120. ‘WhatsApp suggests a cure for virality’, The Economist, 26 July 2018.
121. McMillan R. and Hernandez D., ‘Pinterest Blocks Vaccination Searches in Move to Control the Conversation’, Wall Street Journal, 20 February 2019.
122. Quotes from author interview with Whitney Phillips, October 2018.
123. Baumgartner J. et al., ‘What we learned from analyzing thousands of stories on the Christchurch shooting’, Columbia Journalism Review, 2019.
124. Quotes from author interview with Brendan Nyhan, November 2018.
125. Source: Web of Science. Search string: (<platform> AND (contagio* OR diffus* OR transmi*). Studies were excluded if they only mentioned the platform as an illustrative or comparative example, or focused adoption of the platform itself rather than diffusion via the platform. In total, 391 Twitter studies and 85 Facebook studies during 2016–2018. 330m Twitter users in 2019 vs 2,400m Facebook users. Source for user data: https://www.statista.com/
126. Nelson A. et al., ‘The Social Science Research Council Announces the First Recipients of the Social Media and Democracy Research Grants’, Social Sciences Research Council Items, 29 April 2019; Alba D., ‘Ahead of 2020, Facebook Falls Short on Plan to Share Data on Disinformation’, New York Times, 29 September 2019.
127. ‘Almost all of Vote Leave’s digital communication and data science was invisible even if you read every single news story or column ever produced in the campaign or any of the books so far published’. Quote from: Cummings D., ‘On the referendum #20’, Dominic Cummings’s Blog, 29 October 2016. In October 2018, Facebook established a public archive of political adverts – an important shift, although it still only captures the first step of the information transmission processes. Source: Cellan-Jones R., ‘Facebook tool makes UK political ads “transparent”’, BBC News Online, 16 October 2018.
128. Ginsberg D. and Burke M., ‘Hard Questions: Is Spending Time on Social Media Bad for Us?’ Facebook newsroom, 15 December 2017; Burke M. et al., ‘Social Network Activity and Social Well-Being’, Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2010; Burke M. and Kraut R.E., ‘The Relationship Between Facebook Use and Well-Being Depends on Communication Type and Tie Strength’, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 2016.
129. Routledge I. et al., ‘Estimating spatiotemporally varying malaria reproduction numbers in a near elimination setting’, Nature Communications, 2018.
6. How to own the internet
1. Background on Mirai from: Antonakakis M. et al., ‘Understanding the Mirai Botnet’, Proceedings of the 26th USENIX Security Symposium, 2017; Solomon B. and Fox-Brewster T., ‘Hacked Cameras Were Behind Friday’s Massive Web Outage’, Forbes, 21 October 2016; Bours B., ‘How a Dorm Room Minecraft Scam Brought Down the Internet’, Wired, 13 December 2017.
2. Quoted in: Bours B., ‘How a Dorm Room Minecraft Scam Brought Down the Internet’, Wired, 13 December 2017.
3. Background on WannaCry from: ‘What you need to know about the WannaCry Ransomware’, Symantec Blogs, 23 October 2017; Field M., ‘WannaCry cyber attack cost the NHS £92m as 19,000 appointments cancelled’, The Telegraph, 11 October 2018; Wiedeman R., ‘The British hacker Marcus Hutchins and the FBI’, The Times, 7 April 2018.
4. Moore D. et al., ‘The Spread of the Sapphire/Slammer Worm’, Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA), 2003.
5. Background on Elk Cloner from: Leyden J., ‘The 30-year-old prank that became the first computer virus’, The Register, 14 December 2012.
6. Quotes from author interview with Alex Vespignani, May 2018.
7. Cohen F., ‘Computer Viruses – Theory and Experiments’, 1984.
8. Background on Morris Worm from: Seltzer L., ‘The Morris Worm: Internet malware turns 25’, Zero Day, 2 November 2013; UNITED STATES of America, Appellee, v. Robert Tappan MORRIS, Defendant-appellant. 928 F.2D 504, 1990.
9. Graham P., ‘The Submarine’, April 2005. http://www.paulgraham.com
10. Moon M., ‘“Minecraft” success helps its creator buy a $70 million mansion’, Engadget, 18 December 2014.
11. Background on DDoS from: ‘Who is Anna-Senpai, the Mirai Worm Author?’, Krebs on Security, 18 January 2017; ‘Spreading the DDoS Disease and Selling the Cure’, 19 October 2016.
12. ‘Computer Hacker Who Launched Attacks On Rutgers University Ordered To Pay $8.6m’, U.S. Attorney’s Office, District of New Jersey, 26 October 2018.
13. @MalwareTechBlog, 13 May 2017.
14. Staniford S. et al., ‘How to 0wn the Internet in Your Spare Time’, ICIR, 2002.
15. Assuming R=20 and infectious for 8 days, equivalent to 0.1 infections per hour.
16. Moore D. et al., ‘The Spread of the Sapphire/Slammer Worm’, Center for Applied Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA), 2003.
17. ‘Kaspersky Lab Research Reveals the Cost and Profitability of Arranging a DDoS Attack’, Kaspersky Lab, 23 March 2017.
18. Palmer D., ‘Ransomware is now big business on the dark web and malware developers are cashing in’, ZDNet, 11 October 2017.
19. Nakashima E. and Timberg C., ‘NSA officials worried about the day its potent hacking tool would get loose. Then it did’, Washington Post, 16 May 2017.
20. Orr A., ‘Zerodium Offers $2 Million for Remote iOS Exploits’, Mac Observer, 10 January 2019.
21. Background on Student from: Kushner D., ‘The Real Story of Stuxnet’, IEEE Spectrum, 26 February 2013; Kopfstein J., ‘Stuxnet virus was planted by Israeli agents using USB sticks, according to new report’, The Verge, 12 April 2012.
22. Kaplan F., Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War (Simon & Schuster, 2016).
23. Dark Trace. Global Threat Report 2017. http://www.darktrace.com
24. Background and quotes from: Lomas A., ‘Screwdriving. Locating and exploiting smart adult toys’, Pen Test Partners Blog, 29 September 2017; Franceschi-Bicchierai L., ‘Hackers Can Easily Hijack This Dildo Camera and Livestream the Inside of Your Vagina (Or Butt)’, Motherboard, 3 April 2017.
25. DeMarinis N. et al., ‘Scanning the Internet for ROS: A View of Security in Robotics Research’, arXiv, 2018.
26. Background on AWS outage from: Hindi R., ‘Thanks for breaking our connected homes, Amazon’, Medium, 28 February, 2017; Hern A., ‘How did an Amazon glitch leave people literally in the dark?’, The Guardian, 1 March 2017.
27. Background on AWS performance: Amazon Compute Service Level Agreement. https://aws.amazon.com, 12 February 2018; Poletti T., ‘The engine for Amazon earnings growth has nothing to do with e-commerce’, Market Watch, 29 April 2018.
28. Swift D., ‘“Mega Outage” Wreaks Havoc on Internet, is AWS too Big to Fail?’, Digit, 2017; Bobeldijk Y., ‘Is Amazon’s cloud service too big
