• Home
  • About Us
  • Contact Us
  • Privacy Policy
  • Special Offers
Business Intelligence Info
  • Business Intelligence
    • BI News and Info
    • Big Data
    • Mobile and Cloud
    • Self-Service BI
  • CRM
    • CRM News and Info
    • InfusionSoft
    • Microsoft Dynamics CRM
    • NetSuite
    • OnContact
    • Salesforce
    • Workbooks
  • Data Mining
    • Pentaho
    • Sisense
    • Tableau
    • TIBCO Spotfire
  • Data Warehousing
    • DWH News and Info
    • IBM DB2
    • Microsoft SQL Server
    • Oracle
    • Teradata
  • Predictive Analytics
    • FICO
    • KNIME
    • Mathematica
    • Matlab
    • Minitab
    • RapidMiner
    • Revolution
    • SAP
    • SAS/SPSS
  • Humor

Fake news: It’s not just for politics anymore

November 28, 2016   DWH News and Info

computer news shock Fake news: It’s not just for politics anymore

The recent uproar over fake news in the U.S. Presidential campaign was depressingly familiar to me. I’ve been dealing with the issue on topics related to my specialized field for more than a decade, and there’s no sign that the problem is getting better.

As with its political counterparts, tech-related fake news comes in all flavors. Some is deliberate disinformation, but most is the outgrowth of a one-two punch: ignorant reporting, fueled by a click-driven echo chamber.

The latest example is a story published last week by IDG’s ARN, an Australian website aimed at the reseller market.

 Fake news: It’s not just for politics anymore

arn fake news headline Fake news: It’s not just for politics anymore

That subhead is completely inaccurate and unsupported by any facts.

The headline above that story is accurate enough, but the subhead is complete fantasy. And the opening two paragraphs of the story compound the error.

FireEye has recently struck a deal Microsoft [sic], designed to place the security vendor’s iSIGHT Intelligence into Windows Defender, an inbuilt Windows security offering.

Terms of the deal will see FireEye gain access to telemetry from every device running Windows 10, serving up access to almost 22 per cent of the total desktop market, alongside laptops and Windows mobile phones. [emphasis added]

What’s strange about this story is that it’s based on a press release from three weeks earlier, which managed to escape into the world with little notice, probably because the “news” was mostly a yawner.

Crucially, though, that release doesn’t contain the word telemetry, nor does it say anything even remotely resembling the inflammatory statement in that subhead and second graf from ARN.

In fact, it’s pretty clear that the author of the story has literally no clue what WDATP is. (I’ll get to that in a minute.)

But the fact that this story was factually challenged didn’t stop the echo chamber from repeating it over and over again. Here’s a snippet from Google News, collected just minutes ago, four days after the story first appeared:

 Fake news: It’s not just for politics anymore

arn fake news on google Fake news: It’s not just for politics anymore

Google News amplifies fake stories like this one.

Even my old friend Woody Leonhard got in the act, posting a story with the provocative headline Is Fireeye getting access to all Win10 telemetry data?

In it, he noted that Fireeye has “deep ties in the corporate and cybersecurity worlds.” The story ends oddly: “I can’t imagine that it’s true,” Woody writes, “but the report’s scary.”

Tell that to anyone who just skimmed the headlines and read the first few paragraphs without scrolling down.

Eventually, someone at Microsoft got wind of the story and released a statement forcefully denying it:

The nature of the deal between Microsoft and FireEye is to license threat intelligence content from FireEye iSIGHT Intelligence. This additional layer of intelligence includes indicators and reports of past attacks collected and edited by FireEye and enhances detection capabilities of Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection (WDATP). The deal does not include the sharing of Microsoft telemetry.

Unfortunately, that statement ended up tacked to the end of a story at BetaNews, which still has the original headline, with a single word tacked onto the end: Microsoft shares Windows 10 telemetry data with third parties [Updated]. [Nope, that story doesn’t deserve a link.]

Meanwhile, the ARN story is still sitting there, uncorrected.

Over at Bing News, the situation is even worse. Google News at least filters out low-quality websites, whereas Bing’s algorithm spews out copycat stories from sketchy sites like nextpowerup.com, latesthackingnews.com, and winbuzzer.com.

Those sites appear to be following the same business model as the Russian and Macedonian sites that fed a steady stream of garbage into online services during the recent Presidential election.

The sad part about this whole mess is that it could have been avoided with even minimal fact-checking by anyone involved. In fact, all they had to do was read the Fireeye press release and ask how the author of the original story came up with that conclusion.

