The United States is taking new steps to make sure the country’s air and surface transportation sectors will not be crippled by ransomware or cyberattacks.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced the measures Tuesday at a virtual cybersecurity conference, warning that recent incidents such as the SolarWinds hack and the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack showed that “what is at stake is not simply the way we communicate or the way we work, but the way we live.”
The new security directives target what the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration describe as “higher risk” rail companies, “critical” airport operators, and air passenger and air cargo companies.
Cybersecurity coordinators
Mayorkas said that going forward, the rail companies will have to name a cybersecurity coordinator who will report any incidents and create contingency plans in the case of a cyberattack.
The aviation companies will also be required to appoint a cybersecurity coordinator and report incidents to the DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
Similar cybersecurity directives are already in place for 2,300 critical maritime companies that, starting this month, will have to submit plans to identify and address cyber vulnerabilities.
The U.S. Coast Guard is also working with the International Maritime Organization to require that passenger and cargo vessels arriving in U.S. ports have plans to deal with cyber emergencies.
“Whether by air, land or sea, our transportation systems are of utmost strategic importance to our national and economic security,” Mayorkas said.
Spike in ransoms paid
Top U.S. officials, including Mayorkas and FBI Director Christopher Wray, have warned that cyberattacks and ransomware attacks, in particular, have become a persistent threat.
“Last year, victims paid an estimated $350 million in ransoms, a 311% increase over the prior year, with the average payment exceeding $300,000,” Mayorkas told U.S. lawmakers at a hearing last month.
“We’re now investigating over 100 different types of ransomware, each with scores of victims,” Wray added.
U.S. officials have blamed Russia for many of the attacks, saying that despite Moscow’s assurances, they have seen few indications the Kremlin is doing anything to address the problem.
Russian officials deny any role in the recent, high-profile ransomware attacks.
Speaking at a separate cybersecurity forum Tuesday, the head of U.S. Cyber Command warned the problem with ransomware is likely to persist.
“Our adversaries are targeting everyone,” General Paul Nakasone told the Mandiant Cyber Defense Summit. “What was once viewed as criminal behavior has become a national security issue.”
To help facilitate the fight against cyberattacks and ransomware attacks, U.S. lawmakers are considering several bills that would require private companies to report intrusions and attacks on the government.
“We’re optimistic the legislation will pass,” Mayorkas said Wednesday at the annual Billington CyberSecurity Summit.
“I think we’re at a point, seeing the arc of cybercrimes and the cyberthreats, that really there’s an urgency to it,” he said.
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Amazon.com Inc.’s livestreaming e-sports platform Twitch said Wednesday that it had been hit by a data breach. It gave no details.
An anonymous hacker claimed to have leaked Twitch data, including information related to the company’s source code, clients and unreleased games, according to Video Games Chronicle, which first reported the news of the hack.
Twitch confirmed the breach and said its “teams are working with urgency to understand the extent of this.”
The company declined to comment further and said ((https://twitter.com/Twitch/status/1445770441176469512)) it would “update the community as soon as additional information is available.” Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The hacker’s motive was to “foster more disruption and competition in the online video streaming space,” according to the Video Games Chronicle report.
About 125GB of data was leaked, including information on Twitch’s highest-paid video game streamers since 2019, such as a $9.6 million payout to the voice actors of popular game “Dungeons & Dragons” and $8.4 million to Canadian streamer xQcOW, the report said.
“Twitch leak is real. Includes significant amount of personal data,” cyber security expert Kevin Beaumont tweeted.
Twitch, which has more than 30 million daily visitors on average, has become increasingly popular with musicians and video gamers. They interact with users while live streaming content.
The platform, which was boycotted earlier this year by users for not doing enough to block harassment, previously made a move to ban users for offenses such as hate-group membership and credible threats of mass violence.
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Russia’s Federal Security Service has issued an arrest warrant for investigative journalist Roman Dobrokhotov, editor of the Insider news website. He’s being accused of illegally crossing the border into Ukraine in August and could face up to two years in prison. Anna Rice has the story.
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Відколи в серпні таліби взяли під контроль більшу частину Афганістану, бойовики угруповання «Ісламська держава» активізували напади на нових правителів
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Скорочено кількість позицій, які Російська Федерація може акредитувати при НАТО, – до 10
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Комітет проситиме міністра внутрішніх справ та генпрокурорку взяти на особистий контроль цю справу
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43-річного Сянкова заарештували на початку липня і звільнили з роботи у Слідчому комітеті. Він заявляв про свою невинуватість.
