into conversations on private, invite-only Discord chats, WhatsApp groups, Reddit forums, and dark web message boards to help those powerful customers keep tabs on a variety of potential threats, from political hacktivists to the illegal markets that traffic in stolen passwords and intellectual property.
I spoke to representatives of ZeroFox, DarkOwl, Searchlight Cyber, Recorded Future, CyberInt, Flashpoint, and other threat intelligence firms at RSA Conference 2023, an annual convention for cyber security professionals from across the world that is held in San Francisco.
“We have personnel who already have established credentials in these environments so that we're able to go in and look for things,” said A.J. Nash, the vice president of intelligence at ZeroFox, a leader in the threat intelligence industry that is based in Baltimore, Maryland.
Nash confirmed that the company is active in Discord, an audio and video group chat app popular among young video-game players.
"We can do the same thing with Discord," Nash added. "It's hard to infiltrate a small group because everybody knows everybody. But some of the groups that are larger, yeah, we have the ability to get into some opportunities."
SNIP
(Excerpt) Read more at leefang.com ...
Ok I retract as to you, it seems you have just been duped. Recovery is possible.
So you’re still asserting that the other people you named are employees or contractors for the Federal government of the United States of America?
Definitely not! That’s outrageous.
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