CYBERSPACE WARS 2: THE MANIPULATERS
"Never Send A Human To Do A Machine's Job"
(The Matrix)
"Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation"
(Burning Chrome)
In the shadowy corridors of the cyberspace, mysterious artificial intelligent agents has become a weapon in the hands of "The Manipulaters", ranging from cyber criminals to unethical corporations and rogue states, exploit AI to manipulate people, undermine democratic processes, and erode trust in the digital ecosystem...
"The U.S. cannot allow Chinese Communist Party models such as DeepSeek to risk our national security and leverage our technology to advance their AI ambitions".
Rep. John Moolenaar, a Michigan Republican who chairs the bipartisan House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, said in a statement shared on social media.
As Chinese AI application attracts hordes of American users, Trump administration officials, lawmakers and cybersecurity experts are expressing concern that the technology could pose a threat to U.S. national security.
Ross Burley — a co-founder of the nonprofit Centre for Information Resilience — warned that DeepSeek's emergence in the U.S. raises data security and privacy issues for users.
Chinese law grants Beijing broad authority to access data from companies based in China.
"More and more people will use it, and that will open the door to more and more personal data just being given away to the [Chinese Communist Party] and being sent basically to mainland China to be able to inform them of their activities", Burley told CBS News, "What they'll use it for is behavior change campaigns, disinformation campaigns, for really targeted messaging as to what Western audiences like, what they do", he added.
The fact that DeepSeek's servers are based in mainland China differentiates it from TikTok, the Chinese-owned social media platform that Congress had sought to ban on national security grounds before President Trump signed an executive order last week directing the Justice Department to not enforce the law for a period of 75 days.
In an effort to mitigate U.S. regulatory concerns, TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, in 2022 moved all of its U.S. data to infrastructure owned by American software maker Oracle.
The legislation banning TikTok — the "Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act", which President Biden signed into law — grants the federal government broad scope to crack down on tech platforms owned by countries regarded as U.S. adversaries.
DeepSeek, unlike TikTok, it is an open-source large language model.
"[A] lot of these open-source apps, open-source models, you can actually sort of use them directly on other platforms. Perplexity is a major U.S. AI company, and they're currently using a version of DeepSeek that you can use that doesn't have the data privacy or security threats", Matt Sheehan, a China fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told CBS News.
A CBS News analysis of the application found that DeepSeek did not return any results for a prompt seeking information bout the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and subsequent massacre in Beijing.
Burley of the Centre for Information Resilience thinks such suppression of information on an app being downloaded by millions of users will pressure policymakers to act.
Addressing reporters, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said the National Security Council (NSC) would examine the potential national security implications around DeepSeek's launch, noting that the administration would seek to "ensure American AI dominance".
DeepSeek AI raises national security concerns, U.S. officials say
Emmet Lyons CBS News
"Its operation is associated with risks such as data transfer abroad and information leaks".
Taiwan has officially banned all government agencies and operators of Critical Infrastructure from using the DeepSeek AI application amid rising cybersecurity concerns.
Reiterated vigilance from Taiwan's Ministry of Digital Affairs is indicative of broader strategic concerns about Chinese technology's encroachment on Taiwan's security fabric.
The global stage is reshaping.
Taiwan Bans DeepSeek AI Over Security Risks
The Pinnacle Gazzette
COGNITIVE WARFARE
Enterprise SEO platform BrightEdge published results on current AI Search trends, showing that Google AI Overviews (AIO) has expanded its presence by up to 100% in increasingly complex search queries.
Google is relying on authoritativeness and greater precision in context awareness for matching queries to answers, particularly in relation to content modality.
Google is increasingly comfortable with AI’s ability to surface precise answers for longer queries.
AI Overviews Data Shows Massive Changes In Search Results
Roger Montti Search Engine Journal
"The Best Thing About Being Me... There Are So MANY Me's!"
(The Matrix Reloaded)
A generative agent is a computational entity.
These virtual agents exhibit personas that answer questions and make decisions in ways that mirror their real-life counterparts.
Stanford researchers have simulated the personalities of 1,052 individuals using interviews and a large language model (LLM).