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Цьогорічну нагороду отримають спільно Бенджамін Ліст і Девід Макміллан «за розвиток асиметричного органокаталізу» – інструменту з синтезування молекул.
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За словами дружини Андрія Захтея, його відправили до карцера за порушення режиму
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Раніше 6 жовтня Євген Мецгер оголосив про тимчасове складання повноважень на час розслідування нападу на знімальну групу програми «Схеми»
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After a push to patch U.S.-French relations, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken closes a Paris visit Wednesday with the final day of ministerial talks at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Blinken highlighted several challenges as he spoke at the opening of the meeting Tuesday, including the coronavirus pandemic, the climate crisis, inequity and setting rules for a technologically advancing world.
“The principles at the heart of this organization and our democracies are being challenged by authoritarian governments that argue their model is better at meeting people’s basic needs. Some of these same governments are actively seeking to undermine the rules-based order that has been fundamental to security and prosperity of our countries for generations,” Blinken said, without naming specific nations.
Blinken said member nations must “prove that our approach can make a better life for people … in all countries and in a way that’s more equitable than in the past” while holding “ourselves accountable.”
In addition to the final work at the OECD meetings Wednesday, Blinken is holding separate talks with Italian Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio, Spanish Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Albares and Colombian Vice President and Foreign Minister Marta Lucia Ramirez.
Tensions over AUKUS deal
The first part of his Paris trip was focused on repairing strained ties with ally France following a dispute about a security partnership among the United States, Britain and Australia.
That included a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron during which a U.S. official said Blinken and Macron discussed joint projects the two sides could announce during a meeting later this month between Macron and U.S. President Joe Biden.
“We could and we should have communicated better,” Blinken told France 2 television in an interview after his meeting with Macron. “We sometimes tend to take for granted a relationship as important and deep as the one that links France and the United States.”
The Biden administration announced September 15 a new security pact with Australia and Britain. Under the deal, Australia will get at least eight nuclear-powered submarines to be built domestically using American technology. The agreement came as Australia pulled out of an earlier deal with France for diesel-electric submarines, which angered Paris.
France recalled its ambassadors to the United States and Australia within two days following the announcement. Le Drian declared a “crisis of trust” in the United States.
Blinken heads to Mexico
Blinken’s weeklong trip also includes a stop at Stanford University, and meetings in Mexico City on Thursday and Friday for the U.S.-Mexico High Level Security Dialogue.
He will join U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland to discuss security issues, Mexican Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard said this week.
The high-level meeting comes amid a recent migration crisis as tens of thousands of Haitian migrants gathered at the U.S.-Mexico border last month.
The Biden administration confirmed on September 24 that a makeshift camp where 15,000 Haitian migrants braved desperate conditions along the U.S.-Mexico border was now vacant.
In late September, Mexico also began flying Haitian migrants back to their homeland.
Some information for this report came from the Associated Press.
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A group of French senators arrived in Taiwan for a five-day visit Wednesday following a large Chinese show of force with fighter jets amid the highest tensions in decades between China and Taiwan.
The group, led by senator Alain Richard, will meet with President Tsai Ing-wen, Taiwanese economic and health officials and the Mainland Affairs Council. Richard, a former French defense minister, previously visited Taiwan in 2015 and 2018, according to Taiwan’s semi-official Central News Agency, and heads the Taiwan Friendship group in the French senate.
China’s ambassador to France Lu Shaye sent a warning letter in February calling on Richard to cancel the Taiwan visit, according to local media reports.
The visit will likely provoke a rebuke from China, which claims self-ruled Taiwan as its own territory and therefore opposes any international engagement with the island such as visits by foreign government officials. It also has aggressively poached Taiwan’s remaining diplomatic allies.
In its most recent display of sustained military harassment, China flew fighter jets 149 times toward Taiwan over four days from Friday to Monday. The White House called the flights risky and destabilizing, while China responded that the U.S. selling weapons to Taiwan and its ships navigating the Taiwan Strait were provocative.
Taiwan’s defense minister Chiu Kuo-cheng told legislators Wednesday that the situation “is the most severe in the 40 years since I’ve enlisted.” Chiu was answering questions as the legislature decides whether to approve a special budget for air and naval defense purchases.
China and Taiwan split amid civil war in 1949. Today they have extensive trade and investment ties but no official relations, and China has increasingly mobilized military, diplomatic and economic pressure to undermine Tsai’s independence-leaning administration.