Oh, wait, the Google News snippet from Softpedia News notes that they did exactly that:

“[T]he official press release that Fireeye posted today [it was actually three weeks earlier] says nothing about Microsoft providing them with access to information collected from Windows 10 systems, but…”

In other words, the author of that story spotted the enormous problem with it and chose to run with it anyway, adding a bogus click-baiting headline that ignored their own suspicions.

Please kill me.

So, what’s the real story here?

Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection has nothing to do with Windows 10 telemetry collection. As the name suggests, it’s an advanced feature that is available by subscription only for large organizations running Windows 10 Pro and Enterprise editions.

The privacy statement for WDATP contains this language:

[Y]our data is isolated through access authentication and logical segregation based on customer identifier. Each customer can only access data collected from its own organization and generic data that Microsoft provides.

[…]

Customer data is isolated from other customers and is not shared. However, insights on the data resulting from Microsoft processing, and which don’t contain any customer specific data, might be shared with other customers. Each customer can only access data collected from its own organization and generic data that Microsoft provides.

see all of ed bott’s Windows 10 Tips

My colleague Mary Jo Foley wrote about it back in March, when the service was announced. The point of WDATP, as a September white paper notes, is to allow enterprise security professionals to find evidence of attacks that have “made it past all other defenses (post breach detection).” The point is to provide “actionable, correlated alerts for known and unknown adversaries trying to hide their activities on endpoints.”

Microsoft even noted that the service provides a “built in unique threat intelligence knowledge base … [with] actor details and intent context for every threat intel-based detection – combining first and third-party intelligence sources.”

That latter portion includes Fireeye’s data source.

The WDATP infrastructure is intensely private. When an organization signs up for the service, they get a dedicated, secure portal to analyze information collected from within their organization. If a security professional finds a suspicious file that might have been used to compromise a device or a network, they can choose to submit it for further analysis, using that threat database to locate clues about the origin of the attack and what it might have done.

And no, Fireeye neither wants nor needs general-purpose telemetry information from Windows 10 devices. That information wouldn’t be even remotely relevant to their mission.

Like the proven garbage that polluted Facebook and the web in the run-up to the Presidential election, this sort of story thrives on confirmation bias. If you believe that Evil Microsoft is secretly harvesting all your secrets, you have no incentive to analyze “evidence” of this sort. It’s much easier just to copy, paste, and publish.

And that same confirmation bias works to reinforce fake news like this, garnering clicks and other evidence of interest that drives stories to the top of search results, regardless of their inherent accuracy.

In politics and tech, the problem is one of algorithms. Google has made some baby steps in the direction of improving its results by banning many content mills from its news page, but there’s no such filter for verifiable truth. And until there is, this is a problem that will get worse, not better.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Colbran South Africa

Anymore, Fake, It's, Just, News, Politics
  • Recent Posts

    • Accelerate Your Data Strategies and Investments to Stay Competitive in the Banking Sector
    • SQL Server Security – Fixed server and database roles
    • Teradata Named a Leader in Cloud Data Warehouse Evaluation by Independent Research Firm
    • Derivative of a norm
    • TODAY’S OPEN THREAD
  • Categories

  • Archives

    • April 2021
    • March 2021
    • February 2021
    • January 2021
    • December 2020
    • November 2020
    • October 2020
    • September 2020
    • August 2020
    • July 2020
    • June 2020
    • May 2020
    • April 2020
    • March 2020
    • February 2020
    • January 2020
    • December 2019
    • November 2019
    • October 2019
    • September 2019
    • August 2019
    • July 2019
    • June 2019
    • May 2019
    • April 2019
    • March 2019
    • February 2019
    • January 2019
    • December 2018
    • November 2018
    • October 2018
    • September 2018
    • August 2018
    • July 2018
    • June 2018
    • May 2018
    • April 2018
    • March 2018
    • February 2018
    • January 2018
    • December 2017
    • November 2017
    • October 2017
    • September 2017
    • August 2017
    • July 2017
    • June 2017
    • May 2017
    • April 2017
    • March 2017
    • February 2017
    • January 2017
    • December 2016
    • November 2016
    • October 2016
    • September 2016
    • August 2016
    • July 2016
    • June 2016
    • May 2016
    • April 2016
    • March 2016
    • February 2016
    • January 2016
    • December 2015
    • November 2015
    • October 2015
    • September 2015
    • August 2015
    • July 2015
    • June 2015
    • May 2015
    • April 2015
    • March 2015
    • February 2015
    • January 2015
    • December 2014
    • November 2014
© 2021 Business Intelligence Info
Power BI Training | G Com Solutions Limited