FBI issues sober warning on Chinese cyberwarfare capabilities

FBI Director Christopher Wray on Wednesday warned that Chinese hackers are preparing to “wreak havoc and cause real-world harm” to the US.

“China’s hackers are positioning on American infrastructure in preparation to wreak havoc and cause real-world harm to American citizens and communities, if or when China decides the time has come to strike,” Wray told the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party.

Though cyber officials have long sounded the alarm about China’s offensive cyber capabilities, Wray’s dramatic public warning underlines the huge level of concern at the top of the US government about the threat Chinese hackers pose to critical infrastructure nationwide. The head of the National Security Agency and other senior US officials are also testifying on Chinese cyber activity in front of the panel Wednesday.

PRC hackers, Wray said, are targeting things like water treatment plants, electrical infrastructure and oil and natural gas pipelines, Wray said. “our water treatment plants, our electrical grid, our oil and natural gas pipelines, our transportation systems.

The Chinese hackers are working “to find and prepare to destroy or degrade the civilian critical infrastructure that keeps us safe and prosperous,” Wray said. “And let’s be clear: Cyber threats to our critical infrastructure represent real world threats to our physical safety.”

The Chinese government has previously denied allegations of hacking efforts.

Read the rest here.

The dangerous liberal ideas for censorship in the United States

Almost everywhere you turn today, politicians are telling the public to “get used to the new normal” after the pandemic. For some people, this means public health precautions from social distancing to banning handshakes. Others have quickly added long standing dreams for everything from the guaranteed basic income advocated by Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, which was also recently raised by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, to mailed voting elections advocated by many Democrats.

The most chilling suggestion, however, comes from the politicians and academics who have called for the censorship of social media and the internet. The only thing spreading faster than the coronavirus has been censorship and the loud calls for greater restrictions on free speech. The Atlantic published an article last week by Harvard Law School professor Jack Goldsmith and University of Arizona law professor Andrew Keane Woods calling for Chinese style censorship of the internet.

They declared that “in the great debate of the past two decades about freedom versus control of the network, China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong” and “significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet, and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is compatible with society norms and values.”

The justification for that is the danger of “fake news” about coronavirus risks and cures. Yet this is only the latest rationalization for rolling back free speech rights. For years, Democratic leaders in Congress called for censorship of “fake news” on social media sites. Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube have all engaged in increasing levels of censorship and have a well known reputation for targeting conservative speech.

Read the rest here.

Wisdom!

Let us attend.

Ransomware: Pay or fight?

Ask security experts what to do when hit with ransomware – the sophisticated malware that infects a device or network, uses military-grade encryption to restrict access, and demands payment for the decryption key – and you'll typically get the same answer: "never pay the ransom."

But for many, that's simply not an option. For example, last November an employee in the Sheriff's Department in Dickinson County, Tenn., accidentally clicked on a malicious ad and exposed the office network to the infamous CryptoWall ransomware. Detective Jeff McCliss told local News Channel 5 that CryptoWall had encrypted "every sort of document you could develop in an investigation," such as witness statements and evidence photos. Even after consulting with the FBI and U.S. military, McCliss told the news station that the only solution was to pay the $500 to the cybercriminals to get their files back.

Read the rest here.

China is main suspect in massive hack

Investigators suspect Chinese hackers may be responsible for a breach of health insurer Anthem, one of the largest medical-related cyberattacks in history and a harbinger of a growing threat facing the health care industry, said an individual briefed on some aspects of the probe. 

Anthem, the country’s second largest health insurer, said hackers gained access to the sensitive data of 80 million former and current members and employees, including Social Security numbers, income data, birthdays, street and e-mail addresses. 

There are some indications that other health care companies may have been targeted, said the individual said, who declined to be named because the investigation is ongoing.

Read the rest here.

North Korea's Internet Crashes

It's a mostly symbolic gesture. The whole country has fewer IP addresses than any medium sized office building in Manhattan. But it does send a message to others who may have been watching and getting ideas of their own. We know where the "Off Switch" is, and we know how to use it.

Speaking of morons...

