Aymac Group Blog - News Sources

FCC to finally publish net neutrality order, and lawyers can't wait

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 22 Feb 2018 09:58:00 +0000

The battle to save net neutrality is about to heat back up.
The Federal Communications Commission is on the verge of officially publishing its order demolishing the rules that protected a free and open internet, and activists actually have a reason to look forward to it. Why? Think lawsuits.

A quick look at the webpage of the Federal Register shows that the order axing net neutrality will be published Thursday, and, according to Reuters, that will give those opposed to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's vision of the internet a chance to fight back.

That's because once that ruling, known as the Restoring Internet Freedom order (ha!), officially drops, opponents will have something to sink their teeth into and can begin the long process of fighting the rules in court.

You'll likely remember that the order in question was passed by the FCC with a vote of 3-2, and at the time Pai insisted everything was going to be totally cool.

"It is not going to end the internet as we know it," he observed (possibly while daydreaming about the contents of his giant mug). "It is not going to kill democracy. It is not going to stifle free expression online."
Yummmmmm... deregulation...

Not everyone bought the assurances of the Reese's Peanut Butter Cups fan. In fact, the Attorney Generals of 22 different states announced their intention to sue the FCC over its decision.

"An open internet – and the free exchange of ideas it allows – is critical to our democratic process," New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman noted in a press release. "The repeal of net neutrality would turn internet service providers into gatekeepers – allowing them to put profits over consumers while controlling what we see, what we do, and what we say online."

With the official publishing of Pai's order to the Federal Register happening Thursday, expect to see more lawsuits aiming to defend net neutrality hitting any day now.

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Democrats search for 51st net neutrality vote

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 17 Jan 2018 02:02:00 +0000

Senate Democrats are hunting for one more Republican vote to prevent the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) from repealing net neutrality rules.

Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) announced Tuesday that all 49 Democrats have endorsed legislation to preserve the rules. With Sen. Susan Collins (Maine) already on board, Democrats need the support of just one more Republican to ensure the legislation is sent to the House.

The bill, which will be introduced by Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), would use a legislative tool called the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to roll back the FCC’s vote last month scrapping the 2015 net neutrality rules. The rules have required internet service providers (ISP) to treat all web traffic equally, and supporters say they’re essential to preventing companies such as Comcast and Verizon from abusing their control over internet access.The Democrats plan to use procedural rules under the CRA to force a vote on their bill in the coming months.

Even though the bill is unlikely to pass the House or be signed by President Trump, Democrats see an opportunity to capitalize on the outcry surrounding the FCC repeal and force Republicans to vote on net neutrality ahead of the midterm elections.

“With full caucus support, it’s clear that Democrats are committed to fighting to keep the internet from becoming the Wild West where ISPs are free to offer premium service to only the wealthiest customers while average consumers are left with far inferior options,” Schumer said in a statement Tuesday.

He added, “When we force a vote on this bill, Republicans in Congress will — for the first time — have the opportunity to right the administration’s wrong and show the American people whose side they’re on: big ISPs and major corporations or consumers, entrepreneurs, and small business owners.”

On the House side, Rep. Mike Doyle (D-Pa.) announced Tuesday that he had lined up 82 co-sponsors for his companion CRA bill, including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). But the procedural rules for CRA bills are different in the House; Democrats do not have the power to force a vote by securing co-sponsors.

That’s left the Senate as the primary venue for the net neutrality fight.

Supporters of the rules looking for the 51st vote for the CRA bill could have several targets.

Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), for example, who made headlines last year by bucking the administration on a handful of judicial nominees, said last week that he is undecided on Markey’s bill.

“There a lot of nuances, and there are very good arguments on both sides,” Kennedy said to reporters, according to the National Journal. “I’m honestly undecided. Right now, to me, it’s a very, very close call.”

Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.), who’s seen as one of the most vulnerable Republicans in this year’s midterm election, is another possible target in the net neutrality push. Spokespeople for Kennedy and Heller did not respond to requests for comment.

Still, Republicans have largely opposed the Obama-era rules as heavy-handed regulation that has stifled investment from broadband companies. They say existing antitrust and consumer protection laws are already sufficient to secure an open internet.

Democrats and their allies disagree and think Republicans will pay a political price for that stance.

Fight for the Future, a group that helped rally internet users to protest the FCC vote, has already launched an online scorecard to track members’ positions on the CRA, directing supporters to reach out to their representatives.

“Net neutrality is going to be an election issue in 2018 and every member of Congress knows it,” Evan Greer, the group’s campaign director, said in a statement.

“The CRA is steamrolling through the Senate because lawmakers are reading the writing on the wall that it’s the only viable legislation on the table. Cleanly reversing the FCC’s unpopular and illegitimate decision is, on substance, the correct policy move, and the only one that has support from voters,” Greer said.

It could be months before the net neutrality bill reaches the Senate floor. The FCC’s final order still needs to receive approval from the White House’s Office of Management and Budget and must be published in the Federal Register before Congress can review it. At that point, lawmakers will have 60 legislative days to take up the CRA bills.

Even if the effort in Congress fails, as expected, the FCC’s repeal order will be facing court challenges for years to come. That will allow Democrats to extend the shelf life of a political battle in which they see themselves on the winning side.

“Republicans now have a clear choice — be on the right side of history and stand with the American people who support a free and open internet, or hold hands with the special interests who want to control the internet for their own profit,” Markey said in a statement Tuesday. “I urge them to join the majority of Americans, embrace the bipartisanship of net neutrality, and support this resolution.”

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The FCC’s Christmas Gift to Internet Users

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 23 Dec 2017 11:43:00 +0000

No doubt your Christmas would be troubled and anxiety ridden if not for this column assuring you that the Trump administration decision last week to “repeal net neutrality” does no such thing.

Net neutrality long ago became the expectation of broadband customers. It was an expectation that internet service providers routinely met during the two decades before the Obama rules were enacted. It’s an expectation they will continue to meet after the Obama rules have been withdrawn.

Net neutrality means unfiltered, unhindered access to what the web offers. Net neutrality is the business that broadband suppliers are in.

What is being repealed is a decision to recategorize broadband from a Title I to a Title II service under the 1934 Communications Act. This decision had little to do with net neutrality but meant that lobbyists and petitioners and courts would be able to pressure Washington steadily in the direction of regulating the internet the way it did the railroads in the early 1900s.

Title II is what many groups militating in the name of net neutrality really wanted. They conflated net neutrality with Title II regulation because they thought it politically expedient to do so.

Does this mean you should run screaming to the nearest cliff and throw yourself off because now the internet will be taken over by “fast lanes”?I, for one, will pass. The whole idea of fast lanes reflects a faulty, obsolete metaphor for how the internet works. The internet is more like a giant computer providing a diverse array of services to a billion-plus users simultaneously.

It delivers you a webpage, me a video. In the future, it will help your driverless car navigate traffic, a doctor examine and treat an injury remotely. It will make sure your refrigerator is full of beer.

The businesses supplying each of these services care only that their own customers are happy. Their customers care only that their own service is satisfactory. They won’t care or even notice that the computer is constantly optimizing its performance so its diverse users are all kept simultaneously happy.

The whole “fast lane” nonsense is even more nonsense when we realize how much it’s the efforts of so-called edge providers that determine service quality. If a static webpage doesn’t load as quickly as you might wish, today it’s because of slow servers among the dozens that nowadays contribute pieces of a webpage. Not to blame usually is the last-mile carrier, who’s moving these elements to you as fast as content suppliers make them available.

Or take Netflix: It spends millions to place servers containing its shows inside the systems of last-mile providers to improve delivery and reduce transport costs.

Laws against fraud and anticompetitive behavior apply to broadband suppliers as they do to other companies in the economy. If a supermarket sells you a can of dirt labeled “peas,” it would not long stay in business. But, wait, aren’t we in a uniquely bad position because so many of us have only one or two choices for broadband at home?

All businesses would like to charge an infinitely high price for infinitely chintzy service, but not even Comcast can get away with this, even when competition is inadequate, because customers have voices and politicians and regulators listen to those voices. And competition can only improve matters.

Ironically, what consistently outrages the net-neut freaks is the wireless sector, where competition is fierce, and where rivals dangle offers of uncapped streaming from certain video services, and even free Netflix or Sling TV. This offends sacred principle, never mind that it increasingly turns wireless into a plausible substitute for the local fixed-line monopolist.

Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile—all have made announcements, and put money behind them, promising that 5G wireless will render the local cable oligopoly a thing of the past. Repealing Title II not only makes such investment attractive. It will enable wireless to support a whole slew of advanced services while keeping customers maximally happy.

Disney last week announced it would spend $52.4 billion to acquire certain Fox assets to replicate Netflix’s business model. Notice that Netflix’s business model is premised entirely on the existence of ubiquitous, affordable, unhindered broadband.

Ajit Pai, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, is the Santa, not the Grinch, of this holiday season. Repeal of Title II is what will make the future internet possible. It’s just too bad those net-neutrality obsessives piling up lifelessly at the bottom of the nearest cliff won’t be around to enjoy it.

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Government-forced 'net neutrality': Putting future inventors between a rock and a hard place

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 12 Nov 2017 12:04:00 +0000

One of my favorite Greek Myths is Sisyphus, an arrogant king who earned a terrible punishment by trying to cheat death: he was forced to roll a rock pointlessly up a hill, only to watch it roll back down every time, for all of time.

Fast forward to modern times, and the debate surrounding “net neutrality” very much feels like my rock. We make a move in the right direction — taking a hands-off regulatory approach to the Internet — but then leftist activists swoop in, and try to throw shackles on the Internet.

Armed with their good old playbook, these activists have declared war and are unapologetic in their efforts to spread mistruths that will hopefully trick enough people into believing that burdensome overregulation of the Internet is our only choice. Instead of commonsense and transparency, they opt for radical ideological warfare.

One point to clarify is that these pretend consumer advocates are not on their white horses, brandishing their swords and shields, to save your “free and open Internet.” That is what they desperately want you to believe.

The activists are supporters of the deceptively titled “net neutrality," which treats Internet service providers as public utilities, like electric companies. Net neutrality is not neutral at all. It would appoint a bureaucrat to play referee over the Internet, which it doesn’t need, but even worse, that referee would only call fouls on one team. That means that it is nearly impossible (Greek mythology-type impossible) for net neutrality to bring down costs.

Their efforts now focus on protecting a set of 2015 rules put in place by former President Barack Obama and his Federal Communications Commission known as Title II, which classifies Internet service providers as public utilities, like electricity, gas, and water. That is the contentious point in this debate, not the issue of a free and open Internet.

These groups are raising an all-out policy war and kicking dust in the air because of the current FCC’s intent to reverse this crippling 2015 rule, which not only prioritizes certain companies over others but it also manipulates the very foundation of how our nation’s markets work.

The irrefutable economic truth is that more regulation like Title II equals more costs and less innovation.

A market doesn’t become more efficient when a bureaucrat tries to step in and dictate how decisions are to be made and how a market/service/transaction is going to run. That kind of meddling always slows things down, both Internet speeds and innovation, because even if a better solution is found, old regulations can stifle the marketplace and hurt consumers. Think of the way taxi unions have tried to stop ride-share programs like Uber and Lyft.

For example, this trend can be seen in markets from TVs to college, as this Bureau of Labor Statistics chart wonderfully illustrates.

Armed with their good old playbook, these activists have declared war and are unapologetic in their efforts to spread mistruths that will hopefully trick enough people into believing that burdensome overregulation of the Internet is our only choice. Instead of commonsense and transparency, they opt for radical ideological warfare.

One point to clarify is that these pretend consumer advocates are not on their white horses, brandishing their swords and shields, to save your “free and open Internet.” That is what they desperately want you to believe.

The activists are supporters of the deceptively titled “net neutrality," which treats Internet service providers as public utilities, like electric companies. Net neutrality is not neutral at all. It would appoint a bureaucrat to play referee over the Internet, which it doesn’t need, but even worse, that referee would only call fouls on one team. That means that it is nearly impossible (Greek mythology-type impossible) for net neutrality to bring down costs.