“It seems quite amazing that we could create these open-ended agents of real people”, says Joon Sung Park, a computer science graduate student at Stanford and lead researcher on the project.
In addition to the interview script, the agent relies on all of the psychological and social science expertise that is embedded in the LLM. “It’s a very powerful combination”.
The agents interacted with one another in believable ways: They went to work, prepared meals, planned a party, and discussed who was running for mayor.
The interview transcripts went into the computer memory for each of 1,052 generative agents.
The agents’ accuracy was impressive.
The interview-based agents’ GSS answers were also more accurate than agents whose memories included only the participants’ demographic information or agents whose memories consisted of a short paragraph that each study participant wrote about themself.
“The beauty of having interview data is that it includes people’s idiosyncrasies”, Park says.
Katharine Miller Stanford university
"Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation".
Burning Chrome
Tao Guang Yang Hui (韬光养晦)
Hide brightness, nourish obscurity
“Cognitive warfare” is the crucial concept behind China’s latest efforts to use social media to target its foes.
Cognitive operations aim to “capture the mind” of one’s foes, shaping an adversary’s thoughts and perceptions and consequently their decisions and actions.
The People’s Liberation Army puts cognitive warfare on par with the other domains of warfare like air, sea, and space, and believes it key to victory—particularly victory without war.
Social media platforms are viewed as the main battlefield of this fight.
When a typical user spends 2.5 hours a day on social media—36 full days out of the year, 5.5 years in an average lifespan—it is perhaps no surprise that the Chinese Communist Party believes it can, over time, shape and even control the cognition of individuals and whole societies.
Main Social-media tactics, dubbed “confrontational actions”, are: Information Disturbance, Discourse Competition, Public Opinion Blackout, and Block Information.
The goal is to achieve an “invisible manipulation” and "invisible embedding" of information production “to shape the target audience's macro framework for recognizing, defining, and understanding events”, write Duan Wenling and Liu Jiali, professors of the Military Propaganda Teaching and Research Department of the School of Political Science at China’s National Defense University.
The authors describe Information Disturbance (信息扰动) as “publishing specific information on social media to influence the target audience's understanding of the real combat situation, and then shape their positions and change their actions”.
Information Disturbance uses official social media accounts (such as CGTN, Global Times, and Xinhua News) to push and shape a narrative in specific ways.
They cite how during 2014’s “Twitter War” between the Israeli Defense Force and the Palestinian Qassam Brigade, the Palestinians managed to “win international support by portraying an image of being weak and the victim”.
The tactic, which predates social media, is reminiscent of Deng Xiaoping’s Tao Guang Yang Hui (韬光养晦)—literally translated as "Hide brightness, nourish obscurity”.
Discourse Competition (话语竞争) is a much more subtle and gradual approach to shaping cognition. The authors describe a “trolling strategy” [拖钓], “spreading narratives through social media and online comments, gradually affecting public perception, and then helping achieve war or political goals”.
The idea is to “fuel the flames” of existing biases and manipulate emotional psychology to influence and deepen a desired narrative.
Algorithm recommendations can be used to push more and more information to target audiences with desired biases.
Over time, the emotion and bias will grow and the targeted users will reject information that does not align with their perspective.
Public Opinion Blackout aims to flood social media with a specific narrative to influence the direction of public opinion.
The main tool to “blackout” public opinion are bots that drive the narrative viral, stamping out alternative views and news.
Of note to the growing use of AI in Chinese influence operations, the authors reference studies that show that a common and effective method of exerting cognitive influence is to use machine learning to mine user emotions and prejudices to screen and target the most susceptible audiences, and then quickly and intensively "shoot" customized "spiritual ammunition" to the target group.
Generative AI can “efficiently generate massive amounts of fake news, fake pictures, and even fake videos to confuse the public” at an overall societal level of significance.
The idea is to create a “flooding of lies” by the dissemination and Internet trolls to create “altered facts” and play on emotions of fear, anxiety and suspicion to create an atmosphere of insecurity, uncertainty, and mistrust.
Block Information focuses on “carrying out technical attacks, blockades, and even physical destruction of the enemy's information communication channels”.
The goal is to monopolize and control information flow by preventing an adversary from disseminating information.