I am back online after a long day without internet. Yes, I am aware that you want a detailed explanation of how such a thing could happen. It went down thusly...

The house I rent has two very large, indeed sprawling pine trees in the yard that help to shade it during the often brutal summer days. However the tree limbs have grown to the point where they overhang the road to a degree that sometimes they fall off creating potential traffic hazards. The city has, somewhat understandably gotten a bit irritated and after the latest such incident they sent a crew over to trim one of the trees back. Since the landlord has thus far shown little interest in the matter, I have no real issue with the city's decision.

But in the course of trimming the tree branches that overhang the road... they CUT THE BLEEPING INTERNET CABLE LINE! After making sure they left word to the effect that the landlord would be billed for the trimming, they got into their truck, performed a well executed K Turn and then stopped before the downed internet cable lying in the street. At which point our fearless tree trimming heroes got out of the vehicle, gathered around the downed cable, picked it up and passed the end around. Then they dropped it, got back into their truck and without another word, DROVE OVER THE DOWNED CABLE and left.

I cannot of course be certain, but I will hazard a guess that no man on the tree trimming detail makes less than $50,000 a year plus full civil service benefits.

It took most of the day to get the Charter internet repair guy out here; not his fault, they were backed up with service calls. Once here the poor guy spent about an hour and half rerunning the cable and then another half hour fiddling with the modem which didn't want to read the signal. He ended up installing a new one. Oh, I forgot to mention that the outdoor work was done mostly in the dark and it was raining. Happily we were his last call for the day. I gave him a couple bottles of Guinness in gratitude for his outstanding customer service.

As for what I'd like to give the the city's tree trimming crew, one wonders if they would even know what a piece of coal looks like. I hope Charter sends a nasty note and a bill to the city.

Britain: Internet providers to begin restricting access to porn

All 20million families with internet connections are to be forced within months to say whether they want access to online pornography. Hundreds of thousands are already signing up to have it blocked.

A scheme to combat the tide of web sleaze that is corroding childhood has been dramatically accelerated, David Cameron told the Daily Mail last night. Speaking ahead of a Downing Street summit with online giants next week, the Prime Minister revealed that huge numbers of households have already opted for family-friendly filters.

Read the rest here.

Firefox Web browser to move ahead with ‘Do Not Track’ option

The maker of the popular Firefox browser is moving ahead with plans to block the most common forms of Internet tracking, allowing hundreds of millions of users to eventually limit who watches their movements across the Web, company officials said Wednesday.

Firefox made the decision despite intense resistance from advertising groups, which have argued that tracking is essential to delivering well-targeted, lucrative ads that pay for many popular Internet services. When Firefox’s maker, Mozilla, first suggested in February that it might limit blocking, one advertising executive called it “a nuclear first strike” against the industry.

Read the rest here.

OK so your web browsing might no longer show up in Walmart's daily advertising report. That's a plus. Now if we could only get an opt out for Obama's NSA briefing.

Hell hath no fury...

Ah, romance. Boy meets girl. Boy dates girl. Boy dumps girl. Girl embarks on a campaign of online harassment that lands her a prison sentence. Girl flees country.

Lee David Clayworth, 35, met Lee Ching Yan, 29, while he was teaching at an international school in Malaysia. They began casually dating in mid-2010, said Clayworth, who called it quits by December. "I decided to go my own way," he told TODAY, describing a relationship that at times "wasn't the healthiest." Unfortunately, he said, the dumping "didn't go down so well with her."

After the split, Yan broke into Clayworth's home and took his laptop, external hard drive, teaching portfolio and other significant personal belongings, he said.

"And then this online onslaught started," Clayworth said. "My email account was hacked into, my Skype account was hacked into. Emails started coming from my account ... claiming that I'm having sex with underage students."

Read the rest here.

Scary news from Down Under

Australia is a nation where freedom of speech has appeared as solidly established as anywhere in the world.

Today, however, it is under a massive threat. This is all the more shocking because it is as head-on assault on Australia's entire political culture of liberty and democracy.

In the latest development, the governing alliance of the leftist Australian Labor Party and the extreme leftist Greens have received an official report into media regulation recommending draconian controls.