Their efforts now focus on protecting a set of 2015 rules put in place by former President Barack Obama and his Federal Communications Commission known as Title II, which classifies Internet service providers as public utilities, like electricity, gas, and water. That is the contentious point in this debate, not the issue of a free and open Internet.

These groups are raising an all-out policy war and kicking dust in the air because of the current FCC’s intent to reverse this crippling 2015 rule, which not only prioritizes certain companies over others but it also manipulates the very foundation of how our nation’s markets work.

The irrefutable economic truth is that more regulation like Title II equals more costs and less innovation.

A market doesn’t become more efficient when a bureaucrat tries to step in and dictate how decisions are to be made and how a market/service/transaction is going to run. That kind of meddling always slows things down, both Internet speeds and innovation, because even if a better solution is found, old regulations can stifle the marketplace and hurt consumers. Think of the way taxi unions have tried to stop ride-share programs like Uber and Lyft.

For example, this trend can be seen in markets from TVs to college, as this Bureau of Labor Statistics chart wonderfully illustrates.

The trend is obvious, but many on the left still think they can regulate an industry into submission. They can use the stick instead of the carrot to encourage innovation and competition. Markets just don’t work that way.

Regulation is an extra constraint, and the way to create more innovation is to eliminate constraints. In a lot of ways, that is the way that the Internet currently functions. The Internet catapulted us into the future because Internet providers and Silicon Valley were not hamstrung by excessive extortion: taxes, regulation, and unionization. Silicon Valley exploded because its barons followed Atlas Shrugged, not Haight-Ashbury.

In the lead up to a potential December vote on restoring Internet freedom at the FCC’s open meeting, there has been an uptick in events, congressional hearings, and commentary. While it’s no surprise that debate continues on the merits of Title II, the FCC needs to look one step further. If it really wants to restore and preserve Internet freedom, it needs a national framework to pre-empt a patchwork framework in the states, which is where the leftist activists will go next to try to get wins.

Sisyphus’s action of rolling his rock make sense, at least in the context of Greek Mythology. It’s his punishment. But this isn’t ancient Greece, and U.S. tech innovators shouldn’t be punished in similar fashion.

The leftist activist support of slow government bureaucracy to foster innovation from the Internet doesn’t make any sense. I guess, unless, they are trying to cheat the laws of economics. That might not be as punishable as cheating death, but maybe they should be “punished” by being forced to read Ludwig Von Mises' Human Action only to return to the riveting beginning of the economic page-turner when they are done.

A punishment for sure, but one which will likely lead to something greater: a faster, cheaper, less-regulated Internet.

Charles Sauer (@CharlesSauer) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential blog. He is president of the Market Institute and previously worked on Capitol Hill, for a governor, and for an academic think tank.
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The $300 Million Contract Awarded to the Interior Secretary's Friend's Company Is Exempt from Government Audits

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 28 Oct 2017 03:03:00 +0000

The federal government has awarded a tiny Montana company a $300 million no-bid contract to repair Puerto Rico's hurricane-wrecked electrical grid. The company, Whitefish Energy, has close ties to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. A copy of that contract leaked last night, and it seems to prohibit the federal government from auditing Whitefish's work and to shield other details of the company's efforts from being disclosed via open records laws.

"In no event," the contract says, will the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Comptroller General of the United States, "or any of their authorized representatives have the right to audit or review the cost and profit elements" of the deal.

The contract was posted online by Ken Klippenstein, a contributor to The Daily Beast, the first publication to report on the connections between the company and the secretary of the interior.

The leaked document seems to confirm concerns—voiced by lawmakers, pundits, and reform groups—that the Whitefish contract is a lucrative special deal for a friend of a top administration official, and that it places politics ahead of what's in the best interest of Puerto Ricans, many of whom are still without electricity.

Andy Techmanski, owner of Whitefish Energy, is a neighbor and friend of Secretary Zinke, according to multiple news reports. The two men have publicly disclosed their acquaintance. The company has only a handful of employees and is relying almost entirely on subcontractors to do the actual work of restoring power in Peurto Rico.

Members of Congress have called for an investigation into the Whitefish contract. Yesterday members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce sent a letter to Techmanski seeking copies of all contracts and subcontracts signed by Whitefish as part of its work in Puerto Rico. Meanwhile, members of the House Natural Resources Committee wrote to the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) requesting more information about how and why Whitefish was selected for this work.

Separately, Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) have requested a Government Accountability Office review of the "use of public money to reimburse work completed by Whitefish Energy," according to Reuters.

Prior to landing the contract for repair work in Puerto Rico, Whitefish's largest project had been a $1.3 million deal to rebuild less than 5 miles of electrical lines in Arizona, The Washington Post reported this week. By comparison, there are more than 2,400 miles of transmission lines and 30,000 of distribution electrical lines in Puerto Rico.

The Trump administration and the company itself have offered only the barest of explanations for how a small electrical firm from Montana managed to land a lucrative contract for work in the Caribbean. Both have claimed that the company has experience working in mountain ranges and on rugged terrain and have denied that cronyism played a role in awarding the contract.

"There was no federal involvement," Chris Chiames, a spokesman for Whitefish Energy, told BuzzFeed this week. "There was never any special favors asked, nor would there have been."

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which is no stranger to fiscal malfeasance, said Friday that it had "significant concerns" about the Whitefish contract. According to The Hill, FEMA denied having signed off on the contract and said details of the contract suggesting as much were inaccurate.

Whether Whitefish gets the job done is supposed to be shrouded in secrecy. The copy of the contract posted by Klippenstein includes a provision prohibiting the government from auditing its work. Another part of the contract says the Puerto Rican government "waives any claim against [Whitefish Energy] related to delayed completion of work."

Until the Trump administration can offer a better explanation for the decision to award a multi-million no-bid contract to a company with close ties to a top administration official, this whole thing smells really bad. The administration sure looks like it's been swallowed by the very swamp it promised to drain.

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6 Reasons to Use a VPN

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 18 Sep 2017 17:10:00 +0000

A Virtual Private Network, or VPN, allows you to browse the Internet without fear of being spied on by neighbors, hackers, or the government, as the case may be. While you might think that only those with something to hide would be interested in using a VPN, that’s definitely not the case. Think of all the information you put out there on a daily basis without even thinking about it: Your Facebook status, your credit card numbers, your passwords…the list goes on. You might think that the websites you’re using are secure, and while that may be the case, it’s the security of your network that you need to worry about.

There are also some ways you can benefit from using a VPN while utilizing WiFi connections other than your own, as well as if you were to travel abroad. Choosing the right VPN allows you to essentially view the Internet as if you’re in your home country, without any restrictions that may affect local ISPs. Bear in mind that you utilize a VPN in this manner at your own risk, as many countries can be extremely strict when enforcing their Internet censorship policies.
If you’re still on the fence about whether or not to use a VPN, decide for yourself after reading up on the following benefits of a Virtual Private Network:

Access restricted content abroad

So you took a trip to another country, but it’s raining and you’re jet-lagged. You go to load up some Breaking Bad on Netflix, only to realize that Netflix is completely blocked in the country you’re currently staying in. And so are a ton of your favorite websites. With a VPN, you can use your American IP address anywhere in the world, thus tricking Netflix and other websites into thinking your actually in the States. Hey, it’s not like you’re downloading movies illegally.

Access restricted content at school or work

How many times have you tried to visit a legitimate site for work- or school-related research only to find it’s been blocked by your organization’s “Acceptable Use” policy? I can recall a time when I worked in a high school in which Khan Academy was blocked. I’m not advocating for you to circumvent your school or company’s gateway for illicit or immoral means, but using a VPN can allow you to access important information that is completely necessary to your current task.

Use public WiFi

Public WiFi is about as unsecure as you can get. If you’ve ever logged into the free WiFi at Starbucks, you ran a huge risk of having all of your information stolen by some guy sitting in his car in the parking lot. Not only that, but if you really weren’t careful, you may have logged into a different WiFi network altogether, inadvertently handing your information directly over to a spoofer without him having to do any work at all. With a VPN, your information is encrypted, so it is indecipherable to anyone trying to eavesdrop.

Private file sharing

Again, I’m not saying you should be downloading and uploading stolen files such as copyrighted music and movies, but a VPN allows you to send and receive files to friends without anyone else seeing what you’re doing. Surely there times you need to share files that you don’t want others seeing. By using a VPN, sending private documents or personal photo albums can be done without the thought crossing your mind of your information being leaked to the world for all to see.

Browsing isn’t logged

Once again, this sounds a little shady, but think about it. Imagine you were accused of a drug-related crime, but weren’t able to prove your innocence. The authorities subpoena your Internet browsing history, and find that you had previously looked up the recipe for crack cocaine. It’s not going to matter that this was for a research project in chemistry class; it’s only going to make you look worse in front of a judge. If you had used a VPN, your browsing history would be completely untraceable, and you’d have a much better chance at convincing the court of your innocence.
Right to privacy

Above all else, privacy is (or at least, should be) a basic human right. Everything discussed above should be private in the first place. But unfortunately, in this day and age, it’s not. Even those who have nothing to hide should be wary about how their Internet browsing habits may appear when viewed out of context by outsiders. Remember: Nothing you do online is private, but with a VPN you can minimize the chances of your private information becoming public knowledge.

Massive iOS 11 leak reveals key iPhone 8 secrets ahead of launch

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 09 Sep 2017 12:52:00 +0000

Oh, Apple, you just can’t keep leaking unreleased software, can you? After the massive HomePod leaks that practically confirmed many of the iPhone 8 rumors that we kept bumping into, we have a similar blunder from the Cupertino-based company. This time around, someone close to Apple leaked iOS 11 GM, the final iOS 11 version that’s actually be installed on the iOS devices launching soon. And iOS 11 GM is full of iPhone 8 details.

The software was obtained by 9to5Mac, which inspected it for iPhone 8 clues. It turns out there are plenty of secrets that were not spilled in the previous HomePod dump.

iPad Pro display
The iPhone is finally getting the True Tone Display that Apple first launched on the iPad Pro for white balancing. iOS 11 GM beta also indicates the resolution of the phone will be at 2436 x 1125, which seems to match previous leaks and estimates.

iPhone 8 design
More references to the new iPhone 8 are found in iOS 11, which confirm the phone’s top notch. An animation that shows instructions for enabling the SOS mode also highlights the design changes, including the top bezel and bigger on/off button on the side.

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FTC settles with Lenovo over a built-in snooping software, $3.5 million fine

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 05 Sep 2017 23:02:00 +0000

SAN FRANCISCO — Lenovo, the world’s second largest computer manufacturer, has settled with the Federal Trade Commission over charges it shipped some of its laptops preloaded with software that compromised security protections in order to deliver ads to consumers. The company will also pay $3.5 million to 32 states that were part of the settlement.

The VisualDiscovery program caused pop-up ads to appear on the user's screen whenever his or her cursor hovered over a similar-looking product on a website. While only information about websites the user visited was transmitted, the program had the ability to access all of a consumer’s sensitive personal information transmitted over the Internet, including login credentials, Social Security numbers, medical information, and financial and payment information, the FTC alleged.

Consumers are frequently shown ads the correspond to their search or viewing history, but it's done via ad tracking software or cookies, which can be turned off on Facebook and Google or by deleting cookies. In the case of the VisualDiscovery software, the software hijacked encrypted web sessions.

“It’s the online equivalent of someone intercepting your mail, opening it, reading it, closing it back up and then putting it back in your mailbox,” said FTC acting chair Maureen Ohlhausen.

The program was created by an third-party advertising software company Superfish that was founded in Israel but headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif. It has since shut its doors.

As many as 750,000 laptops sold in the United States had the program installed from 2014 through 2015, the FTC says.

The FTC alleges that beginning in August of 2014, China-based Lenovo began selling laptops in the United States that came pre-installed with the software program. Consumers weren’t told the software was on their systems.

Beijing-based Lenovo made headlines in 2005 when it purchased IBM’s personal computing division for $1.75 billion, an acquisition that at the time was controversial as many feared it was a beachhead for other Chinese businesses. Today it is the world’s second-largest PC maker, with 20.4% of the global market, very close behind HP which has 21.8%, according to research firm IDC. In 2016 Lenovo's revenue was $43 billion.

