After Elon Musk first pushed a misleading claim about Reuters, the president raged about the global news agency returning a contract that was awarded under his first administration. The president’s Thursday morning social media tirade comes hours after DOGE chief Elon Musk peddled a misleading claim on X (formerly Twitter) that Reuters engaged in a “total scam,” sharing a post that alleged the news organization had been paid millions of dollars from the government for a “social engineering” program.
“DOGE: Why was Politico paid Millions of Dollars for NOTHING. Buying the press??? PAY BACK THE MONEY TO THE TAXPAYERS! How much has the Failing New York Times paid? Is this the money that is keeping it open??? THEY ARE BUYING THE PRESS,” the president added in another post. (The payments to Politico and the Times were for subscriptions to the outlets’ paid content for government employees.). While the implication from Musk and Trump was that the Reuters news service was running a disinformation campaign on behalf of the Pentagon, the truth of the matter is far more benign. It also began under Trump’s first administration in the first place — and was centered mainly on preventing cyberattacks and phishing.
DARPA adds: “More focused attacks attempt to elicit sensitive information, such as passwords or private information from organizations or steal things of value from particular individuals by earning unwarranted trust.”. The agency also notes that ASED aims “to develop the core technology to enable the capability to automatically identify, disrupt, and investigate social engineering attacks,” and if successful, the technology would do this by “actively detecting attacks, intervening in communications between users and potential attackers, and coordinating investigations into the source of the attacks.”.
