Louise Daphne Mensch is a British blogger, novelist, and former Conservative Member of Parliament. In the 1990s she became known as a writer of chick lit novels under her maiden name Louise Bagshawe. She was elected Conservative MP for Corby at the 2010 UK general election.
The Internet has a long history of turbulent relations, major maliciously designed disruptions, and other conflicts. This is a list of known and documented Internet, Usenet, virtual community and World Wide Web related conflicts, and of conflicts that touch on both offline and online worlds with possibly wider reaching implications.
WikiLeaks is a media organisation and publisher that operates as a non-profit and is funded by donations and media partnerships. It has published classified documents and other media provided by anonymous sources. It was founded in 2006 by Julian Assange, an Australian editor, publisher, and activist, who is currently challenging extradition to the United States over his work with WikiLeaks. Since September 2018, Kristinn Hrafnsson has served as its editor-in-chief. Its website states that it has released more than ten million documents and associated analyses. WikiLeaks' most recent publication of original documents was in 2019 and its most recent publication was in 2021. Beginning in November 2022, many of the documents on the organisation's website could not be accessed. In 2023, Assange said that WikiLeaks was no longer able to publish due to his imprisonment and the effect that US government surveillance and WikiLeaks' funding restrictions were having on potential whistleblowers.
X, formerly and colloquially known as Twitter, is a social media website based in the United States. With over 500 million users, it is one of the world's largest social networks. Users can share and post text messages, images, and videos known historically as "tweets". X also includes direct messaging, video and audio calling, bookmarks, lists and communities, and Spaces, a social audio feature. Users can vote on context added by approved users using the Community Notes feature. Although the service is now called X, the primary domain name 'twitter.com' remains in place as of February 2024, with the 'x.com' URL redirecting to that address.
Anonymous is a decentralized international activist and hacktivist collective and movement primarily known for its various cyberattacks against several governments, government institutions and government agencies, corporations and the Church of Scientology.
Censorship of X, formerly and colloquially known as Twitter, refers to Internet censorship by governments that block access to X. X censorship also includes governmental notice and take down requests to X, which X enforces in accordance with its Terms of Service when a government or authority submits a valid removal request to X indicating that specific content is illegal in their jurisdiction.
Operation Anti-Security, also referred to as Operation AntiSec or #AntiSec, is a series of hacking attacks performed by members of the hacking group LulzSec and Anonymous, and others inspired by the announcement of the operation. LulzSec performed the earliest attacks of the operation, with the first against the Serious Organised Crime Agency on 20 June 2011. Soon after, the group released information taken from the servers of the Arizona Department of Public Safety; Anonymous would later release information from the same agency two more times. An offshoot of the group calling themselves LulzSecBrazil launched attacks on numerous websites belonging to the Government of Brazil and the energy company Petrobras. LulzSec claimed to retire as a group, but on 18 July they reconvened to hack into the websites of British newspapers The Sun and The Times, posting a fake news story of the death of the publication's owner Rupert Murdoch.
The News of the World phone hacking scandal investigations followed the revelations in 2005 of voicemail interception on behalf of News of the World. Despite wider evidence of wrongdoing, the News of the World royal phone hacking scandal appeared resolved with the 2007 conviction of the News of the World royal editor Clive Goodman and the private investigator Glenn Mulcaire, and the resignation of editor Andy Coulson. However, a series of civil legal cases and investigations by newspapers, parliament and the police ultimately saw evidence of "industrial scale" phone hacking, leading to the closure of the News of the World on 10 July 2011. However, the affair did not end there, developing into the News Corporation ethics scandal as wrongdoing beyond the News of the World and beyond phone hacking came to light.
The news media phone hacking scandal is a controversy over illegal acquisition of confidential information by news media organizations that reportedly occurred in the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia between 1995 and 2011. This article includes reference lists for various topics relating to that scandal.
This article provides a narrative beginning in 1999 of investigations by the Metropolitan Police Service (Met) of Greater London into the illegal acquisition of confidential information by agents in collaboration with the news media that is commonly referred to as the phone hacking scandal. The article discusses seven phases of investigations by the Met and several investigations of the Met itself, including critiques and responses regarding the Met's performance. Separate articles provide an overview of the scandal and a comprehensive set of reference lists with detailed background information.