Lenovo has published a list of computers that came with the software installed. Its popular ThinkPad laptops were not affected.
“Egregious does describe it,” said Eugene Spafford, founder of the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security at Purdue University.

“Sadly, other vendors may be doing something similar as the competition for ad revenue is huge, and the mechanisms are not that difficult to build in (or get prepackaged),” he said.

The snooping software was first discovered by and reported by Chris Palmer from the Google Chrome security team.

As part of the settlement, Lenovo must now get consumers' permission before pre-installing any software that injects advertising into consumers' Internet browsing sessions or that transmits sensitive information from their systems to third parties. Lenovo must also implement a comprehensive software security program to test all software the comes preloaded onto its laptops, and that security program will be subject to third-party audits.

In a statement, Lenovo said it "disagrees" with allegations contained in these complaints but is pleased to bring the matter to a close.
In order to be able to show pop-up ads on encrypted websites, the VisualDiscovery program used an insecure method to replace the digital certificates for the websites with its own certificates. VisualDiscovery did not adequately verify that the websites’ digital certificates were valid before replacing them, and used the same, easy-to-crack password on all affected laptops rather than using unique passwords for each laptop, the FTC said.

That meant that even if a consumer went to a website that began with https://, which would lead them to believe they were on a secure and encrypted site, in fact the security had been breached.
“The harm was consumers were buying computers whose basic security features were undermined without their knowledge or consent,” said Ohlhausen.
Lenovo stopped installing the software over a year ago, and many antivirus programs were updated to identify the program and remove it was news about the insecurity broke.

Still, it’s possible that it still exists on some laptops, the FTC said. Lenovo has published instructions on how to remove the Superfish software on its website.

Neither Lenovo nor the FTC are aware of any actual instances of a third party exploiting the vulnerabilities the VisualDiscovery software created to steal user’s communications.

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Apple's Real Reason for Finally Joining the Net Neutrality Fight

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 01 Sep 2017 00:47:00 +0000

OVER THE PAST few months, as the Federal Communications Commission has moved closer to weakening net neutrality protections, countless tech companies have signaled their support for a strong and open internet. The lone voice missing through the debate: Apple. Yesterday, the final day to comment on the FCC's current net neutrality proceedings, the company finally broke its silence with a comment filed in support of strong rules to protect the open internet. But why, at the 11th hour and well after other tech giants joined the fight, is Apple speaking up now? And why, for that matter, is it speaking up at all?

Apple's filing outlines several key principles it sees as important for protecting the open internet: consumer choice, transparency, competition, investment and innovation, and a ban on paid fast lanes. "These key principles are reflected in the FCC’s current rules and should form the foundation of any net neutrality framework going forward," the filing says. "Apple remains open to alternative sources of legal authority, but only if they provide for strong, enforceable, and legally sustainable protections, like those in place today."

Apple hasn't always stood up for these principles. In 2009, the company was caught blocking Skype calls from iPhones at the request of AT&T, a textbook example of violating net neutrality. Apple was conspicuously missing from a 2014 open letter signed by 100 different tech companies–including Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft–in support of net neutrality. It didn't join the Internet Association, a coalition of internet heavyweights that has lobbied in support of open internet rules, nor did it participate in this year's Day of Action.

The first sign that Apple was rethinking its position came earlier this year, when CEO Tim Cook voiced support for net neutrality regulations during a shareholder meeting earlier this year. "We stay out of politics but stay in policy," Cook said during the meeting, according to 9to5Mac. "If net neutrality became a top thing, we would definitely engage in it."
So what made Cook and co. decide that net neutrality was "a top thing?" Apple didn't respond to a request for comment on why the company held off for so long. And given that its fellow tech giants have already thrown their lobbying weight behind net neutrality, Apple's support for net neutrality probably won't do much to sway the FCC at this point. (It might motivate the company's cult following to start paying attention to the issue, which could make a difference as the fight shifts from the FCC to courts and Congress.)

The real significance of Apple's filing is what it says about the company's future. The company has long aspired to be more than just a hardware company, and now that Apple is in the streaming video business, net neutrality will become increasingly important to the company's bottom line. Apple's first two original shows Carpool Karaoke and Planet of the Apps debuted this year, and it reportedly plans to spend $1 billion to produce even more content. If companies like AT&T and Verizon can hobble Apple's streams while boosting their own, it could be a real problem for Cupertino's video (and revenue) ambitions.

Yes, Apple's interest in net neutrality is likely driven by its business agenda. The same goes for the other tech giants lobbying to preserve the FCC regulations. But as the FCC moves forward with its plan to gut net neutrality, the open internet will need all the support it can get.

Why You Should Care About Net Neutrality?

A world without net neutrality might end up meaning that you have to pay more to access the internet content that you want. But it also might crush innovation.

Read More >>

Saros Cycle Solar Eclipses (Astronomy)

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 20 Aug 2017 17:19:00 +0000

"Eclipse Countdown Until First Contact in Oregon August 21, 2017 UT"

On Monday, August 21, 2017, all of North America will be treated to an eclipse of the sun. Anyone within the path of totality can see one of nature’s most awe inspiring sights - a total solar eclipse. This path, where the moon will completely cover the sun and the sun's tenuous atmosphere - the corona - can be seen, will stretch from Salem, Oregon to Charleston, South Carolina. Observers outside this path will still see a partial solar eclipse where the moon covers part of the sun's disk. NASA created this website to provide a guide to this amazing event. Here you will find activities, events, broadcasts, and resources from NASA and our partners across the nation.

Read More >>

Google Will Launch Android O After The Total Solar Eclipse On Aug. 21: Rumors Say It's Android Oreo

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 19 Aug 2017 14:18:00 +0000

Google announced that it will launch Android O on Aug. 21, and rumors claim that the next major version of the mobile operating system will indeed be named Android Oreo.

Android O will be unveiled right after the total solar eclipse, a phenomenon that will sweep across the entire country for the first time since 1918.

Android O To Launch Aug. 21
Google created a webpage dedicated to the upcoming total solar eclipse, which includes important information on the phenomenon, such as its expected time and ways to watch it for users outside the United States. Google also revealed details about the Eclipse Megamovie Project, which will gather videos from more than 1,000 volunteers across the United States to create a movie of a continuous view of the total solar eclipse.

The main news on the Android Eclipse page, however, is the announcement that Google will officially reveal Android O at 2:40 p.m. ET. The total solar eclipse is expected to end at 2:37 p.m. ET, and Google will jump into the trail left behind by the phenomenon to unveil the next major version of Android.

The Aug. 21 Android O release date partially confirms a report from last week, wherein Android Police managing editor David Ruddock and prolific leaker Evan Blass both claimed that the operating system will be rolled out on that day. The partial confirmation is because it is unclear if Google will also be rolling out Android O after its official unveiling.

The report also claimed that the official name of Android O will be revealed on Aug. 21.

Android O Name: Android Oreo?
Android Oreo has long been theorized as the official name of Android O, as Google names the major versions of the mobile operating system after sweets. Tying up with a brand for the name is not unprecedented, as Google already did it before with Android KitKat.

Two new clues have increased the likelihood that Android O will indeed be named Android Oreo. The first hint comes from Blass, who simply tweeted "Happy Eclipse" alongside a picture of an Oreo cookie. The connection is easy to make, considering the planned Android O launch after the total solar eclipse.

The second clue is much more definitive, and comes from Google itself. Google uploaded a video on Google+, and its filename was "GoogleOreo_Teaser_0817_noDroids (1).mp4". While this is not complete confirmation of the Android Oreo name, the fact that the post containing the video was taken down and replaced with a video named "Octopus Teaser.mp4" means that uploading the first one was a mistake, and spoiled the operating system's name.

How To Watch The Total Solar Eclipse
Google's Android Eclipse page contains a link to the NASA livestream of the total solar eclipse, though users can also watch the phenomemon on Twitter, in partnership with The Weather Channel.

For those who will be watching the total solar eclipse not on their computer monitors but outside, you will need to exercise proper safety precautions, including making sure the eclipse glasses you purchased will really protect you.

Read More >>

China pledges neutrality unless US strikes North Korea first

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 12 Aug 2017 12:27:00 +0000

China’s government says it would remain neutral if North Korea attacks the United States, but warned it would defend its Asian neighbor if the U.S. strikes first and tries to overthrow Kim Jong Un’s regime, Chinese state media said Friday.

“If the U.S. and South Korea carry out strikes and try to overthrow the North Korean regime, and change the political pattern of the Korean Peninsula, China will prevent them from doing so,” reported the Global Times, a daily Chinese newspaper controlled by the Communist Party.

Meanwhile, other Asia-Pacific countries have come out in support of the United States in the event of a North Korean nuclear attack.

Japan’s defense minister, Itsunori Onodera, said this week that his nation’s military was ready to shoot down North Korean nuclear missiles, if necessary.

In Australia, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull described his country and the U.S. as being “joined at the hip,” the South China Morning Post reported.

“If there is an attack on the U.S., the Anzus Treaty would be invoked,” and Australia would aid the U.S., Turnbull told Australia’s 3AW radio Friday morning. Turnbull was referring to a collective security agreement between the United States, Australia and New Zealand.

The Chinese response to the heightened tensions between the U.S. and North Korea followed a number of hot-headed proclamations.

North Korea has threatened the U.S. with a nuclear attack on Guam, a U.S. territory south of Japan, after President Donald Trump said additional threats against the country or its allies would be met with “fire and fury.”

On Thursday, the president doubled-down on the remarks, saying his original comment possibly “wasn’t tough enough.”

In a separate appearance, Trump added: “Let’s see what [Kim Jong Un] does with Guam. He does something in Guam, it will be an event the likes of which nobody has seen before – what will happen in North Korea.”

One North Korean government official, meanwhile, accused Trump of “going senile,” Fox News reported.

Read More >>

Donald Trump prepares supporters for worst as Robert Mueller's Russia investigation closes in

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 09 Aug 2017 01:19:00 +0000

Embattled President tells fanbase election hacking conspiracy an establishment fabrication invented to deprive them of their leader of choice

President Donald Trump is again attacking the media on Monday, and his broadsides carry a newly ominous edge: He is both faulting the media for allegedly downplaying the size and intensity of support from his base and accusing them of trying to deliberately weaken that support for him.

7 Aug
Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump
The Trump base is far bigger & stronger than ever before (despite some phony Fake News polling). Look at rallies in Penn, Iowa, Ohio.......

Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump
Hard to believe that with 24/7 #Fake News on CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, NYTIMES & WAPO, the Trump base is getting stronger!
7:18 AM - Aug 7, 2017
25,742 25,742 Replies 16,584 16,584 Retweets 69,173 69,173 likes

This comes some 24 hours after Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein made big news by telling Fox News Sunday that if the special counsel finds evidence of crimes in the course of his probe into Russian sabotage of our election, it may be within the scope of his investigation to pursue them.

In these seemingly disparate developments, it is hard not to discern the potential for a volatile, combustible combination.

Because Trump is undermining our democratic norms and processes in so many ways, it is often easy to focus on each of them in isolation, rather than as part of the same larger story. But, taken together, they point to a possible climax in which Trump, cornered by revelations unearthed by Robert S. Mueller III's probe and by ongoing media scrutiny, seeks to rally his supporters behind the idea that this outcome represents not the imposition of accountability by functioning civic institutions, but rather an effort to steal the election from him - and from them.

On ABC's This Week, Trump counsellor Kellyanne Conway on Sunday dismissed the “entire Russia investigation” as a “total fabrication” to “excuse” Hillary Clinton's loss. This echoed Trump himself, who recently told a rally that the probe is an effort to “cheat” his supporters out of their legitimately elected leadership (i.e., him) with a “fake story” that is “demeaning to our country and demeaning to our Constitution.”

It bears repeating that Mueller's investigation is looking at how a hostile foreign power may have sabotaged our democracy, and at whether the Trump campaign colluded with it, and at conduct by Trump himself that came after the election: Whether the firing of former FBI Director James Comey after a demand for his loyalty was part of a pattern of obstruction of justice. The first of these has been attested to by our intelligence services, and evidence of the second (at least in the form of a willingness to collude) and the third of these has been unearthed by dogged scrutiny by news outlets. It is hardly an accident that Trump continues to cast doubt on the credibility of both those institutions, even as he and his spokespeople continue to cast the entire affair as an effort to reverse the election by illegitimate means.

