Monday, January 27, 2020

What I Am Reading 1/27/2020

Reuters - U.S. state AGs, Justice Department officials to meet and coordinate on Google probe: sources -
U.S. state attorneys general will meet Justice Department attorneys next week to share information on their investigations into Alphabet Inc’s Google, two sources familiar with the matter told Reuters on Sunday. The probes revolve around monopolistic behavior that may harm consumers through Google’s control of online advertising markets and search traffic. 
Al Jazeera - Plastic recycling: Australian engineers create a 'micro' solution -
They say the micro-factory ends the need for waste products to be transported over long distances and could lead to much more rubbish being recycled.
Seattle Times - ‘I did it’: Portugal hacker says he exposed African tycoon  -
Lawyers for Rui Pinto, who is in a Lisbon jail awaiting trial in a separate case, said in a statement Monday he gave the information about Isabel dos Santos to the Platform to Protect Whistleblowers in Africa, an advocacy group based in Paris, in 2018.
Dos Santos is a daughter of Angola’s former president Jose Eduardo dos Santos and is reputedly Africa’s richest woman after holding top jobs in Angola and a high-profile international career.
Cyberscoop -  Hack of Jeff Bezos' phone likely happened through Saudi crown prince, analysts tell UN -
With “medium to high confidence,” forensic investigators have concluded that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was directly involved in hacking into Jeff Bezos’ phone in 2018, according to a United Nations statement released Wednesday.
...
FTI Consulting’s cybersecurity practice — led by Anthony Ferrante, the former director for Cyber Incident Response at the National Security Council at the White House — found “no matches against known conventional or typical malicious software” remaining on Bezos’ phone.
The malicious file was delivered by an encrypted downloader host on WhatsApp’s media server, FTI found. Due to WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption, it was “virtually impossible” to determine the contents of the downloader, according to FTI.
Cyberscoop -  The big questions from FTI's report on the Jeff Bezos hack -
For now, the published information has left many observers unsatisfied. Alex Stamos, the former CISO of Facebook, which owns WhatsApp, said the FTI report didn’t go far enough in its analysis.
“This FTI forensics report is not very strong. Lots of odd circumstantial evidence, for sure, but no smoking gun,” Stamos said. “The funny thing is that it looks like FTI potentially has the [device] sitting right there, they just haven’t figured out how to test it.”
Schneier on Security - Brazil Charges Glenn Greenwald with Cybercrimes -
Glenn Greenwald has been charged with cybercrimes in Brazil, stemming from publishing information and documents that were embarrassing to the government. The charges are that he actively helped the people who actually did the hacking:
Security Magazine - Risk of Destructive Attacks on the Electric Sector Significantly Increases -
According to Dragos, Inc.'s January 2020 North American Electric Cyber Threat Perspective report, seven of 11 tracked activity groups target North American electric entities: PARISITE, XENOTIME, DYMALLOY, ALLANITE, MAGNALLIUM, RASPITE, and COVELLITE. Dragos identified a recent increase in activity targeting North American electric entities, led by the identification of PARISITE activity targeting known VPN vulnerabilities, and MAGNALLIUM password spraying campaigns focusing on oil and gas that expanded to include the electric sector.


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