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Згідно з правилами Організації із заборони хімічної зброї, на відповідь у російської влади є 10 днів
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«Так, я буду відстоювати своє право. Тому що це вже не про посаду, а це про можливість робити те, що я обіцяв як людина, як Дмитро Разумков, як вже сьогодні політик»
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Key U.S. lawmakers pilloried social media giant Facebook on Tuesday after Frances Haugen, an inside whistleblower who once worked at the company, alleged that Facebook’s products are harming young people, undermining democracy and helping to divide the country politically.
Haugen, who worked as a Facebook project manager for less than two years, held Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg responsible for prioritizing concerns about company profits over controlling online content on its various platforms, including Instagram.
Haugen testified before the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Consumer Protection a day after Facebook had encountered hourslong technical issues that left millions of users wondering why they could not access the site and its other platforms such as Instagram and WhatsApp.
“I don’t know why it went down,” Haugen said, “but I know that for more than five hours, Facebook wasn’t used to deepen divides, destabilize democracies, and make young girls and women feel bad about their bodies” with the posting of glamorous pictures of models, pop singers and Hollywood starlets.
Democratic and Republican lawmakers, in a rare show of political unanimity in Washington, quickly castigated Facebook and panned Zuckerberg for a recent sailing trip while controversy engulfed his company. They promised to enact tighter controls on social media.
Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut contended, “The damage to self-interest and self-worth inflicted by Facebook today will haunt a generation. Our children are the ones who are victims. Teens today looking in the mirror feel doubt and insecurity. Mark Zuckerberg ought to be looking at himself in the mirror.”
He said, “Big Tech now faces the Big Tobacco jaw-dropping moment of truth.”
Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee declared that Facebook “is not interested in making significant changes to improve kids’ safety on their platforms, at least not when that would result in losing eyeballs on posts or decreasing their ad revenues.”
“It is clear that Facebook prioritizes profit over the well-being of children and all users,” she said.
Other lawmakers accused Facebook of helping to foment the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, when hundreds of supporters of former President Donald Trump stormed into the building to try to prevent lawmakers from declaring that Democrat Joe Biden had won last November’s election.
Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota said, “When they allowed 99% of violent content to remain unchecked on their platform, including the lead-up to the January 6 insurrection, what did they do? Now we know Mark Zuckerberg was going sailing.”
While the hearing was ongoing, Facebook pushed back against Haugen and the onslaught of criticism. It said in a statement that Haugen had no other Facebook employees who reported to her, had never attended a decision-making meeting with top Facebook officials, and had acknowledged in her testimony at least six times she was being asked questions about aspects of the company she had not worked on.
“We don’t agree with her characterization of the many issues she testified about,” Facebook said.
“Despite all this,” Facebook said, “we agree on one thing; it’s time to begin to create standard rules for the internet. It’s been 25 years since the rules for the internet have been updated, and instead of expecting the industry to make societal decisions that belong to legislators, it is time for Congress to act.”
Haugen acknowledged that she was the one who provided the documents used in a Wall Street Journal investigation of Facebook.
Some information for this report came from Reuters.
your ad hereNATO’s top official is signaling that it would be a mistake to see the withdrawal of forces from Afghanistan or simmering tensions between France and the United States as a weakening of the trans-Atlantic alliance.
Instead, Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg warned would-be adversaries that NATO will remain unified and resolute against a growing number of threats from old adversaries and new ones.
“Questions are being asked about the strength of the bond between Europe and North America,” Stoltenberg told an audience at Georgetown University in Washington following a series of meetings with top U.S. officials.
“They do not change the big picture,” he said. “We do not know what the next crisis will be, but we do know that whatever happens, we are safer when we stand together.”
Specifically, Stoltenberg pushed back against charges that U.S. President Joe Biden cast aside NATO allies when he decided to make good on the previous U.S. administration deal to pull American troops from Afghanistan.
“The idea that the United States did not consult is wrong,” Stoltenberg said. “That’s factually wrong.”
The NATO leader also said that while France was “disappointed” by a new security pact between the U.S., United Kingdom and Australia — the so-called AUKUS deal in which the U.S. and the U.K. will share technology with Australia to help it build nuclear-powered submarines — “NATO allies agree on the big picture that we need to stand together also working with our Asia-Pacific partners.”
“China has the second-largest defense budget in the world. They’re investing heavily in new military capabilities, including nuclear long-range weapons systems,” Stoltenberg said. “I expect that the upcoming new strategic concept for NATO will actually reflect a much more comprehensive and unified position on how to relate to China.”