This threatens damage on multiple levels. By casting the entire Russia story as fiction, Trump seeks to undermine the credibility of efforts to determine how our electoral system might be vulnerable to further attacks, separate and irrespective of what is learned about the Trump campaign's conduct, possibly making it less likely that we secure our system against any such future sabotage.

We don't know what all the ongoing scrutiny will produce in the way of revelations. But if it does produce any serious wrongdoing by Trump and/or his campaign - or even evidence of serious misconduct that is not criminal - it's not difficult to imagine what might happen next. Trump's advisers regularly tell us he will cooperate with Mueller's probe and play down the possibility of any effort to remove the special counsel. But Trump has confirmed that he is furious with his own attorney general, Jeff Sessions, for failing to protect him from Mueller's probe. That Trump confirmed this publicly only further underscores that he has zero sense of any obligation to the public to follow any rules of conduct, and plainly views any efforts to hold him accountable to those rules as illegitimate.

Conservative writer Matt Lewis floats a scenario in which Mueller, under pressure to produce results, slips into prosecutorial overreach, giving Trump voters legitimate reasons to feel that the presidency is being stolen from them. It is fair to worry about such an outcome, and we must remember that we are far from knowing the full truth about what happened in 2016. But it's also easy to envision the flip side: Trump demagoguing his supporters into a frenzy of rage, at rallies that are exactly like the ones we've seen in recent days, in the face of legitimate revelations.

To be sure, there are new signs that Republicans in Congress are taking steps to set up safeguards, should Trump try to remove Mueller. There is reassuring evidence that our institutions are holding - for now, anyway - and as Brian Beutler notes in The New Republic, it's likely that more future revelations about Trump's unfitness for the presidency will further undercut his efforts to cast institutions holding him accountable as illegitimate. But Trump is already giving every indication that he will go all out in trying. And how much damage that will cause is anyone's guess.

Read More >>

No more ransomware: How one website is stopping the crypto-locking crooks in their tracks

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 09 Aug 2017 00:30:00 +0000

No More Ransom launched a year ago: here's the story of how cybersecurity firms and law enforcement are working together to bring down ransomware.

Law enforcement organisations and cybersecurity companies around the world have attempted to do what they can to disrupt ransomware -- whether through takedowns of cybercriminal gangs by the authorities or security companies finding and providing decryption keys.
But this disjointed approach can only get so far in the modern hyper-connected world in which criminals cooperate across international borders and time zones.

It's why the No More Ransom initiative was launched a year ago, with the idea of bringing together law enforcement and private industry to combine efforts in the fight against cybercrime.
"It's the idea of everyone bringing what they're best at to the table to jointly try and tackle the biggest threat that we see out there," says Steve Wilson, head of Europol's Cybercrime Centre (EC3).

Launched jointly by Europol, the Dutch National Police, McAfee (then Intel Security), and Kaspersky Lab on July 25 2016, No More Ransom provided keys to unlocking encrypted files, as well as information on how to avoid succumbing to ransomware in the first place.

The portal initially provided decryption tools for four ransomware families: Shade, Rannoh, Rakhn, and CoinVault. It was collaborative work on decrypting CoinVault that led to the creation of a precursor to No More Ransom.
"We were working on CoinVault and did a lot of work with the Dutch police, and we were able to identify the command and control servers the cybercriminals were using," says David Emm, principal security researcher, Kaspersky Lab.

The operation led to Kaspersky uploading free-to-use decryption keys to a website and it took off from there. "It was really successful and this was just one and part of a wider trend, so we wanted to establish wider involvement," he says.

McAfee agreed that this collaboration -- both between competing private firms and the authorities -- was the way forward in the fight against the escalation of ransomware.

"There was just a sense that what would be nice would be to have an initiative to collaborate and work together on. But also to have a single point that people could go to when we create free decryption tools," says Raj Samani, chief scientist at McAfee.

That single place was the No More Ransom portal, which since its launch has been hosted by Amazon Web Services and Barracuda Networks -- and if it wasn't for cloud-hosting, the website would have been overwhelmed on its first day.

"Part of my responsibility was to find a hosting provider and I remember at the time I was asked how many HTTPs requests do you think you'll get a day and I thought 12,000 a day would be reasonable," says Samani.

"On day one we had 2.7 million -- then during one day, the weekend of WannaCry, we had eight million hits in a single day, so it's much bigger than we ever thought."

Following the initial success of the initiative, seven more cybersecurity firms have since joined as associate partners -- Bitdefender, Check Point, Trend Micro, Emisoft, ElevenPaths, Avast and Cert.PL -- each contributing to the development of decryption keys.

Dozens of law enforcement agencies -- including Interpol, Enisa and the NCA -- have also become actively involved in the scheme, which also receives additional support from dozens of security firms. There's now 109 partners in total and for Wilson, the more involved, the merrier: "The more people we get to contribute, the better this resource is going to be," he says.

Cybercrime is a global problem, but while there is more international cooperation between law enforcement agencies than there's been before, rules and regulations mean that sometimes the authorities can't act as quickly as they'd like.

That's a disadvantage against global crime gangs, but private cybersecurity firms can be more flexible, enabling the No More Ransom operation to take the fight to cybercriminals at a faster pace by releasing decryption tools as and when they're developed.

"Law enforcement agencies have restrictions that criminals don't -- they have the logistics of paperwork. Whereas at least under the umbrella of a project like this, there's nothing to slow it down," says Emm.

It's difficult to quantify the exact number of decryptions which have occurred thanks to downloads from No More Ransom -- the portal just provides links, it doesn't monitor what happens next -- but it's thought that over 28,000 decryptions have taken place using the tools, saving millions from being paid to cybercriminals in the process.

"It really strongly justified a single response to this rather than over each country trying to develop something themselves," says EC3's Wilson.

No More Ransom doesn't discriminate about what decryption tools are added to the portal -- sometimes these come in batches, sometimes individual decryptors are uploaded as and when they're made available -- but how does this happen?

There are a number of ways. The first is if encryption keys simply get leaked. Indeed, an example of this occurred just hours after the launch of No More Ransom when the cybercriminal gang behind the Petya ransomware -- long before it caused a global incident -- leaked 3,500 decryption keys for a competing form of ransomware, Chimera. "We were able to grab them and create a tool," says Samani.

But most of the time, decrypting ransomware comes down to hard work, with cybersecurity firms and the authorities working together in order to identify ransomware variants and crack codes.

"Working with law enforcement, we identify the infrastructure, go through the proper legal process to seize the key server and extract the decryption keys," says Samani. That's how Shade ransomware was decrypted, resulting in 165,000 decryption keys being made available.

That's where the aid of law enforcement especially comes in -- a cybersecurity firm can't walk in and seize a botnet, but they can aid in its takedown, as was the case with Operation Avalanche, which took down a prominent malware botnet.

"On the offensive side from us, tackling the actual business model of ransomware-as-a-service and very much going after the large scale perpetrators of cybercrime is very much what we're trying to do," says Wilson.

Naturally, the very existence of No More Ransom has irked malicious actors. "Analysis of the chatter on underground forums shows how angry they are," says McAfee's Samani. "We even had a ransomware variant named after us -- there's an extension that had been encrypted as NoMoreRansom."

So the portal is required to have the best defences possible in order to prevent attacks against it.

"We've got to do all the normal housekeeping things to keep it secure. We've got to pen test it to ensure that it's as secure as we can make it. People are going to want to stop it, we need to make it as resilient as we can," says David Emm.

That's where Barracuda Networks and Amazon Web Services come in -- both powering the portal and keeping it safe from attackers -- in the spirit of cooperation on which No More Ransom is based.

"I'm blown away by how open and collaborative we've been. AWS, for example, hosting it for free, it's incredible, it's probably the most targeted website in the world and they've said OK, no arguments," says Samani.

A year on from the launch of No More Ransom, what's the project's future? An anniversary update includes more decryption tools and the website translated into even more languages to reflect the global interest in the project and to help users and businesses around the world.

The platform is now available in 26 languages, with the most recent additions Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, Greek, Hungarian, Indonesian, Malay, Norwegian, Romanian, Swedish, Tamil and Thai.

Ransomware is a major problem and while no one is under any illusion that the project is going to eliminate the problem, those behind it are doing all they can to educate against the dangers of ransomware and provide aid against it.

"We totally accept that this isn't a panacea; there's always going to be a lag time between us being able to assist, but we're trying to make that difference," says Wilson.

That's no small task, given ransomware is ever-evolving - and things are likely to get worse before they get better.

Read More >>

The Petya ransomware is starting to look like a cyberattack in disguise

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 28 Jun 2017 23:37:00 +0000

The ransomware that wasn’t

The haze of yesterday’s massive ransomware attack is clearing, and Ukraine has already emerged as the epicenter of the damage. Kaspersky Labs reports that as many as 60 percent of the systems infected by the Petya ransomware were located within Ukraine, far more than anywhere else. The hack’s reach touched some of the country’s most crucial infrastructure including its central bank, airport, metro transport, and even the Chernobyl power plant, which was forced to move radiation-sensing systems to manual.

The ostensible purpose of all that damage was to make money — and yet there’s very little money to be found. Most ransomware flies under the radar, quietly collecting payouts from companies eager to get their data back and decrypting systems as payments come in. But Petya seems to have been incapable of decrypting infected machines, and its payout method was bizarrely complex, hinging on a single email address that was shut down almost as soon as the malware made headlines. As of this morning, the Bitcoin wallet associated with the attack had received just $10,000, a relatively meager payout by ransomware standards.

“THERE’S NO FUCKING WAY THIS WAS CRIMINALS.”
It leads to an uncomfortable question: what if money wasn’t the point? What if the attackers just wanted to cause damage to Ukraine? It’s not the first time the country has come under cyberattack. (These attacks have typically been attributed to Russia.) But it would be the first time such an attack has come in the guise of ransomware, and has spilled over so heavily onto other countries and corporations.

Because the virus has proven unusually destructive in Ukraine, a number of researchers have come to suspect more sinister motives at work. Peeling apart the program’s decryption failure in a post today, Comae’s Matthieu Suiche concluded a nation state attack was the only plausible explanation. “Pretending to be a ransomware while being in fact a nation state attack,” Suiche wrote, “ is in our opinion a very subtle way from the attacker to control the narrative of the attack.”

Another prominent infosec figure put it more bluntly: “There’s no fucking way this was criminals.”

There’s already mounting evidence that Petya’s focus on Ukraine was deliberate. The Petya virus is very good at moving within networks, but initial attacks were limited to just a few specific infections, all of which seem to have been targeted at Ukraine. The highest-profile one was a Ukrainian accounting program called MeDoc, which sent out a suspicious software update Tuesday morning that many researchers blame for the initial Petya infections. Attackers also planted malware on the homepage of a prominent Ukraine-based news outlet, according to one researcher at Kaspersky.

THE INFECTIONS SEEM TO TARGET UKRAINE’S MOST VITAL INSTITUTIONS
In each case, the infections seem to specifically target Ukraine’s most vital institutions, rather than making a broader attempt to find lucrative ransomware targets. These initial infections are particularly telling because they were directly chosen by whoever set the malware in motion. Computer viruses often spread farther than their creators intended, but once Petya was on the loose, the attackers would have had no control over how far it reached. But the attackers had complete control over where they planted Petya initially, and they chose to plant it by some of the most central institutions in Ukraine.

The broader political context makes Russia a viable suspect. Russia has been engaged in active military interventions in Ukraine since former president Viktor Yanukovych was removed from power in 2014. That has included the annexation of Crimea and the active movement of troops and equipment in the eastern region of the country, but also a number of more subtle activities. Ukraine’s power grid came under cyberattack in December 2015, an attack many interpreted as part of a hybrid attack by Russia against the country’s infrastructure. That hybrid-warfare theory extends to more conventional guerrilla attacks: the same day that Petya ripped through online infrastructure, Ukrainian colonel Maksim Shapoval was killed by a car bomb attack in Kiev.

