In June 2005, I published a cover story in the Atlantic, “How We Would Fight China.” I wrote that, “The American military contest with China … will define the twenty-first century. And China will be a more formidable adversary than Russia ever was.” I went on to explain that the wars of the future would be naval, with all of their abstract battle systems, even though dirty counterinsurgency fights were all the rage 14 years ago.That future has arrived, and it is nothing less than a new cold war: The constant, interminable Chinese computer hacks of American warships’ maintenance records, Pentagon personnel records, and so forth constitute war by other means. This situation will last decades and will only get worse, whatever this or that trade deal is struck between smiling Chinese and American presidents in a photo-op that sends financial markets momentarily skyward. The new cold war is permanent because of a host of factors that generals and strategists understand but that many, especially those in the business and financial community who populate Davos, still prefer to deny. And because the U.S.-China relationship is the world’s most crucial—with many second- and third-order effects—a cold war between the two is becoming the negative organizing principle of geopolitics that markets will just have to price in.
In the latest sign of tensions between the United States and Beijing over trade, the coronavirus pandemic, human rights and the status of Hong Kong, the Trump administration may soon expel thousands of Chinese graduate students enrolled at universities in the US and impose other sanctions against Chinese officials.
President Donald Trump said he would make an announcement about China on Friday, and administration officials said he is considering a months-old proposal to revoke the visas of students affiliated with educational institutions in China linked to the People's Liberation Army or Chinese intelligence.
Adversaries understand the importance of these networks and have attacked them boldly to create widespread havoc, as in the case of WannaCry and NotPetya. They also know how to manipulate them in more subtle ways that would not be immediately observable but could erode public trust. For example, disrupting production of the top pharmaceutical companies to create shortages of medications, or tampering with the industrial machines responsible for logistics at our largest transportation hubs to bring commerce to a standstill.
The more important OT networks are to your business, the more essential effective OT security is to the success of your operations. In fact, it enables your business in three important ways: 1) protecting “business as usual,” 2) reducing risk from digital transformation, and 3) securing remote access.
Threat actors have targeted industrial suppliers in Japan and several European countries in sophisticated attacks that employed various techniques to make malware detection and analysis more difficult, Kaspersky’s ICS CERT unit reported on Thursday.
The first attacks were spotted in early 2020 and, as of early May, Kaspersky has seen targeted organizations in Japan, Italy, Germany and the UK. The cybersecurity firm says the targets supply equipment and software for industrial organizations, particularly for the energy sector.
Kaspersky said its products blocked the malware in each of the attacks it observed, and the company currently does not know what the hackers’ goals are.
The NSA says that members of Unit 74455 of the GRU Main Center for Special Technologies (GTsST), a division of the Russian military intelligence service, have been attacking email servers running the Exim mail transfer agent (MTA).
Also known as "Sandworm," this group has been hacking Exim servers since August 2019 by exploiting a critical vulnerability tracked as CVE-2019-10149, the NSA said in a security alert [PDF] shared today with ZDNet.
Since at least August 2019, Sandworm Team was observed launching such attacks from two IP addresses and one domain: 95.216.13.196, 103.94.157.5, and hostapp(.)be, the NSA explains.
“Update Exim immediately by installing version 4.93 or newer to mitigate this and other vulnerabilities. Other vulnerabilities exist and are likely to be exploited, so the latest fully patched version should be used. Using a previous version of Exim leaves a system vulnerable to exploitation,” the NSA warns.
A court has ruled that Capital One must allow plaintiffs to review a cybersecurity firm’s forensic report related to the bank’s 2019 data breach despite the bank’s protests that it is a protected legal document.
A judge in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia ruled Tuesday that attorneys suing Capital One on behalf of customers could review a copy of an incident response report to prepare for a possible trial. The Virginia-based bank had sought to keep the report private on the grounds that it was protected under legal doctrine. Yet U.S. Magistrate Judge John Anderson said the report, prepared by Mandiant, was the result of a business agreement, and that the legal doctrine argument was “unpersuasive.”
After Twitter slapped a fact-check label on two of President Trump's tweets about mail-in ballots late Tuesday, the president ordered his staff to respond.
"The direction from on high was: 'Do something,'" a White House official with direct knowledge of the situation told Protocol.
What came next involved an old draft of an executive order that had been kicking around Washington since last year, one that threatened to strip tech giants of critical legal protections enshrined under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. That law shields tech platforms from being held liable for what other people post and gives them the ability to moderate those platforms "in good faith."
North Korea accused the United States of smear tactics on Friday after Washington renewed accusations last month that Pyongyang was responsible for malicious cyber attacks.
It was the latest in a series of exchanges underscoring the friction between the two countries after denuclearization talks launched by U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un stalled late last year.
"We want to make it clear that our country has nothing to do with the so-called 'cyber threat' that the U.S. is talking about," North Korea's Foreign Ministry said in the statement.
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