It was a unprecedented and historic week in the United States when a crowd of supporters of President Donald Trump rioted on Capitol Hill in Washington DC and stormed the Capitol building, forcing Congress to revoke its symbolic certification of Joe Biden’s presidential election evacuate and temporarily cease. Digital archivists and others scrambled to preserve photos and footage of the uprising, while social networks used ad hoc moderation of content policies. Meanwhile, national security experts are wary of the risks that the incident for information security – and national security – poses at the Capitol.
In other news, transparency activists DDoSecrets, a kind of successor to WikiLeaks, publish a series of corporate information – a move that was particularly controversial, as the data was originally stolen by ransomware attackers. Speaking of Wikileaks, the UK on Monday rejected the US Department of Justice’s request to extradite Julian Assange, citing Assange’s state of mind and the risk of suicide, rather than any evaluation or the WikiLeaks founder’s Espionage Act violated.
WhatsApp users received a notification this week that a change in the app’s privacy policy means they can no longer participate in sharing data with Facebook – which was confusing as WhatsApp has been sharing the data since 2016 and only ‘ an opt-out option gave a 30-day volatile window that year. And Ticketmaster was caught breaking into a competing company’s systems and agreeing to pay a $ 10 million fine to settle the case with federal prosecutors.
And there is more. Below we have taken the most important SolarWinds stories so far from the internet. Click on the headlines to read it and stay safe out there.
Since it came to light that SolarWinds’ Orion IT management tool was being used in an attack on the software supply chain, the cyber security industry has anxiously feared the news that the same Russian hackers are also using other popular software. This week, FBI sources told Reuters that the software company JetBrains, Czech Republic, was scrutinized as another possible victim and a possible vector for corrupt code. JetBrains ‘project management tool TeamCity is used by tens of thousands of customers, including SolarWinds, raising the possibility that it could have been the first place of infection in SolarWinds’ network. The fact that JetBrains was founded by three Russian engineers brought the company further suspicion. But the CEO of JetBrains in St. Petersburg, said this week that he was not contacted by the FBI or any other agency. He also says that JetBrains saw no evidence that it itself had been violated by hackers, not to mention the practice of further disrupting SolarWinds’ systems.
Chris Krebs, former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, became a cause of celebrity in November when President Trump fired him because he – correctly – stated that the allegations of widespread intrusion and fraud were made by the president and his supporters is, was false. After a federal career that is widely attributed to helping secure the 2020 presidential election from foreign interference, Krebs ventures into another massive cyber security story from last year: the Russian hacker hack into SolarWinds, a Texas-based company whose software was hijacked and used to infiltrate the networks of at least half a dozen federal agencies. SolarWinds has hired Krebs to help him recover and recover from the offense that put it at the center of the pervasive burglary scandal. Accompanying him is former Facebook and Yahoo security chief Alex Stamos, who also signed with video conferencing firm Zoom last spring to help him recover from his safety. Krebs and Stamos both work with SolarWinds through a consulting firm they have put together, the Krebs Stamos Group. Since SolarWinds’ share has lost more than a third of its value, or about $ 2.5 billion, since breaking the news of its breach, it is undoubtedly a rounding error, regardless of the fees paid by the consultation. his total infringement costs.
Singapore Interior Minister Desmond Tan told parliament on Monday that Singapore police could use data from the country’s Covid-19 contact tracking platform in investigations. Originally, the service was marketed as the collection of the least possible amount of information and only as a single-purpose tool for contact detection. But on Monday, the platform was updated to reflect the potential for access to law enforcement. More than four million of Singapore’s six million citizens are reportedly using the app.