“I THINK ULTIMATELY IT’S ABOUT MONEY.”
All that evidence is still circumstantial, and there’s no hard link between yesterday’s attacks and any nation state. It could be Ukraine simply presented a soft target, and the attackers screwed up their payment and decryption systems out of simple carelessness. Functional or not, the software involved still has strong ties to traditional ransomware systems, and even if the attackers didn’t make much money off ransom payments, Petya was still collecting credentials and other data from infected machines, which could be valuable fodder for future attacks. That has led researchers like F-Secure’s Sean Sullivan to hold off on nation-state suspicions. “Maybe there’s multiple ways they’re working the money angle, but I think ultimately it’s about money,” Sullivan told me. “Tigers don’t change their stripes.”

Still, the line between common criminals and state agents can be difficult to parse. A recent indictment in the Yahoo hacking case charged Russian officials alongside freelance hackers, and the division of labor was often unclear. Criminals can be enlisted as privateers, or agents can adopt criminal tactics as a way of disguising themselves. If the suspicions around Petya are correct, that line may be growing even thinner, as globe-spanning attacks get lost in the fog of war. With no clear path to a firm attribution, we may never be able to prove who was responsible for this week’s attacks, or what they hoped to achieve. For anyone digging out a Petya-bricked computer system, that clean getaway is adding insult to injury.The haze of yesterday’s massive ransomware attack is clearing, and Ukraine has already emerged as the epicenter of the damage. Kaspersky Labs reports that as many as 60 percent of the systems infected by the Petya ransomware were located within Ukraine, far more than anywhere else. The hack’s reach touched some of the country’s most crucial infrastructure including its central bank, airport, metro transport, and even the Chernobyl power plant, which was forced to move radiation-sensing systems to manual.

The ostensible purpose of all that damage was to make money — and yet there’s very little money to be found. Most ransomware flies under the radar, quietly collecting payouts from companies eager to get their data back and decrypting systems as payments come in. But Petya seems to have been incapable of decrypting infected machines, and its payout method was bizarrely complex, hinging on a single email address that was shut down almost as soon as the malware made headlines. As of this morning, the Bitcoin wallet associated with the attack had received just $10,000, a relatively meager payout by ransomware standards.

“THERE’S NO FUCKING WAY THIS WAS CRIMINALS.”
It leads to an uncomfortable question: what if money wasn’t the point? What if the attackers just wanted to cause damage to Ukraine? It’s not the first time the country has come under cyberattack. (These attacks have typically been attributed to Russia.) But it would be the first time such an attack has come in the guise of ransomware, and has spilled over so heavily onto other countries and corporations.

Because the virus has proven unusually destructive in Ukraine, a number of researchers have come to suspect more sinister motives at work. Peeling apart the program’s decryption failure in a post today, Comae’s Matthieu Suiche concluded a nation state attack was the only plausible explanation. “Pretending to be a ransomware while being in fact a nation state attack,” Suiche wrote, “ is in our opinion a very subtle way from the attacker to control the narrative of the attack.”

Another prominent infosec figure put it more bluntly: “There’s no fucking way this was criminals.”

There’s already mounting evidence that Petya’s focus on Ukraine was deliberate. The Petya virus is very good at moving within networks, but initial attacks were limited to just a few specific infections, all of which seem to have been targeted at Ukraine. The highest-profile one was a Ukrainian accounting program called MeDoc, which sent out a suspicious software update Tuesday morning that many researchers blame for the initial Petya infections. Attackers also planted malware on the homepage of a prominent Ukraine-based news outlet, according to one researcher at Kaspersky.

THE INFECTIONS SEEM TO TARGET UKRAINE’S MOST VITAL INSTITUTIONS
In each case, the infections seem to specifically target Ukraine’s most vital institutions, rather than making a broader attempt to find lucrative ransomware targets. These initial infections are particularly telling because they were directly chosen by whoever set the malware in motion. Computer viruses often spread farther than their creators intended, but once Petya was on the loose, the attackers would have had no control over how far it reached. But the attackers had complete control over where they planted Petya initially, and they chose to plant it by some of the most central institutions in Ukraine.

The broader political context makes Russia a viable suspect. Russia has been engaged in active military interventions in Ukraine since former president Viktor Yanukovych was removed from power in 2014. That has included the annexation of Crimea and the active movement of troops and equipment in the eastern region of the country, but also a number of more subtle activities. Ukraine’s power grid came under cyberattack in December 2015, an attack many interpreted as part of a hybrid attack by Russia against the country’s infrastructure. That hybrid-warfare theory extends to more conventional guerrilla attacks: the same day that Petya ripped through online infrastructure, Ukrainian colonel Maksim Shapoval was killed by a car bomb attack in Kiev.

“I THINK ULTIMATELY IT’S ABOUT MONEY.”
All that evidence is still circumstantial, and there’s no hard link between yesterday’s attacks and any nation state. It could be Ukraine simply presented a soft target, and the attackers screwed up their payment and decryption systems out of simple carelessness. Functional or not, the software involved still has strong ties to traditional ransomware systems, and even if the attackers didn’t make much money off ransom payments, Petya was still collecting credentials and other data from infected machines, which could be valuable fodder for future attacks. That has led researchers like F-Secure’s Sean Sullivan to hold off on nation-state suspicions. “Maybe there’s multiple ways they’re working the money angle, but I think ultimately it’s about money,” Sullivan told me. “Tigers don’t change their stripes.”

Still, the line between common criminals and state agents can be difficult to parse. A recent indictment in the Yahoo hacking case charged Russian officials alongside freelance hackers, and the division of labor was often unclear. Criminals can be enlisted as privateers, or agents can adopt criminal tactics as a way of disguising themselves. If the suspicions around Petya are correct, that line may be growing even thinner, as globe-spanning attacks get lost in the fog of war. With no clear path to a firm attribution, we may never be able to prove who was responsible for this week’s attacks, or what they hoped to achieve. For anyone digging out a Petya-bricked computer system, that clean getaway is adding insult to injury.

Read More >>

Cyberattack Hits Ukraine Then Spreads Internationally

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 28 Jun 2017 01:44:00 +0000

Several companies have been affected by the Petya cyberattack, including, from left, Rosneft, the Russian energy giant; Merck, a pharmaceutical company; and Maersk, a shipping company. Credit Left, Sergei Karpukhin/Reuters; center, Matt Rourke/Associated Press; right, Enrique Castro Sanchez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Computer systems from Ukraine to the United States were struck on Tuesday in an international cyberattack that was like a recent assault that crippled tens of thousands of machines worldwide.

In Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, A.T.M.s stopped working. About 80 miles away, workers were forced to manually monitor radiation at the old Chernobyl nuclear plant when their computers failed. And tech managers at companies around the world, from Maersk, the Danish shipping conglomerate, to Merck, the drug giant in the United States, were scrambling to respond.

It was unclear who was behind this cyberattack, and the extent of its impact was still hard to gauge Tuesday. It started as an attack on Ukrainian government and business computer systems — an assault that appeared to have been intended to hit the day before a holiday marking the adoption in 1996 of Ukraine’s first Constitution after breaking away from the Soviet Union. It spread from there, causing collateral damage around the world.

This outbreak is the latest and perhaps the most sophisticated in a series of attacks that make use of dozens of hacking tools that were stolen from the National Security Agency and leaked online in April by a group called the Shadow Brokers.

Like the WannaCry attacks in May, the latest global hacking took control of computers and demanded digital ransom from their owners to regain access. The new attack used the same N.S.A. hacking tool, Eternal Blue, that was used in the WannaCry incident, and two other methods to promote its spread, according to researchers at the computer security company Symantec.

The N.S.A. has not acknowledged its tools were used in WannaCry or other attacks. But computer security specialists are demanding that the agency help the rest of the world defend against the weapons it created.

”The N.S.A. needs to take a leadership role in working closely with security and operating system platform vendors such as Apple and Microsoft to address the plague that they’ve unleashed,” said Golan Ben-Oni, the global chief information officer at IDT, a Newark-based conglomerate hit by a separate attack in April that used N.S.A. hacking tools. Mr. Ben-Oni warned federal officials that more serious attacks were probably on the horizon.

The vulnerability in Windows software used by Eternal Blue was patched by Microsoft in March, but as the WannaCry attacks demonstrated, hundreds of thousands of organizations around the world failed to properly install the fix.

“Just because you roll out a patch doesn’t mean it’ll be put in place quickly,” said Carl Herberger, vice president of security at Radware. “The more bureaucratic an organization is, the higher chance it won’t have updated its software.”

Because the ransomware used at least two other ways to spread on Tuesday, even those who used the Microsoft patch could be vulnerable, according to researchers at F-Secure, the Finnish cybersecurity firm.

A Microsoft spokesman said the company’s latest antivirus software should protect against the attack.

The Ukrainian government said several of its ministries, local banks and metro systems had been affected. A number of other European companies, including Rosneft, the Russian energy giant; Saint-Gobain, the French construction materials company; and WPP, the British advertising agency, also said they had been targeted.

Ukrainian officials pointed a finger at Russia on Tuesday, though Russian companies were also affected. Home Credit bank, one of Russia’s top 50 lenders, was paralyzed, with all of its offices closed, according to the RBC news website. The attack also affected Evraz, a steel manufacturing and mining company that employs about 80,000 people, the RBC website reported.

In the United States, DLA Piper, the multinational law firm, also reported being hit. Hospitals in Pennsylvania were being forced to cancel surgeries after the attack hit computers at Heritage Valley Health Systems, a Pennsylvania health care provider, and its hospitals in Beaver and Sewickley, Penn., and satellite locations across the state.

A spokesman for the N.S.A. referred questions about the attack to the Department of Homeland Security. “The Department of Homeland Security is monitoring reports of cyber attacks affecting multiple global entities and is coordinating with our international and domestic cyber partners,” Scott McConnell, spokesman for D.H.S., said in a statement.

Computer specialists said the ransomware was very similar to a virus that first emerged last year called Petya. Petya means “Little Peter,” in Russian, leading some to speculate the name referred to Sergei Prokofiev’s 1936 symphony “Peter and the Wolf,” about a boy who captures a wolf.

Reports that the computer virus was a variant of Petya suggest the attackers will be hard to trace. Petya was for sale on the so-called dark web, where its creators made the ransomware available as “ransomware as a service” — a play on Silicon Valley terminology for delivering software over the internet, according to the security firm Avast Threat Labs.

That means anyone could launch the ransomware with the click of a button, encrypt someone’s systems and demand a ransom to unlock it. If the victim pays, the authors of the Petya ransomware, who call themselves Janus Cybercrime Solutions, get a cut of the payment.

That distribution method means that pinning down the people responsible for Tuesday’s attack could be difficult.

The attack is “an improved and more lethal version of WannaCry,” according to Matthieu Suiche, a security researcher who helped contain the spread of the WannaCry ransomware when he created a kill switch that stopped the attacks.

In just the last seven days, Mr. Suiche noted that WannaCry had tried to hit an additional 80,000 organizations, but was prevented from executing attack code because of the kill switch. Petya does not have a kill switch.


	A screenshot of what appeared to be the ransomware affecting systems worldwide on Tuesday. The Ukrainian government posted the shot to its official Facebook page.	Petya also encrypts and locks entire hard drives, while the earlier ransomware attacks locked only individual files, said Chris Hinkley, a researcher at Armor, the security firm.

The hackers behind Petya demanded $300 worth of the cybercurrency Bitcoin to unlock victims’ machines. By Tuesday afternoon, online records showed that 30 victims had paid the ransom, though it was not clear whether they regained access to their files. Other victims may be out of luck, after Posteo, the German email service provider, shut down the hackers’ email account.

In Ukraine, people turned up at post offices, A.T.M.s and airports to find blank computer screens, or signs about closures. At Kiev’s central post office, a few bewildered customers milled about, holding parcels and letters, looking at a sign that said, “closed for technical reasons.”