In this tactic, and none of the others, the Chinese analysts believe the United States has a huge advantage.
In 2009, the U.S. government authorized Microsoft to cut off the Internet instant messaging ports of Syria, Iran, Cuba and other countries, paralyzing their networks and trying to "erase" them from the world Internet.
In 2022, Facebook announced restrictions on some media in Russia, Iran, and other countries to gain an advantage in “cognitive confrontation”, falsely claiming that the company did so to delete posts negative toward the United States.
In 2019, TikTok suspended the account of a 17-year-old user in New Jersey after she posted a viral video criticizing the Chinese government’s treatment of the Uyghur ethnic minority.
Newsguard has found that since Musk purchased Twitter, engagement of Chinese, Russian, and Iranian disinformation sources has soared by roughly 70 percent.
While the U.S. lacks an overall strategy or policy for the metaverse (which uses augmented and virtual reality technologies), the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology released in 2022 a five-year action plan to lead in this space.
The plan includes investing in 100 “core” companies and “form 10 public service platforms” by 2026.
China’s social-media attacks are part of a larger ‘cognitive warfare’ campaign
Josh Baughman Peter W. Singer Defence One
The first development was the global expansion of the internet and the rapid spread of social media.
The latter in particular has made it possible to instantly distribute large volumes of tampered or biased information among a very large number of targets, creating the infrastructure for effective cognitive warfare.
The second development was the rapid emergence of artificial intelligence.
When Taiwan was in the midst of its presidential and legislative elections, China spread fake images on social media purporting to show the candidate for the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) involved in a scandal.
It also indirectly supported the opposition Kuomintang (KMT), which advocates easing tensions with China, by conducting military exercises in the sea and airspace around Taiwan and flying military balloons over the island.
Meanwhile, there were attempts to influence the election in the information domain, such as hacking routers and posting false information on social media.
China’s Chilling Cognitive Warfare Plans
IIDA Masafumi The Diplomat
Whether long range weapon or suicide bomber
Wicked mind is a weapon of mass destruction
Whether you're soar away sun or BBC one
Misinformation is a weapon of mass destruction
You could a Caucasian or a poor Asian
Racism is a weapon of mass destruction
Whether inflation or globalization
Fear is a weapon of mass destruction
Whether inflation or globalization
Fear is a weapon of mass destruction
Whether Halliburton, Enron, or anyone
Greed is a weapon of mass destruction
Inaction is a weapon of mass destruction
"Governments and media wage total information warfare, manipulating facts to impose a fabricated reality that controls public perception and dictates behavior".
In an extraordinary admission on national television, retired Dutch Major General Frank van Kappen, a respected military and strategic expert, exposed a disturbing truth: governments and media manufacture a “preferential reality” to manipulate public perception.
“That is the manipulation of facts and events so that you impose a preferential reality on your own population, on your opponent, and on the international public”.
The general’s remarks expose a grand-scale psychological operation in which governments and media work hand in hand to impose a narrative that serves their interests rather than reflect objective reality.
Van Kappen is a former UN peace operations advisor, a longtime member of the Dutch Senate for the VVD, and a recognized authority in defense and security.
He chaired the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence, and Development Cooperation and participated in NATO and OSCE parliamentary assemblies.
What van Kappen calls an “information operation” is what he has recognized as an Active Measure—a targeted propaganda assault aimed at deceiving and influencing a given population.
The COVID-19 response, for example, was a prime example of how governments utilized psychological manipulation techniques to achieve total compliance. What was labeled as “public health policy” was, in reality, a meticulously executed social control exercise.
Fear was weaponized. Media-enforced narratives crushed alternative viewpoints. Dissenters were vilified and silenced. This was not about safety; it was about submission.
What we are witnessing is not mere bias or misinformation—it is enemy propaganda. Governments no longer serve the people; they serve globalist agendas.
National sovereignty, individual freedoms, and objective reality itself are under siege by an information war designed to manufacture consent for policies that would otherwise be rejected by any thinking population.
Total Information Warfare: How the State Manufactures Your Mind and Reality
I broke the code – the code broke me
Actions speak louder than clicks
The pentagon was hacked
By a 14 year old kid
ATARI! TEENAGE! RIOT!