The 470-page report, commissioned as part of the government's vendetta against the Murdoch press, demands that the media be made more "accountable," and that the government have the power to impose "professional standards." The chairman of the inquiry that made the report, retired Federal Court Judge Roy Finkelstein, recommends a News Media Council be set up to license the press and to censor news reporting and political commentary.

Licensing the media has always been abhorrent in the English-speaking world. It was not contemplated even in Australia's first days as a penal colony.

It is recommended that the council -- presumably to be called the Ministry of Truth -- should have a judge or lawyer as its chairman, appointed by the government, and 20 members, a large portion of whom would be nominated by the Labor-affiliated journalists' union.

The council would have power to alter or permanently ban articles. Disobedience would result in a fine or imprisonment for contempt of court, and there would be no appeal. As well as having the power to ban articles, the council would have the power to compel media to publish responses to stories.

Now get this: its jurisdiction would extend not merely to newspapers -- which would be outrageous enough -- but also to any website. Perhaps even if it was visited by only one or two people a day. Finkelstein says its jurisdiction should cover websites which get more than 15,000 hits a year, or an average of 41 a day, that is, practically every website that could be described as publishing "news, information and opinion of current value."

Read the rest here.
HT: Bill (aka The Godfather).

Al-Qaeda’s online forums are silenced; cyber attack suspected

Al-Qaeda’s main Web forums have been offline for the past 11 days in what experts say is the longest sustained outage of the sites since they began operating eight years ago.

No one has publicly claimed responsibility for disabling the sites, but the breadth and the duration of the outages have prompted some experts to conclude the forums have been taken down in a cyberattack — launched perhaps by a government, government-backed organization or hacking group.

Read the rest here.

Archives Census Web Site Is Buried With Traffic

Embarrassed by a computer system that crumbled under public demand, the National Archives and Records Administration said Monday that it's working to add more servers for the release of 1940 Census records. For more users the wait to see records on family members from the Great Depression era will go on for a while longer.

The Archives had hired Inflection, a Silicon Valley database company, to run the computers, but frustrated users lit up Facebook and Twitter with complaints about images that were said to be "loading" but never arrived.

"Our testing indicated NARA and Inflection could handle the load, but 1.9 mil visitors caused issues we're working to resolve," the Archives said via Twitter. Later it added, "We'll let you know as soon as we have another update - thank you for your patience, we know it's incredibly frustrating."

Read the rest here.

Blog Blackout Over

As some may have noticed Ad Orientem was offline today.  This was in support of the global protests against the SOPA and PIPA legislation being considered by Congress.  Enough of our civil liberties have been trampled on by our government.  I urge everyone who reads this blog to contact their members of Congress and United States Senators and communicate their opposition to these outrageous bills.

On a side note, although access to A/O was blocked today I did continue to post on matters of interest.  Scroll down to see the posts.

Wikipedia to Go Dark on Wednesday to Protest Bills on Web Piracy

The wave of online protests against the Congressional efforts to curtail copyright violations on the Internet is gathering momentum.

Wikipedia is the latest Web site to decide to shut on Wednesday in protest against the two Congressional bills, the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, and the Protect IP Act, or PIPA.

Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, confirmed the site’s decision on Monday on Twitter, writing: “Student warning! Do your homework early. Wikipedia protesting bad law on Wednesday!”

The members of Wikipedia have been debating and voting about whether the site should participate in a blackout, which several other Web sites, including Reddit, the social news site, and BoingBoing, a technology and culture blog, plan to join.

On Twitter, Mr. Wales said that Wikipedia would go dark beginning at midnight Eastern time on Tuesday and remain unavailable until midnight Eastern time on Wednesday. Visitors who try to reach the Wikipedia home page will be greeted with information about the bills and details about how to reach their local representative. Mr. Wales estimated that the blackout could affect as many as 100 million people.

“This is going to be wow, ” Mr. Wales wrote. “I hope Wikipedia will melt phone systems in Washington on Wednesday. Tell everyone you know!”

Source.

Feds Falsely Censor Popular Blog For Over A Year, Deny All Due Process, Hide All Details...