But the NATO secretary-general saved his toughest talk for Russia, warning that relations between NATO and Moscow are “at the lowest point since the end of the Cold War.”
“They have deployed new, advanced weapon systems. They have violated one of the cornerstones of arms control, the INF (Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty) that banned all intermediate-range weapon systems,” he said. “And we have seen a more aggressive Russia abroad, in many places, and then a more repressive Russia at home.”
And Stoltenberg went even further, appearing to chastise Moscow for its stance on NATO enlargement, specifically its opposition to membership for Georgia and Ukraine.
“It is the right for any sovereign nation to decide its own path. The whole idea that it’s a provocation to Russia that small neighbors join NATO is absolutely wrong,” he said. “That’s the provocation, that anyone is saying that.”
Stoltenberg declined to say when Georgia or Ukraine might gain NATO membership, calling it a matter for the two countries and the alliance, and “no one else.”
Stoltenberg also said that during his time in Washington, specifically during his meeting Monday with Biden, he pushed for NATO members to do more to help aspiring members.
“We need to step up and do more for those aspirant countries, because as long as they are not members, we should provide more support, more training, more capacity building, help them implement reforms, fight corruption and build the security and defense institutions,” Stoltenberg said.
“We need to establish that there is a lot in between nothing and full membership,” he added.
A White House readout of Monday’s meeting said the two leaders, “discussed the international security environment and NATO’s ongoing efforts to safeguard Transatlantic defense.”
It also said Biden “reaffirmed his strong support for NATO and the importance of bolstering deterrence and defense against strategic competitors and transnational threats.”
your ad hereFacebook is in the hot seat again. A recent Wall Street Journal report cites internal knowledge of its harmful effects and the company’s reticence to act. A whistleblower, a former Facebook employee, came out in public this week to testify against the social media company, only adding to the scrutiny. Tina Trinh reports.
Produced by: Tina Trinh
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Наглядова рада «Укрексімбанку» «занепокоєна та стурбована звинуваченнями проти Банку у перешкоджанні журналістській діяльності»
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Facebook took another pounding in the U.S. Congress on Tuesday and a senator called on federal regulators to investigate accusations by a whistleblower that the company pushed for higher profits while being cavalier about user safety.
In an opening statement to a Senate Commerce subcommittee, chair Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat, said that Facebook knew that its products were addictive, like cigarettes. “Tech now faces that big tobacco jawdropping moment of truth,” he said.
He called for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to testify before the committee, and for the Securities and Exchange Commission and Federal Trade Commission to investigate the social media company.
“Our children are the ones who are victims. Teens today looking in the mirror feel doubt and insecurity. Mark Zuckerberg ought to be looking at himself in the mirror,” Blumenthal said, adding that Zuckerberg instead was going sailing.
In an era when bipartisanship is rare on Capitol Hill, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle agreed on the need for big changes at Facebook.
The top Republican on the subcommittee, Marsha Blackburn, said that Facebook turned a blind eye to children below age 13 on its sites. “It is clear that Facebook prioritizes profit over the well-being of children and all users.”
Facebook spokesman Kevin McAlister said in an email ahead of the hearing that the company sees protecting its community as more important than maximizing profits and said it was not accurate that leaked internal research demonstrated that Instagram was “toxic” for teenage girls.
Frances Haugen, a former product manager on Facebook’s civic misinformation team, said the company keeps its algorithms and operations a secret.
“The core of the issue is that no one can understand Facebook’s destructive choices better than Facebook, because only Facebook gets to look under the hood,” she said in written testimony prepared for the hearing.
“A critical starting point for effective regulation is transparency,” she said in testimony to be delivered to the subcommittee. “On this foundation, we can build sensible rules and standards to address consumer harms, illegal content, data protection, anticompetitive practices, algorithmic systems and more.”
Haugen revealed she was the one who provided documents used in a Wall Street Journal investigation and a Senate hearing on Instagram’s harm to teenage girls.
The Journal’s stories showed the company contributed to increased polarization online when it made changes to its content algorithm; failed to take steps to reduce vaccine hesitancy; and was aware that Instagram harmed the mental health of teenage girls.
Haugen said Facebook had also done too little to prevent its site from being used by people planning violence.
Facebook was used by people planning mass killings in Myanmar and the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of then-President Donald Trump who were determined to toss out the 2020 election results.
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