Facebook and Google were conned out of $100m in phishing scheme

Google and Facebook were phished for over $100m, it has been reported, proving not even the biggest technology companies in the world are immune from the increasingly sophisticated attacks of online scammers.

Last month it was reported that two major tech companies were tricked by a Lithuanian man into sending him over $100m (£77m). Evaldas Rimasauskas, 48, was charged with wire fraud, money laundering and aggravated identity theft for impersonating Quanta Computer – a Taiwanese electronics manufacturer that includes Google, Facebook and Apple as clients.

Now an investigation by Fortune has shown that the two firms Rimasauskas reportedly sent fraudulent invoices to were Facebook and Google, who both paid out over $100m.

Facebook said in a statement: “We recovered the bulk of the funds shortly after the incident and has been cooperating with law enforcement in its investigation.” Likewise Google said it had “detected this fraud against our vendor management team and promptly alerted the authorities. We recouped the funds and we’re pleased this matter is resolved.”

The case shows just how big an issue phishing and online fraud has become, with phishing attacks conning people and companies all over the world out of significant sums of money.

Where the age old Nigerian Prince scams still operate with bogus claims of money, techniques used by the thieves have become increasingly sophisticated. The National Audit Office warned in December that the UK was ill prepared for online fraud and that it cost UK consumers at least £14.8bn last year, of which £4.2bn is thought to be hidden and unreported losses from crime such as mass marketing fraud and counterfeit goods.

In January, accountants KPMG recorded the value of fraud committed in the UK last year reported to the court system to have exceeded £1.1bn – a 55% year-on-year rise highlighting a dramatic rise in cybercrime.

From costly conveyancing scams to fake IT support, it’s more important than ever to double-check anything asking for personal details or money. But when even Facebook and Google, who make technology that is meant to help protect against online scammers, get tricked, it paints a grim picture for your average user.

Facebook is building brain-computer interfaces for typing and skin-hearing

Facebook revealed it has a team of 60 engineers working on building a brain-computer interface that will let you type with just your mind without invasive implants. The team plans to use optical imaging to scan your brain a hundred times per second to detect you speaking silently in your head, and translate it into text.

Regina Dugan, the head of Facebook’s R&D division Building 8, explained to conference attendees that the goal is to eventually allow people to type at 100 words per minute, 5X faster than typing on a phone, with just your mind.

Eventually, brain-computer interfaces could let people control augmented reality and virtual reality experiences with their mind instead of a screen or controller. Facebook’s CEO and CTO teased these details of this “direct brain interface” technology over the last two days at F8.

Brain-Typing

“What if you could type directly from your brain?” Dugan asked. She showed a video of a paralyzed medical patient at Stanford who can type using their mind thanks to an implanted sensor. She went on to explain how Facebook wants to do this without surgical implants.

Building 8 only began working on the brain typing project six months ago, but it now is collaborating with UC San Francisco, UC Berkeley, Johns Hopkins Medicine, Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory and Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Researchers who specialize in machine learning for decoding speech and language, building optical neuroimaging systems with advanced spatial resolution and next-generation neural prosthetics are involved.

A Stanford patient can type with their mind via a surgical implant. Facebook wants to build a faster, non-invasive version

The plan is to eventually build non-implanted devices that can ship at scale. And to tamp down on the inevitable fear this research will inspire, Facebook tells me “This isn’t about decoding random thoughts. This is about decoding the words you’ve already decided to share by sending them to the speech center of your brain.” Facebook likened it to how you take lots of photos but only share some of them. Even with its device, Facebook says you’ll be able to think freely but only turn some thoughts into text.

Skin-Hearing

Meanwhile, Building 8 is working on a way for humans to hear through their skin. It’s been building prototypes of hardware and software that let your skin mimic the cochlea in your ear that translates sound into specific frequencies for your brain. This technology could let deaf people essentially “hear” by bypassing their ears.

A team of Facebook engineers was shown experimenting with hearing through skin using a system of actuators tuned to 16 frequency bands. A test subject was able to develop a vocabulary of nine words they could hear through their skin.

To underscore the gravity of Building 8s mind-reading technology, Dugan started her talk by saying she’s never seen something as powerful as the smartphone “that didn’t have unintended consequences.” She mentioned that we’d all be better off if we looked up from our phones every so often. But at the same time, she believes technology can foster empathy, education and global community.

Building 8’s Big Reveal

Facebook hired Dugan last year to lead its secretive new Building 8 research lab. She had previously run Google’s Advanced Technology And Products division, and was formerly a head of DARPA.

Facebook built a special Area 404 wing of its Menlo Park headquarters with tons of mechanical engineering equipment to help Dugan’s team quickly prototype new hardware. In December, it signed rapid collaboration deals with Stanford, Harvard, MIT and more to get academia’s assistance.

Yet until now, nobody really knew what Building 8 was…building. Business Insider had reported on Building 8’s job listings and that it might show off news at F8.