Imagine if the US government, with no notice or warning, raided a small but popular magazine's offices over a Thanksgiving weekend, seized the company's printing presses, and told the world that the magazine was a criminal enterprise with a giant banner on their building. Then imagine that it never arrested anyone, never let a trial happen, and filed everything about the case under seal, not even letting the magazine's lawyers talk to the judge presiding over the case. And it continued to deny any due process at all for over a year, before finally just handing everything back to the magazine and pretending nothing happened. I expect most people would be outraged. I expect that nearly all of you would say that's a classic case of prior restraint, a massive First Amendment violation, and exactly the kind of thing that does not, or should not, happen in the United States.

But, in a story that's been in the making for over a year, and which we're exposing to the public for the first time now, this is exactly the scenario that has played out over the past year -- with the only difference being that, rather than "a printing press" and a "magazine," the story involved "a domain" and a "blog."

Read the rest here.

WikiLeaks publishes list of worldwide infrastructure 'critical' to security of U.S.

A list drawn up by U.S. officials of companies and installations around the world regarded as "critical" to the security of the United States has been published online by controversial website WikiLeaks.

The list includesfactories, ports, fuel companies, drug manufacturers, undersea cables, pipelines, communication hubs and a host of other "key resources."

A Danish insulin plant, a company making anti-snake venom in Australia and a Cobalt mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo are also included.

Its publication was denounced as "irresponsible" by U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Philip Crowley, amid fears it could be used as a list of targets by terrorists, Britain's Times newspaper reported.

The document was drawn up after the State Department asked diplomats in February 2009 to identify "systems and assets, whether physical or virtual, so vital to the United States the incapacitation or destruction of such systems and assets would have a debilitating impact on security, national economic security, national public health or safety, or any combination of those matters."

The cable is marked "secret state ... noforn, not for internet distribution." "Noforn" means it should not be shown to foreign governments or other non-U.S. interests.

Read the rest here.

Alleged prolific spammer is jailed without bail

MILWAUKEE — A 23-year-old Russian man accused of masterminding a vast worldwide spamming network pleaded not guilty Friday in federal court in Wisconsin to violating a U.S. anti-spam law.

The judge ordered Oleg Y. Nikolaenko held without bond, saying he was a flight risk because of his access to cash and his lack of ties to Wisconsin or the U.S.

Nikolaenko was brought into court wearing bright orange prison pants and matching sweatshirt and shackled at the ankles. His attorney entered the plea as a Russian interpreter translated for the Moscow man.

Prosecutors say Nikolaenko ran a network that involved placing malicious code on unsuspecting users' computers and then hijacking the infected machines to blast out billions of e-mails.

Internet security experts say the network was so massive that on some days it accounted for one of every three unwanted e-mails in the world.

Nikolaenko is charged with violating the CAN-SPAM act by intentionally falsifying header information in commercial e-mail messages and sending at least 2,500 spam e-mails per day, the minimum threshold for the charge. Prosecutors say his network was capable of sending up to 10 billion messages per day.

The charge carries a maximum penalty of three years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

Read the rest here.

Russian Orthodox Church launches YouTube channel

Here.

Russian Church to establish its own YouTube channel

Moscow, October 7, Interfax - The Russian Orthodox Church will open its own site at popular YouTube video hosting service.

The project presentation will be held October 11 in the conference hall of the Christ the Savior Cathedral during the international festival of Orthodox media "Faith and Word", the Synodal Information Department reported to Interfax-Religion Thursday.

Before, Vladimir Legoyda, head of this department, acknowledged in an interview the need to develop the church public relations and "create proper awareness of the Church's activity."

He emphasized that the Church currently "is exposed to continuous information pressure, i.e. "counter-public relation" practices initiated by people who never play fair and do not scruple to employ dirty tricks."

Legoyda believes that such challenge should be opposed by "a competent and efficient work performed by specialists, otherwise the Church may be drowned in the flood of lies and deceit."

"If "public relations" means creating and promoting any image, I believe, this term is not quite appropriate in relation to the Church," Legoyda states.

He reminded that the Church is "a bearer of Truth and the Truth - Christ - does not need any image."

Source.