Shadow banning, also called stealth banning, hellbanning, ghost banning, and comment ghosting, is the practice of blocking or partially blocking a user or the user's content from some areas of an online community in such a way that the ban is not readily apparent to the user, regardless of whether the action is taken by an individual or an algorithm. For example, shadow-banned comments posted to a blog or media website would be visible to the sender, but not to other users accessing the site.
Mustafa Al-Bassam is a British computer security researcher, hacker, and co-founder of Celestia Labs. Al-Bassam co-founded the hacker group LulzSec in 2011, which was responsible for several high profile breaches. He later went on to co-found Chainspace, a company implementing a smart contract platform, which was acquired by Facebook in 2019. In 2021, Al-Bassam graduated from University College London, completing a PhD in computer science with a thesis on Securely Scaling Blockchain Base Layers. In 2016, Forbes listed Al-Bassam as one of the 30 Under 30 entrepreneurs in technology.
The Islamic State Hacking Division (ISHD) or The United Cyber Caliphate(UCC) is a merger of several hacker groups self-identifying as the digital army for the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIS/ISIL). The unified organization comprises at least four distinct groups, including the Ghost Caliphate Section, Sons Caliphate Army (SCA), Caliphate Cyber Army (CCA), and the Kalashnikov E-Security Team. Other groups potentially involved with the United Cyber Caliphate are the Pro-ISIS Media group Rabitat Al-Ansar (League of Supporters) and the Islamic Cyber Army (ICA). Evidence does not support the direct involvement of the Islamic State leadership. It suggests external and independent coordination of Pro-ISIS cyber campaigns under the United Cyber Caliphate(UCC) name. Investigations also display alleged links to Russian Intelligence group, APT28, using the name as a guise to wage war against western nations.
Phineas Fisher is an unidentified hacktivist and self-proclaimed anarchist revolutionary. Notable hacks include the surveillance company Gamma International, Hacking Team, the Sindicat De Mossos d'Esquadra and the ruling Turkish Justice and Development Party three of which were later made searchable by WikiLeaks.
The 2017 Finsbury Park attack was a terror-attack in Finsbury Park, London, England, on 19 June 2017. A van was driven into pedestrians in Finsbury Park, London, by Darren Osborne, causing one death and injuring at least nine people. This occurred near the Muslim Welfare House, 100 yards (90 m) from Finsbury Park Mosque.
On 14 August 2018, three people were injured when a silver Ford Fiesta hit them near the Palace of Westminster, London, England. The car then went on to crash into the separation barrier of the pavement situated between St Margaret Street / Abingdon Street and Old Palace Yard. The Metropolitan Police responded within seconds and arrested the driver, Salih Khater, without further incident. An ambulance immediately behind the Ford stopped and gave assistance to the injured. Khater was subsequently found guilty of two counts of attempted murder and sentenced to life in prison.
On July 15, 2020, between 20:00 and 22:00 UTC, 130 high-profile Twitter accounts were reportedly compromised by outside parties to promote a bitcoin scam. Twitter and other media sources confirmed that the perpetrators had gained access to Twitter's administrative tools so that they could alter the accounts themselves and post the tweets directly. They appeared to have used social engineering to gain access to the tools via Twitter employees. Three individuals were arrested by authorities on July 31, 2020, and charged with wire fraud, money laundering, identity theft, and unauthorized computer access related to the scam.
In October 2020, a controversy arose involving data from a laptop that belonged to Hunter Biden. The owner of a Delaware computer shop, John Paul Mac Isaac, said that the laptop had been left by a man who identified himself as Hunter Biden. Mac Isaac also stated that he is legally blind and could not be sure whether the man was actually Hunter Biden. Three weeks before the 2020 United States presidential election, the New York Post published a front-page story that presented emails from the laptop, alleging they showed corruption by Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. According to the New York Post, the story was based on information provided to Rudy Giuliani, the personal attorney of incumbent president and candidate Donald Trump, by Mac Isaac. Forensic analysis later authenticated some of the emails from the laptop, including one of the two emails used by the Post in their initial reporting.
The Twitter Files are a series of releases of select internal Twitter, Inc. documents published from December 2022 through March 2023 on Twitter. CEO Elon Musk gave the documents to journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, Lee Fang, and authors Michael Shellenberger, David Zweig and Alex Berenson shortly after he acquired Twitter on October 27, 2022. Taibbi and Weiss coordinated the publication of the documents with Musk, releasing details of the files as a series of Twitter threads.