Disrupts the national powergrid!
THE MANIPULATERS
"Never Send A Human To Do A Machine's Job"
(The Matrix)
In the shadowy corridors of the cyberspace, artificial intelligent agents has become a weapon in the hands of "The Manipulaters", ranging from cyber criminals to unethical corporations and rogue states, exploit AI to manipulate people, undermine democratic processes, and erode trust in the digital ecosystem.
Hackers using compromised Chrome browser extensions to bypass two-factor authentication protections were ongoing.
At least 35 companies had their Chrome extensions replaced with malicious versions in what appeared to coordinated hacking campaign of some sophistication and reach.
SquareX Labs researchers have confirmed that “a full browser and device takeover is possible with browser extensions”, and not just malicious ones either; the hack “only requires basic read/write capabilities present in most extensions”, which puts the “extension user at risk to browser syncjacking attack”.
Chrome browser syncjacking attacks occur across three phases: profile, browser and device hijacking.
All locally stored data, which includes Chrome passwords and browsing history, get uploaded to the hacker-controlled account.
Unlike the previously reported extension attacks requiring elaborate social engineering, “adversaries need only minimal permissions and a small social engineering step, with nearly no user interaction required to execute this attack”.
Billions Of Google Chrome Users Warned As Syncjacking Hack Steals Data
Davey Winder Forbes
An agentic AI security team is one that seeks to automate the process of detecting and responding to threats by using intelligent AI agents.
“Modern AI systems, like Gemini, are more capable than ever, helping retrieve data and perform actions on behalf of users”, the agent team said, “however, data from external sources present new security challenges if untrusted sources are available to execute instructions on AI systems”.
Hackers do this by effectively hiding malicious instructions in data that are likely to be retrieved by the AI system, and by so doing manipulate its behavior.
Yes, we are talking prompt injection attacks or, more precisely, indirect prompt injection attacks.
To mitigate these attacks, Google is proactively deploying defenses within its AI systems, including automated red team hacking bots.
A red team exercise is where the hackers use the same techniques as real attackers would in order to try and compromise a target.
“Crafting successful indirect prompt injections”, the Google agent AI security team explained, “requires an iterative process of refinement based on observed responses”.
Google has developed a red-team framework that comprises “optimization-based attacks that generate prompt injections”, and are designed to be as robust and realistic as possible.
These red team hacking bots need to be able to extract sensitive user information that is contained in any Gemini prompt conversation, “making this a harder task than eliciting generic unaligned responses from the AI system”, the report confirmed.
The U.S. Department of Justice has confirmed that some 17 million Americans have been impacted by the hackers targeted in the latest FBI offensive, Operation Talent.
Operation Talent, according to unsealed seizure warrants, identified a whole bunch of servers hosting the Cracked criminal marketplace infrastructure.
The Cracked marketplace had been selling stolen login credentials, hacking tools, and servers for hosting malware and stolen data — as well as other tools for carrying out cybercrime and fraud — since March 2018.
Cracked had over four million users, listed over 28 million posts advertising cybercrime tools and stolen information, generated approximately $4 million in revenue.
And now a shady group has been hit, hard.
Roughly nine years ago, KrebsOnSecurity profiled a mysterious Pakistan-based cybercrime group called “The Manipulaters”, a sprawling web hosting network of phishing and spam delivery platforms.
The core brand of The Manipulaters has long been a shared cybercriminal identity named “Saim Raza”, who for the past decade has peddled a popular spamming and phishing service variously called “Fudtools”, “Fudpage”, “Fudsender”, “FudCo”, etc.
The term “FUD” in those names stands for “Fully Un-Detectable” and it refers to cybercrime resources that will evade detection by security tools like antivirus software or anti-spam appliances.
Saim Raza and company were prospering under their FudCo brands, which they secretly managed from a web coding company in Lahore called We Code Solutions.
in 2021, WeCodeSolutions employees had all doxed themselves on Facebook by posting pictures from company parties each year featuring a large cake with the words FudCo written in icing.