The hackers compromised Ukrainian accounting software mandated to be used in various industries in the country, including government agencies and banks, according to researchers at Cisco Talos, the security division of the computer networking company. That allowed them to unleash their ransomware when the software, which is also used in other countries, was updated.

The ransomware spread for five days across Ukraine, and around the world, before activating Tuesday evening.

“If I had to guess, I would think this was done to send a political message,” said Craig Williams, the senior technical researcher at Talos.

One Kiev resident, Tetiana Vasylieva, was forced to borrow money from a relative after failing to withdraw money at four automated teller machines. At one A.T.M. in Kiev belonging to the Ukrainian branch of the Austrian bank Raiffeisen, a message on the screen said the machine was not functioning.

Ukraine’s Infrastructure Ministry, the postal service, the national railway company, and one of the country’s largest communications companies, Ukrtelecom, had been affected, Volodymyr Omelyan, the country’s infrastructure minister, said in a Facebook post.

Officials for the metro system in Kiev said card payments could not be accepted. The national power grid company Kievenergo had to switch off all of its computers, but the situation was under control, according to the Interfax-Ukraine news agency. Metro Group, a German company that runs wholesale food stores, said its operations in Ukraine had been affected.

At the Chernobyl plant, the computers affected by the attack collected data on radiation levels and were not connected to industrial systems at the site, where, though all reactors have been decommissioned, huge volumes of radioactive waste remain. Operators said radiation monitoring was being done manually.

Cybersecurity researchers questioned whether collecting ransom was the true objective of the attack.

“It’s entirely possible that this attack could have been a smoke screen,” said Justin Harvey, the chief security officer for the Fidelis cybersecurity company. “If you are an evil doer and you wanted to cause mayhem, why wouldn’t you try to first mask it as something else?”

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Global Cyberattack: What We Know and Don’t Know

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 28 Jun 2017 01:05:00 +0000

A screenshot of what appeared to be the ransomware affecting systems worldwide on Tuesday. The Ukrainian government posted the shot to its official Facebook page.

A quickly spreading ransomware attack is hitting countries across the world including France, Russia, Spain, Ukraine and the United States, just weeks after a ransomware attack known as WannaCry.

What We Know

• Several private companies have confirmed that they were hit by the attack, including the American pharmaceutical giant Merck, the Danish shipping company AP Moller-Maersk, the British advertising firm WPP, the French multinational Saint-Gobain and the Russian steel, mining and oil companies Evraz and Rosneft.

• Photographs and videos of computers affected by the attack show a message of red text on a black screen. The message read: “Oops, your important files have been encrypted. If you see this text then your files are no longer accessible because they have been encrypted. Perhaps you are busy looking to recover your files but don’t waste your time.”

• Kaspersky Lab, a cybersecurity firm based in Moscow, reported that about 2,000 computer systems had been affected by the new ransomware.

• Cybersecurity researchers first called the new ransomware attack Petya, as it bore similarities to a ransomware strain known by that name, which was first reported by Kasperksy in March 2016. But Kaspersky later said that its investigation into the new attack found that it was a type of ransomware that had never been seen before.

• ESET, a Slovakia-based cybersecurity company, said the first known infection occurred early on June 27, through a Ukrainian software company called MeDoc. MeDoc denied that its program was the initial infection point. In a Facebook post, the firm wrote, “At the time of updating the program, the system could not be infected with the virus directly from the update file,” though an earlier message confirmed that its systems had been compromised.

• Symantec, a Silicon Valley cybersecurity firm, confirmed that the ransomware was infecting computers through at least one exploit, or vulnerability to computer systems, known as Eternal Blue.

• Eternal Blue was leaked online last April by a mysterious group of hackers known as the Shadow Brokers, who have previously released hacking tools used by the National Security Agency. That vulnerability was used in May to spread the WannaCry ransomware, which affected hundreds of thousands of computers in more than 150 countries.

• ESET and several other cybersecurity companies have identified at least one other exploit used in the attack known as PsExec, which takes advantage of a single computer that has not been updated with the latest software in a network to spread infections by looking for — and using — administrative credentials. By using PsExec, the ransomware continued spreading across systems that had been updated, or patched, after the WannaCry outbreak last month.

• Several cybersecurity researchers have identified a Bitcoin address to which the attackers are demanding a payment of $300 from their victims. At least some of the victims appear to be paying the ransom, even though the email address used by the attackers has been shut down. That removes the possibility that the attackers could restore a victim’s access to their computer networks, even once ransom is paid.

What We Don’t Know

• Who is behind the ransomware attack. The original Petya ransomware was developed and used by cybercriminals, and variations have been sold through dark web trading sites, which are accessible only by using browsers that mask a user’s identity, making it difficult for cybersecurity researchers to track.

• The motives for the attack. Cybersecurity researchers ask why, if the goal of the attack was to force victims to pay ransom, more care was not taken to protect the email address through which attackers could communicate with their victims, or to provide multiple avenues for payment.

• How much bigger this attack will get. Cybersecurity researchers say that like WannaCry, the ransomware infects computers using vulnerabilities in the central nerve of a computer, called a kernel, making it difficult for antivirus firms to detect. It also has the ability to take advantage of a single unpatched computer on a network to infect computers across a vast network, meaning that even systems that were updated after WannaCry could potentially become vulnerable again.

What Is Ransomware?

• Ransomware is one of the most popular forms of online attack today. It typically begins with attackers sending their victims email that includes a link or a file that appears innocuous but contains dangerous malware.

• Once a victim clicks on the link or opens the attachment, the computer becomes infected. The program encrypts the computer, essentially locking the user out of files, folders and drives on that computer. In some cases, the entire network the computer is connected to can become infected.

• The victim then receives a message demanding payment in exchange for attackers unlocking the system. The payment is usually requested in Bitcoin, a form of digital currency.

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Tumblr Goes Radio Silent On Net Neutrality After Verizon Acquisition

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 25 Jun 2017 17:45:00 +0000

Back when Verizon first began expressing interest in pivoting from broadband duopolist to media and advertising, you might recall that it launched a short-lived technology blog named Sugarstring. Sugarstring quickly made headlines for all the wrong reasons however, after it was revealed that Verizon was banning any new hires from writing about hot-button subjects like net neutrality, or the fact that companies like Verizon and AT&T are now bone-grafted to the nation's intelligence and surveillance apparatus.

Sugarstring is long-since dead, replaced in large part by Verizon's acquisitions of Yahoo and AOL, which also brought Huffpo, Engadget, and Techcrunch under the Verizon umbrella. And while Verizon itself has been busy using fake reporters to blatantly lie about the company's ongoing role in killing net neutrality, there's no indication (yet) that the company has pressured any of its own news outlets to quiet down on the subject. In fact, we've noted previously that some of the best reporting on net neutrality in recent months has originated at TechCrunch (this piece in particular is worth a read).
But while Verizon hasn't yet tried to get its own news outlets to quiet down on net neutrality, other now-Verizon-owned companies that used to be very active on the subject have gone dead quiet. Case in point: Tumblr, which was an integral ally in the SOPA/PIPA fight and an outspoken protector of net neutrality, is now utterly radio silent as FCC boss Ajit Pai attempts to kill the popular consumer protections. Insiders at the company this week expressed their concern to the Verge that Verizon is pressuring CEO David Karp to keep his mouth shut on the subject:

"Now, multiple sources tell The Verge that employees are concerned that Karp has been discouraged from speaking publicly on the issue, and one engineer conveyed that Karp told a group of engineers and engineering directors as much in a weekly meeting that took place shortly after SXSW. “Karp has talked about the net neutrality stuff internally, but won’t commit to supporting it externally anymore,” the engineer said. “[He] assures [us] that he is gonna keep trying to fight for the ability to fight for it publicly.” Karp did not respond to four emails asking for comment, and neither Yahoo nor Tumblr would speak about the matter on the record."

Granted Karp may just have toned down the company's rhetoric voluntarily to avoid ruffling feathers during the transition. And obviously any time a smaller company gets acquired by a larger conglomerate (especially from the historically droll and stodgy telecom sector) you'll see a major culture shift that often isn't for the better. Still, Verizon's positions on subjects like net neutrality are so hostile, Tumblr employees have grown increasingly uneasy in recent weeks, which could lead to an exodus of talent at the company:

“Some of our previous stances on issues that are really important to Tumblr employees and its community are being silenced,” said the former employee. “We've been really noisy about things like net neutrality in the past. We asked the new Head, Simon Khalaf, about it in an all-hands a few weeks ago and he said it was ‘not his problem’ and ‘above his pay grade.’” A current employee and another former employee corroborated this account."
It's unfortunate to have lost Tumblr's voice in the net neutrality fight, especially given that other industry giants like Google and Netflix have similarly gone mute on the subject, leaving consumers and small businesses increasingly alone in fighting for something vaguely resembling an open and healthy internet. And while you'd like to think Verizon is above trampling the editorial independence of former AOL and Yahoo news outlets, Verizon's Sugarstring experiment should make it pretty clear that ham-fisted attempts at censorship aren't exactly out of character for the telco.

For now, however, Verizon appears content to try and use entirely fake journalists like "Jeremy" to spread misinformation on net neutrality, as evident by this recent, comically misleading video by the company:

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Net Neutrality Is Dying. Speak Out Now Before It's Too Late

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 25 Jun 2017 14:31:00 +0000

“Come on! The internet is an incredible place!” said comedian and political commentator John Oliver, “And tonight, we need to talk about an issue that is impacting it.” He was just one of the many advocates of a free and open internet who were using the public forum to spread awareness on the threats that the internet is about to face. On May 18, 2017, the current Federal Communications Commission (FCC) led by Chairman Ajit Pai voted 2-1 on a motion to repeal rules and regulations put in place by his predecessor to ensure a free and open internet for all.

The motion, if sustained during a second vote held after the FCC is fully staffed later this year, would mean the repelation of the so-called net neutrality regulations that were put into place by retired FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler to ensure that internet service providers like Comcast, AT&T and Verizon cannot discriminate against various types of internet traffic in a way that suits their businesses. This would give popular broadband companies and internet service providers greater monopoly in their services, allowing them to regulate and alter the people’s access to the internet in a way that suits their needs.

The question of net neutrality is a rather big one, and significantly more important than being able to decide what streaming service you want to use or what search engine you wish to access, though that alone should be incentive enough to speak up. If the proposal put forward by FCC Chairman Ajit Pai falls into place, it would allow internet service providers to block, throttle and fast-lane various parts of the internet at will, potentially regulating and censoring your entire web-surfing experience and forcing you to stick to the destinations that pay protection money to these cable and broadband companies. It would effectively lead to the monopolization of a free institution that since the 1980s has served as the freest and most democratic source of unbridled information.

It is only rarely that we get to see big corporations the likes of Google and Facebook take up the cause of ordinary citizens on a massive scale, but when we do, it is assured that the matter at hand is an important one. When it came to net neutrality, however, we saw our entire country, rich, poor, democrat, republican, independent and corporate, come together to support an idea that is necessary for the growth and prosperity of our data nation as a whole. That is because net neutrality is an idea that anyone can get behind, one that promotes free and equal access to information for every citizen of the country, and initiative that is not only desirable but also essential for the growth of our country and the entire world from an information perspective.

Thankfully for us, the fight isn’t over yet. A huge number of organizations, small and large, are coming together on July 12 to protest the current administration's blatant disregard of public opinion in their decision to break net neutrality, and it is the hope of these participants that, with the correct amount of attention, they can force the government to take notice regarding an issue that should clearly be independent and bipartisan, much like climate change and affordable healthcare.

If you or anyone you know considers themselves an informed citizen of the country and of the internet, one that is prepared to fight for its freedom and in turn, the freedom of the people, I request you to join now by signing up at this website to participate in the massive protest being held on July 12 to demonstrate our apartisan love for net neutrality and the principles that govern it. Remember, the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

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Netflix Joins Support of Net Neutrality

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 25 Jun 2017 12:28:00 +0000

July 12 will be a national day of action for net neutrality, and Netflix has finally announced it will be fully participating.

During the Obama years, Netflix was a major player on the front lines of the fight for ensuring net neutrality. As a streaming service, Netflix theoretically relies on net neutrality to ensure internet providers don’t slow down their streaming speed in order to elevate cable programs.