According to these job listings, Facebook is looking for a Brain-Computer Interface Engineer “who will be responsible for working on a 2-year B8 project focused on developing advanced BCI technologies.” Responsibilities include “Application of machine learning methods, including encoding and decoding models, to neuroimaging and electrophysiological data.” It’s also looking for a Neural Imaging Engineer who will be “focused on developing novel non-invasive neuroimaging technologies” who will “Design and evaluate novel neural imaging methods based on optical, RF, ultrasound, or other entirely non-invasive approaches.”

Elon Musk has been developing his own startup called Neuralink for creating brain interfaces.

Facebook Building 8 R&D division head Regina Dugan

Facebook has built hardware before to mixed success. It made an Android phone with HTC called the First to host its Facebook Home operating system. That flopped. Since then, Facebook proper has turned its attention away from consumer gadgetry and toward connectivity. It’s built the Terragraph Wi-Fi nodes, Project ARIES antenna, Aquila solar-powered drone and its own connectivity-beaming satellite from its internet access initiative — though that blew up on the launch pad when the SpaceX vehicle carrying it exploded.

Facebook has built and open sourced its Surround 360 camera. As for back-end infrastructure, it’s developed an open-rack network switch called Wedge, the Open Vault for storage, plus sensors for the Telecom Infra Project’s OpenCellular platform. And finally, through its acquisition of Oculus, Facebook has built wired and mobile virtual reality headsets.

Facebook’s Area 404 hardware lab contains tons of mechanical engineering and prototyping equipment

But as Facebook grows, it has the resources and talent to try new approaches in hardware. With over 1.8 billion users connected to just its main Facebook app, the company has a massive funnel of potential guinea pigs for its experiments.

Today’s announcements are naturally unsettling. Hearing about a tiny startup developing these advanced technologies might have conjured images of governments or coporate conglomerates one day reading our mind to detect thought crime, like in 1984. Facebook’s scale makes that future feel more plausible, no matter how much Zuckerberg and Dugan try to position the company as benevolent and compassionate. The more Facebook can do to institute safe-guards, independent monitoring, and transparency around how brain-interface technology is built and tested, the more receptive it might find the public.

A week ago Facebook was being criticized as nothing but a Snapchat copycat that had stopped innovating. Today’s demos seemed design to dismantle that argument and keep top engineering talent knocking on its door.

“Do you want to work for the company who pioneered putting augmented reality dog ears on teens, or the one that pioneered typing with telepathy?” You don’t have to say anything. For Facebook, thinking might be enough.

5 Things You Need to Know about Facebook’s Next 10 Years

This week at Facebook’s annual developer conference, F8, in San Francisco, CEO Mark Zuckerberg laid out the social network’s plans for the next decade. Here’s how he plans to keep the more than 1 billion people that use Facebook every day engaged—and lure in still more users.

Bots are your new friends

Facebook is allowing companies to build automated “bots” on its Facebook Messenger mobile app that users can interact with to do things like get the weather or news or buy things like flowers or burgers (see “Facebook Wants You to Chat with Business Bots”). So far, companies including flower seller 1-800-Flowers.com, Burger King, and Dutch airline KLM have signed on.

Chatting with a bot via Facebook Messenger is similar to having a chat with a friend—albeit a friend who only wants to talk about one topic and serves up limited responses to your text-based missives. For instance, the 1-800-Flowers bot gives you options to order flowers or speak with customer support; if you tap “Order flowers,” it wants to know the shipping address and delivery date, and lets you scroll through a handful of options. No small talk here, as far as we could tell.

If businesses can figure out ways to make this engaging and easy, Facebook could generate a lot of revenue from such bots; for now, though, it’s hard to tell why you’d want to get information or buy things this way rather than via a smartphone app or a website.

Prepare to see a lot more live video

Sharing and watching videos are already popular activities on Facebook, and the social network sees this evolving to include much more live video. At F8, Zuckerberg noted that so far people tend to watch live videos longer than they do regular videos, and comment on them 10 times as much.

In hopes of making live video even more prominent on the social network, the company released software tools that let developers stream live video to Facebook from any device, such as drones.

Facebook’s algorithms know what’s in your photos and videos

Facebook is building out software capable of recognizing just about anything inside photos and videos uploaded to the service. At F8, Joaquin Quiñonero Candela, Facebook’s director of applied machine learning, demonstrated a system that lets you search photos that you or friends have put on Facebook using text. For example you could type “mountains” to dig up snaps of a hiking trip from last summer.

Candela didn’t indicate when that service might launch, but it’s plausible it could come soon; the demo was powered by the same deep-learning technology behind the Google Photos service that debuted last year (see “How Computers Can Tell What They’re Looking At”).