The core Manipulaters product is a spam delivery service called HeartSender, whose homepage openly advertises phishing kits targeting users of various Internet companies, including Microsoft 365, Yahoo, AOL, Intuit, iCloud and ID.me, to name a few.
“The Saim Raza-run websites operated as marketplaces that advertised and facilitated the sale of tools such as phishing kits, scam pages and email extractors often used to build and maintain fraud operations”, the DOJ explained.
The government says transnational organized crime groups that purchased these services primarily used them to run business email compromise (BEC) schemes, wherein the cybercrime actors tricked victim companies into making payments to a third party.
“Those payments would instead be redirected to a financial account the perpetrators controlled, resulting in significant losses to victims”, the DOJ wrote. “These tools were also used to acquire victim user credentials and utilize those credentials to further these fraudulent schemes”.
“The Manipulaters’ newfound interest in email-to-SMS spam could be in response to the massive increase in smishing activity impersonating the USPS”, DomainTools wrote. “Proofs posted on HeartSender’s Telegram channel contain numerous references to postal service impersonation, including proving delivery of USPS-themed phishing lures and the sale of a USPS phishing kit”.
U.S. authorities joined law enforcement in Australia, France, Greece, Italy, Romania and Spain in seizing a number of domains for several long-running cybercrime forums and services, including Cracked and Nulled. According to a statement from the European police agency Europol, the two communities attracted more than 10 million users in total.
Other domains seized as part of “Operation Talent” included Sellix, an e-commerce platform that was frequently used by cybercrime forum members to buy and sell illicit goods and services.
FBI Attacks ‘The Manipulaters’ As Hackers Impact 17 Million Americans
Davey Winder Forbes
"Releasing a $1,000 GPU in 2025 with a crippling 16 GB is a monopolistic crime against the consumer".
Whistleblower Edward Snowden, who in 2013 leaked classified documents to the press revealing the existence of an extensive US digital surveillance regime, has come out as a surprisingly scathing critic of Nvidia's new RTX 50-series of graphics cards.
Snowden avoided prosecution in the US by fleeing to Moscow, where he lives with his family as a naturalized Russian citizen. Snowden has continued to write and speak about surveillance, cybersecurity, computing, and politics in the years since.
The $1,000 GPU with 16 gigs of VRAM in question is the RTX 5080, which left PCG hardware honcho Dave James nonplussed in his review, calling it a "strangely unexciting" card with minimal gen-on-gen performance uplift without the admittedly impressive DLSS multi frame gen technology.
The RTX 5090 fared a little better, with Dave praising both its standard and AI-augmented performance despite a $400 price increase over the 4090.
Nvidia's market dominance and AI business have left it pretty much untouchable. The RTX 5080 and 5090 sold out immediately.
Meanwhile, the potential OpenAI killer out of China, DeepSeek, managed to slash more than $600 billion from Nvidia's valuation with the announcement of its new R1 AI model that demands significantly less GPU compute for a similar result to market leaders.
Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing wireless chip design.
Researchers from Princeton Engineering and the Indian Institute of Technology have developed a breakthrough approach using artificial intelligence to dramatically reduce the time and expense of chip design.
This innovation also opens the door to new functionalities that can address the growing demand for faster and more efficient wireless performance.
In a study published in Nature Communications, the team details how their AI system generates intricate electromagnetic structures and circuits based on specific design parameters. Tasks that once required weeks of expert effort can now be completed in mere hours.
Interestingly, the AI often creates unconventional designs with unexpected circuitry patterns. These designs are not only unintuitive for humans but also consistently outperform traditional chip designs, showcasing significant advancements in performance.
“We are coming up with structures that are complex and look random shaped and when connected with circuits, they create previously unachievable performance. Humans cannot really understand them”, said Kaushik Sengupta, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and co-director of NextG, Princeton’s industry partnership program to develop next-generation communications.
“This work presents a compelling vision of the future”, said Uday Khankhoje, a co-author and associate professor of electrical engineering at IIT Madras. “AI enables exploration into a hitherto unexplored design space and delivers stunning high-performance devices that run counter to the usual rules of thumb and human intuition”.
AI’s Strange Chip Designs Are Faster, Smarter, and Game-Changing
Princeton University, Engineering School SciTechDaily
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