But Netflix hasn’t seemed to be as enthusiastic as of late, even as the FCC under Ajit Pai, a former cable lobbyist appointed by Trump, poses the most grave threat to net neutrality we’ve ever seen.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings recently said, “We think net neutrality is incredibly important, [but] not narrowly important to us because we’re big enough to get the deals we want.”

This raised concerns that Netflix had grown too big for it’s britches and that the fight for net neutrality had lost one of its most powerful forces.

But a few days ago, Netflix released another statement saying, “Netflix will never outgrow the fight for net neutrality. Everyone deserves an open Internet.” A Netflix spokesperson also added, “”We support strong net neutrality protections, even if we are at less risk because of our popularity. There are other companies for whom this is a bigger issue, and we’re joining this day of action to ensure the next Netflix has a fair shot to go the distance.”

Some have said that Netflix’s response was just a PR ploy and they’re just doing this to save face because of growing public pressure. That may be true, but ultimately it doesn’t matter. It’s great that there’s enough public zeal out there to put pressure on companies, and it’s great that Netflix has reaffirmed its position regardless of their motive.

Maybe Netflix really is big enough now to have sufficient negotiating power to take care of themselves when it comes to streaming speeds and dealing with ISPs. But the internet-based video streaming industry as a whole needs net neutrality and would be one of the hardest hit mediums if Pai and cable providers have their way.

Without net neutrality, cable providers can prioritize cable TV in ways that will attempt to deter people from using various online video streaming platforms. Imagine going to Youtube, Amazon or Netflix and seeing a message saying something along the lines of, “To access this site you must pay $5.99/month access fee to your internet provider. If you would like to be able to stream without buffering for 10 minutes or more, an additional $2 fee will be added for each video.”

It’s impossible to overstate the importance of the what’s going on with net neutrality right now. Regardless of what you think of Netflix, it’s a huge relief to have them, and all their lobbying resources, in the fight.

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Secret CIA assessment says Russia was trying to help Trump win White House

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 10 Dec 2016 06:59:00 +0000

The CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system, according to officials briefed on the matter.

Intelligence agencies have identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided WikiLeaks with thousands of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and others, including Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, according to U.S. officials. Those officials described the individuals as actors known to the intelligence community and part of a wider Russian operation to boost Trump and hurt Clinton’s chances.

“It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia’s goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected,” said a senior U.S. official briefed on an intelligence presentation made to U.S. senators. “That’s the consensus view.”

The Obama administration has been debating for months how to respond to the alleged Russian intrusions, with White House officials concerned about escalating tensions with Moscow and being accused of trying to boost Clinton’s campaign.

In September, during a secret briefing for congressional leaders, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) voiced doubts about the veracity of the intelligence, according to officials present.

The Trump transition team dismissed the findings in a short statement issued Friday evening. “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The election ended a long time ago in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history. It’s now time to move on and ‘Make America Great Again,’ ” the statement read.

Trump has consistently dismissed the intelligence community’s findings about Russian hacking.

“I don’t believe they interfered” in the election, he told Time magazine this week. The hacking, he said, “could be Russia. And it could be China. And it could be some guy in his home in New Jersey.”

The CIA shared its latest assessment with key senators in a closed-door briefing on Capitol Hill last week, in which agency officials cited a growing body of intelligence from multiple sources. Agency briefers told the senators it was now “quite clear” that electing Trump was Russia’s goal, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.

The CIA presentation to senators about Russia’s intentions fell short of a formal U.S. assessment produced by all 17 intelligence agencies. A senior U.S. official said there were minor disagreements among intelligence officials about the agency’s assessment, in part because some questions remain unanswered.

For example, intelligence agencies do not have specific intelligence showing officials in the Kremlin “directing” the identified individuals to pass the Democratic emails to WikiLeaks, a second senior U.S. official said. Those actors, according to the official, were “one step” removed from the Russian government, rather than government employees. Moscow has in the past used middlemen to participate in sensitive intelligence operations so it has plausible deniability.

Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has said in a television interview that the “Russian government is not the source.”

The White House and CIA officials declined to comment.

On Friday, the White House said President Obama had ordered a “full review” of Russian hacking during the election campaign, as pressure from Congress has grown for greater public understanding of exactly what Moscow did to influence the electoral process.

“We may have crossed into a new threshold, and it is incumbent upon us to take stock of that, to review, to conduct some after-action, to understand what has happened and to impart some lessons learned,” Obama’s counterterrorism and homeland security adviser, Lisa Monaco, told reporters at a breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor.

Obama wants the report before he leaves office Jan. 20, Monaco said. The review will be led by James Clapper, the outgoing director of national intelligence, officials said.

During her remarks, Monaco didn’t address the latest CIA assessment, which hasn’t been previously disclosed.

Seven Democratic senators last week asked Obama to declassify details about the intrusions and why officials believe that the Kremlin was behind the operation. Officials said Friday that the senators specifically were asking the White House to release portions of the CIA’s presentation.

This week, top Democratic lawmakers in the House also sent a letter to Obama, asking for briefings on Russian interference in the election.

U.S. intelligence agencies have been cautious for months in characterizing Russia’s motivations, reflecting the United States’ long-standing struggle to collect reliable intelligence on President Vladimir Putin and those closest to him.

In previous assessments, the CIA and other intelligence agencies told the White House and congressional leaders that they believed Moscow’s aim was to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system. The assessments stopped short of saying the goal was to help elect Trump.

On Oct. 7, the intelligence community officially accused Moscow of seeking to interfere in the election through the hacking of “political organizations.” Though the statement never specified which party, it was clear that officials were referring to cyber-intrusions into the computers of the DNC and other Democratic groups and individuals.

Some key Republican lawmakers have continued to question the quality of evidence supporting Russian involvement.

“I’ll be the first one to come out and point at Russia if there’s clear evidence, but there is no clear evidence — even now,” said Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and a member of the Trump transition team. “There’s a lot of innuendo, lots of circumstantial evidence, that’s it.”

[U.S. investigating potential covert Russian plan to disrupt elections]

Though Russia has long conducted cyberspying on U.S. agencies, companies and organizations, this presidential campaign marks the first time Moscow has attempted through cyber-means to interfere in, if not actively influence, the outcome of an election, the officials said.

The reluctance of the Obama White House to respond to the alleged Russian intrusions before Election Day upset Democrats on the Hill as well as members of the Clinton campaign.

Within the administration, top officials from different agencies sparred over whether and how to respond. White House officials were concerned that covert retaliatory measures might risk an escalation in which Russia, with sophisticated cyber-capabilities, might have less to lose than the United States, with its vast and vulnerable digital infrastructure.

The White House’s reluctance to take that risk left Washington weighing more-limited measures, including the “naming and shaming” approach of publicly blaming Moscow.

By mid-September, White House officials had decided it was time to take that step, but they worried that doing so unilaterally and without bipartisan congressional backing just weeks before the election would make Obama vulnerable to charges that he was using intelligence for political purposes.

Instead, officials devised a plan to seek bipartisan support from top lawmakers and set up a secret meeting with the Gang of 12 — a group that includes House and Senate leaders, as well as the chairmen and ranking members of both chambers’ committees on intelligence and homeland security.

Obama dispatched Monaco, FBI Director James B. Comey and Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson to make the pitch for a “show of solidarity and bipartisan unity” against Russian interference in the election, according to a senior administration official.

Specifically, the White House wanted congressional leaders to sign off on a bipartisan statement urging state and local officials to take federal help in protecting their voting-registration and balloting machines from Russian cyber-intrusions.

Though U.S. intelligence agencies were skeptical that hackers would be able to manipulate the election results in a systematic way, the White House feared that Russia would attempt to do so, sowing doubt about the fundamental mechanisms of democracy and potentially forcing a more dangerous confrontation between Washington and Moscow.

[Putin denies that Russia hacked the DNC but says it was for the public good]

In a secure room in the Capitol used for briefings involving classified information, administration officials broadly laid out the evidence U.S. spy agencies had collected, showing Russia’s role in cyber-intrusions in at least two states and in hacking the emails of the Democratic organizations and individuals.

And they made a case for a united, bipartisan front in response to what one official described as “the threat posed by unprecedented meddling by a foreign power in our election process.”

The Democratic leaders in the room unanimously agreed on the need to take the threat seriously. Republicans, however, were divided, with at least two GOP lawmakers reluctant to accede to the White House requests.

According to several officials, McConnell raised doubts about the underlying intelligence and made clear to the administration that he would consider any effort by the White House to challenge the Russians publicly an act of partisan politics.

Some of the Republicans in the briefing also seemed opposed to the idea of going public with such explosive allegations in the final stages of an election, a move that they argued would only rattle public confidence and play into Moscow’s hands.

McConnell’s office did not respond to a request for comment. After the election, Trump chose McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, as his nominee for transportation secretary.

Some Clinton supporters saw the White House’s reluctance to act without bipartisan support as further evidence of an excessive caution in facing adversaries.

“The lack of an administration response on the Russian hacking cannot be attributed to Congress,” said Rep. Adam B. Schiff (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, who was at the September meeting. “The administration has all the tools it needs to respond. They have the ability to impose sanctions. They have the ability to take clandestine means. The administration has decided not to utilize them in a way that would deter the Russians, and I think that’s a problem.”

Read More >>

7.3-magnitude earthquake strikes off Japan

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 21 Nov 2016 23:29:00 +0000

A tsunami warning is in effect for Japan's Fukushima Prefecture after a 7.3-magnitude earthquake struck off Honshu at 5:59 a.m. Tuesday (3:59 p.m. Monday ET), according to the Japan Meteorological Agency.

A tsunami wave of 1-3 meters (3-10 feet) is possible, according to the agency. The US Geological Survey put the magnitude at 6.9, striking 37 kilometers (23 miles) east-southeast of Namie off the country's east coast at a depth of 11.4 kilometers (7 miles).

Two aftershocks were reported by USGS, one 5.4 and one 4.8.

Several tsunami waves have been spotted off the coast of Fukushima Prefecture, CNN affiliate NHK reported. One was spotted 22 kilometers off the coast of Iwaki City; a 90-centimeter wave was reported at Port of Soma; a 60-centimeter wave was reported at Port of Onahama.

Video on social media from Onahama featured sounds of sirens in response to the warning in effect. Images of the port showed waves that the broadcaster described as "backwash" that happens before a tsunami hits shore.

NHK urged the public to evacuate, cautioning that even if waves appear low in the ocean they can rise as they reach shore. The broadcaster reminded people to dress warmly in the cold rain and urged them to help others leave.

"Please do not think that you are safe. Please evacuate to high grounds," the network said. "Please think about the worst-case scenario and evacuate right away."

Earthquakes are common in Japan. The most recent was a 6.2 magnitude in late October near Kurayoshi, a city to the west of Osaka, which caused a handful of injuries.

The epicenter of this latest earthquake was not far south of the 2011 quake that caused a devastating tsunami, damaged nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant and killed more than 15,000 people. The devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan will rank among the costliest natural disasters on record.

The 2011 quake moved Japan's coast 8 feet and shifted the Earth's axis, ranking among the costliest natural disasters on record.

Tokyo Electric Power Company Inc. said there had been no abnormalities or change in radiation levels at Fukushima Daiichi. Authorities are working to confirm reports that the reactor's cooling system stopped, NHK reported.

There is no tsunami threat to Hawaii as a result of the quake, the Honolulu Department of Emergency Management said.

Developing story - more to come

CNN's Radina Gigova and Taylor Ward contributed to this report.

How smart home devices are being hijacked to attack Internet

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 24 Oct 2016 01:10:00 +0000

The huge cyberattack that crippled the Internet and disabled dozens of websites Friday appeared to be the biggest attack of its kind that the world has ever seen.

But it may not hold that title for for long.

What made last week’s Internet takedown so effective — and, some would say, sinister — was how the attackers weaponized everyday devices like security cameras, digital video recorders and baby monitors.
By exploiting the devices’ Web connections, hackers could infect them with malicious software and use them to paralyze huge portions of the Internet with a barrage of junk data in what is known as a distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attack.
For many, the breach was a stark demonstration of just how insecure the Internet remains. To some, it also felt like a call to action.
At a time when everything from televisions to refrigerators to kids’ toys are being equipped with an Internet connection, experts and legislators said, something ought to be done to ensure the security of these devices.