And this same technology is being used to make a system to automatically categorize the aforementioned live videos that Facebook hopes will flood into the social network’s service. In the future, you might be able to find something to watch by searching for your favorite sports team, for example, and surface the most relevant live streams and past clips. Facebook could also automatically recommend videos it thinks you will like.

VR will let you socialize in virtual space

Facebook has two virtual reality headsets on the market: the Oculus Rift and the Gear VR (developed with Samsung). But headset technology is still in its early stages, and there is only a limited selection of games and movies to experience. Zuckerberg wants virtual reality to be something everyone uses to socialize, because that seems like a key way to get people to stick with VR over time.

On Wednesday, Facebook’s chief technology officer, Mike Schroepfer, demonstrated an early idea of how that might look. He fooled around with a colleague in a virtual space where people appear as disembodied heads and hands, and used a virtual selfie stick to snap photos of the two of them. It looked a lot more fun than it sounds. 

Slideshow: This dome at Carnegie Mellon University is used to study the role of body language in communication.

Slideshow: Microphones and more than 500 cameras line the inside of the dome, which can capture people's movements in 3-D.

Slideshow: This dome at Carnegie Mellon University is used to study the role of body language in communication.

Slideshow: Microphones and more than 500 cameras line the inside of the dome, which can capture people's movements in 3-D.

Slideshow: This dome at Carnegie Mellon University is used to study the role of body language in communication.

Slideshow: Microphones and more than 500 cameras line the inside of the dome, which can capture people's movements in 3-D.

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Facebook’s Oculus group is working on other ways of making virtual socializing more realistic, too. Researcher Yaser Sheikh, a recent hire from Carnegie Mellon University, talked about using a dome studded with over 500 cameras called the Panoptic Studio to study people’s body language in 3-D as they interact. He said Facebook wants to make getting together in virtual space, to catch up with a friend in another city or for a job interview, close to real life. “It would be by far the most compelling electronic social experience yet,” said Sheikh. “The distance between you and the people you care about would melt away.”

Facebook plans to rewire the Internet

In recent years Facebook has rolled out a series of projects aimed at getting more people online. It provides subsidized Internet access to certain services in dozens of countries around the world, and is working on a solar-powered drone called Aquila (which means “eagle” in Latin) with the wingspan of an airliner to beam Internet to rural areas where cellular infrastructure is too pricey to build (see “Meet Facebook’s Stratospheric Internet Drone”).

Facebook tests a second News Feed headed by a rocket ship icon

Facebook’s launch of Stories may be the social network’s big news of the week, but some Facebook users have spotted another addition, and are thoroughly confused. A “rocket ship” icon has popped up in the app of select users worldwide, adjacent to the News Feed button. Its appearance is prompting a lot of users to wonder, “what on earth is this thing?”

The button may be either at the top of the screen or the bottom, depending on whether the user is on iOS or Android.

As it turns out, the rocket ship icon is just the latest in Facebook’s ongoing experiments in presenting an alternate News Feed to users – one that consists of posts, articles, photos and videos from sources you haven’t followed, like Facebook Pages or posts news media organizations, for example.

While you might not be actively tracking these sources, Facebook believes it’s content that you’ll like. The items displayed in the “rocket ship” feed come from Pages that are similar to those you’ve already liked, as well as those that are popular with your friends – like a video that many people in your network are watching, for instance.

This is not a new experiment – Facebook was recently spotted testing an alternative News Feed, but was using a different icon (a small square) at the time. That test was also limited to Android beta users, according to reports. A similar earlier test on iOS actually labeled the second feed with the word “Explore.”

The new experiment with the rocket ship, however, is appearing in the mobile version of Facebook across both iOS and Android platforms, including those who have not opted into a beta.

Despite Facebook’s advanced algorithms designed to keep users engaged and endlessly scrolling – and its understanding of what a user has liked, watched, and clicked – the company has not heavily focused its efforts on helping users connect more broadly with interests through recommended content. Instead, today’s News Feed is filled with content a user has explicitly liked, whether that’s friends’ posts or updates from Pages users are following.

But Facebook has always wanted to have a better angle into people’s interests – especially as other networks (like Twitter) have made it easier to follow news and topics, and not just people, brands, and businesses.

In 2012, Facebook introduced “interests lists” to organize its News Feed by topic, but this never saw mainstream adoption. In 2014, the social network experimented again with interests, via its mobile app Rooms, which offered users a means of discussing various topics. But that app eventually failed. 

An alternative News Feed-like stream of information could be another way of tackling interests, but popping it into the app without an explanation is clearly confusing to those who have new feature.

The expanded test is underway now in markets worldwide, we understand. The rocket ship icon itself is fairly new, based on a number of tweets most of which were either posted this month or the last.

A Facebook spokesperson confirmed the global test in a statement, saying “We are testing a complementary feed of popular articles, videos, and photos, customized for each person based on content that might be interesting to them. We’ve heard from people that they want an easy way to explore new content they haven’t connected with yet.”