Yet there is little consensus around who should bear that responsibility.

“There aren’t just one or two types (of Internet of Things devices), there are tens of millions,” said Jeremiah Grossman, SentinelOne’s chief of security strategy. “So what we can expect going forward is a lot more of the same. ... Look out election day. Look out Cyber Monday.”

The Internet of Things encompasses a wide array of electronics: smart washing machines that will text you when your clothes are done, refrigerators that can order more groceries, wearable tech that can monitor your biorhythms, and talking toys that respond to words uttered by children.

Every year, more and more appliances are being made that connect to the Internet. Securing them is often an afterthought, experts said.

Many consumers, for instance, don’t see the danger in leaving a default password on a smart microwave, said Brian White, the chief operating officer for security firm RedOwl Analytics.

This is the attitude hackers bank on. If they can crack into a device using an easy-to-guess password, they can turn an everyday DVR into a zombie device enslaved to malicious software that can be used in attacks such as Friday’s assault.

“We are putting an enormous amount of compute capability in the average home, and it is very difficult for the average consumer to ensure their home is securely networked and their devices are updated,” White said.

Companies have long been held accountable for securing their own websites — banks, for instance, have security systems in place. But Internet of Things manufacturers are not required to guarantee a base level of security in the devices they create.

And when the priority is making the most inexpensive device possible, Grossman said, makers often skimp on things like security features.

Information security people “have been screaming bloody murder about this for years,” Grossman said. “Everything from cameras to toasters, refrigerators, microwaves. And because there’s no regulation, the manufacturers don’t need to make sure these devices ship with any security whatsoever.”

No single government agency oversees the devices or practices of the Internet of Things, though several have limited authority over parts of it.

Since Friday’s Internet blitz, some legislators have begun calling for greater government intervention.

“Not only does this kind of attack limit access to important information, delay financial transactions, and disrupt our nation’s commerce flows, but it also points to significant vulnerabilities in our national security,” Rep. Jerry McNerney, D-Stockton, said in a statement Saturday.

Friday’s attack targeted Dyn, an Internet infrastructure firm that, among other things, provides domain name services and online traffic management to hundreds of companies, including Amazon, CNN, GitHub, Twitter, Netflix, PayPal, Reddit, Zendesk and the New York Times, among many others.

In a DDoS attack, hackers typically deploy a botnet, or a network of compromised computers, to send phony traffic to a specific site or server with the intent of overwhelming it so it cannot respond to queries from real people.

What made the attack different was that it used a botnet seen only once before — last month in a record-size attack against cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs’ website. The botnet, known as Mirai, used infected cameras spread across the world to send waves of traffic at Dyn’s DNS system at unprecedented rates.

Mirai continually scans the Internet for devices and then attempts to gain access to them by using a known default password or exploiting a weakness in outdated software.

Kyle York, Dyn’s chief strategy officer, said in a statement Saturday that the company was able to mitigate the first two waves in a matter of hours and fended off a third without customers seeing an impact.

But Dyn’s attackers may not have been using the full brunt of Mirai’s force.

Level 3 Communications, an Internet service provider based in Colorado, began monitoring the Mirai assault in the midst of its attack on Dyn. Level 3 reported that only about 10 percent of devices compromised by Mirai were deployed in Friday’s attack.

“There needs to be a much greater awareness among the public, among manufacturers,” White said. “This may have been a wake-up moment, but as with most things in the cyber realm, it may take a few more times for it to sink in.”

It has not yet been determined who was behind Friday’s attack, which came at Dyn in several waves beginning about 4 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time. But because the code behind Mirai was leaked after the attack on Krebs, it could have been anyone.

“Mirai is a DDoS-for-rent environment,” Dale Drew, Level 3 Communications’ chief Internet security officer, said in a video posted on Periscope. Hackers charge others for access to compromised machines, making it hard to determine the actual force behind a given attack.

The Department of Homeland Security and the FBI continue to investigate Friday’s cyberattack, though they have not yet identified a party responsible.

Activist hacker groups Anonymous and New World Hackers said they were responsible for the cyberassault on Dyn late Friday, telling several news organizations that it was an act of solidarity and retaliation over the Ecuadoran government’s decision to cut off WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s Internet connection.

“Twitter was kind of the main target. It showed people who doubted us what we were capable of doing, plus we got the chance to see our capability,” a New World Hacker member who identified himself as “Prophet” told the Associated Press on Saturday via a Twitter message.

The hacker said the group’s next target would be the Russian government in response to the cyberattacks Russia has allegedly launched against the U.S. this year.

But security experts and U.S. officials said they had their doubts about the group’s boasts.

No evidence over the weekend could link either group to the Dyn attacks, and both have taken credit for high-profile attacks in the past when they, in fact, were not involved.

“If they were just trying to prove a point, they would have done it briefly, rather than kept a series of sustained attacks going a number of times throughout the day,” Grossman said. “I mean, it’s possible. But it’s not plausible.”

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Hackers Used New Weapons to Disrupt Major Websites Across U.S.

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 22 Oct 2016 11:18:00 +0000

SAN FRANCISCO — Major websites were inaccessible to people across wide swaths of the United States on Friday after a company that manages crucial parts of the internet’s infrastructure said it was under attack.

Users reported sporadic problems reaching several websites, including Twitter, Netflix, Spotify, Airbnb, Reddit, Etsy, SoundCloud and The New York Times.

The company, Dyn, whose servers monitor and reroute internet traffic, said it began experiencing what security experts called a distributed denial-of-service attack just after 7 a.m. Reports that many sites were inaccessible started on the East Coast, but spread westward in three waves as the day wore on and into the evening.

And in a troubling development, the attack appears to have relied on hundreds of thousands of internet-connected devices like cameras, baby monitors and home routers that have been infected — without their owners’ knowledge — with software that allows hackers to command them to flood a target with overwhelming traffic.

A spokeswoman said the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security were looking into the incident and all potential causes, including criminal activity and a nation-state attack.

Kyle York, Dyn’s chief strategist, said his company and others that host the core parts of the internet’s infrastructure were targets for a growing number of more powerful attacks.

“The number and types of attacks, the duration of attacks and the complexity of these attacks are all on the rise,” Mr. York said.

Security researchers have long warned that the increasing number of devices being hooked up to the internet, the so-called Internet of Things, would present an enormous security issue. And the assault on Friday, security researchers say, is only a glimpse of how those devices can be used for online attacks.

Dyn, based in Manchester, N.H., said it had fended off the assault by 9:30 a.m. But by 11:52 a.m., Dyn said it was again under attack. After fending off the second wave of attacks, Dyn said at 5 p.m. that it was again facing a flood of traffic.

A distributed denial-of-service attack, or DDoS, occurs when hackers flood the servers that run a target’s site with internet traffic until it stumbles or collapses under the load. Such attacks are common, but there is evidence that they are becoming more powerful, more sophisticated and increasingly aimed at core internet infrastructure providers.

Going after companies like Dyn can cause far more damage than aiming at a single website.

Dyn is one of many outfits that host the Domain Name System, or DNS, which functions as a switchboard for the internet. The DNS translates user-friendly web addresses like fbi.gov into numerical addresses that allow computers to speak to one another. Without the DNS servers operated by internet service providers, the internet could not operate.

In this case, the attack was aimed at the Dyn infrastructure that supports internet connections. While the attack did not affect the websites themselves, it blocked or slowed users trying to gain access to those sites.

Mr. York, the Dyn strategist, said in an interview during a lull in the attacks that the assaults on its servers were complex.

“This was not your everyday DDoS attack,” Mr. York said. “The nature and source of the attack is still under investigation.”

Later in the day, Dave Allen, the general counsel at Dyn, said tens of millions of internet addresses, or so-called I.P. addresses, were being used to send a fire hose of internet traffic at the company’s servers. He confirmed that a large portion of that traffic was coming from internet-connected devices that had been co-opted by type of malware, called Mirai.

Dale Drew, chief security officer at Level 3, an internet service provider, found evidence that roughly 10 percent of all devices co-opted by Mirai were being used to attack Dyn’s servers. Just one week ago, Level 3 found that 493,000 devices had been infected with Mirai malware, nearly double the number infected last month.

Mr. Allen added that Dyn was collaborating with law enforcement and other internet service providers to deal with the attacks.

In a recent report, Verisign, a registrar for many internet sites that has a unique perspective into this type of attack activity, reported a 75 percent increase in such attacks from April through June of this year, compared with the same period last year.

The attacks were not only more frequent, they were bigger and more sophisticated. The typical attack more than doubled in size. What is more, the attackers were simultaneously using different methods to attack the company’s servers, making them harder to stop.

The most frequent targets were businesses that provide internet infrastructure services like Dyn.

“DNS has often been neglected in terms of its security and availability,” Richard Meeus, vice president for technology at Nsfocus, a network security firm, wrote in an email. “It is treated as if it will always be there in the same way that water comes out of the tap.”

Last month, Bruce Schneier, a security expert and blogger, wrote on the Lawfare blog that someone had been probing the defenses of companies that run crucial pieces of the internet.

“These probes take the form of precisely calibrated attacks designed to determine exactly how well the companies can defend themselves, and what would be required to take them down,” Mr. Schneier wrote. “We don’t know who is doing this, but it feels like a large nation-state. China and Russia would be my first guesses.”

It is too early to determine who was behind Friday’s attacks, but it is this type of attack that has election officials concerned. They are worried that an attack could keep citizens from submitting votes.

Thirty-one states and the District of Columbia allow internet voting for overseas military and civilians. Alaska allows any Alaskan citizen to do so. Barbara Simons, the co-author of the book “Broken Ballots: Will Your Vote Count?” and a member of the board of advisers to the Election Assistance Commission, the federal body that oversees voting technology standards, said she had been losing sleep over just this prospect.

“A DDoS attack could certainly impact these votes and make a big difference in swing states,” Dr. Simons said on Friday. “This is a strong argument for why we should not allow voters to send their voted ballots over the internet.”

This month the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, and the Department of Homeland Security accused Russia of hacking the Democratic National Committee, apparently in an effort to affect the presidential election. There has been speculation about whether President Obama has ordered the National Security Agency to conduct a retaliatory attack and the potential backlash this might cause from Russia.

Gillian M. Christensen, deputy press secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, said the agency was investigating “all potential causes” of the attack.

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said on the NBC News program “Meet the Press” this month that the United States was prepared to respond to Russia’s election attacks in kind. “We’re sending a message,” Mr. Biden said. “We have the capacity to do it.”

But technology providers in the United States could suffer blowback. As Dyn fell under recurring attacks on Friday, Mr. York, the chief strategist, said such assaults were the reason so many companies are pushing at least parts of their infrastructure to cloud computing networks, to decentralize their systems and make them harder to attack.

“It’s a total wild, wild west out there,” Mr. York said.

Erin McCann contributed reporting from New York.

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Russia no longer denies hacking DNC

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 14 Oct 2016 09:55:00 +0000

WASHINGTON — The Federal Bureau of Investigation suspects Russian intelligence agencies are behind the recent hacking of the emails of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman and of a contractor handling Florida voter data, according to people briefed on the investigations.

Top Russian officials on Wednesday, meanwhile, shifted away from denying a role in a separate hack of the Democratic National Committee. President Vladimir Putin said it is irrelevant who stole the computer records, and the foreign minister said that the U.S. hasn’t proven anything so far.

The comments, made in separate public appearances, reflect an ambivalence among top Russian officials about accusations made Friday by U.S. intelligence agencies that Moscow directed a hack-and-leak campaign aimed at interfering in the U.S. election.

“Everyone is saying, ‘Who did it?’” Putin said Wednesday at an investor forum in Moscow. “But does it matter that much? It’s what’s inside the information that matters.”

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Wednesday, in an interview on CNN, didn’t deny involvement in the recent hacking operation. “We did not deny this,” he said, but added, “They did not prove it.”