Month: June 2021

Facebook’s recent decision to ban former president Donald Trump for two years sends a message to world leaders that Facebook is stepping up its role as sheriff on its service. Tina Trinh reports.Produced by Tina Trinh
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The Senate overwhelmingly approved a bill Tuesday that aims to boost U.S. semiconductor production and the development of artificial intelligence and other technology in the face of growing international competition, most notably from China. The 68-32 vote for the bill demonstrates how confronting China economically is an issue that unites both parties in Congress. That’s a rarity in an era of division as pressure grows on Democrats to change Senate rules to push past Republican opposition and gridlock. The centerpiece of the bill is a $50 billion emergency allotment to the Commerce Department to stand up semiconductor development and manufacturing through research and incentive programs previously authorized by Congress. The bill’s overall cost would increase spending by about $250 billion with most of the spending occurring in the first five years. Supporters described it as the biggest investment in scientific research that the country has seen in decades. It comes as the nation’s share of semiconductor manufacturing globally has steadily eroded from 37% in 1990 to about 12% now, and as a chip shortage has exposed vulnerabilities in the U.S. supply chain. FILE – Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., speaks at the Capitol in Washington, March 6, 2021.”The premise is simple — if we want American workers and American companies to keep leading the world, the federal government must invest in science, basic research and innovation, just as we did decades after the Second World War,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.”Whoever wins the race to the technologies of the future is going to be the global economic leader, with profound consequences for foreign policy and national security, as well,” he added. FILE – U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell speaks during a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, May 25, 2021.Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said the bill was incomplete because it did not incorporate more Republican-sponsored amendments. He nonetheless supported it. “Needless to say, final passage of this legislation cannot be the Senate’s final word on our competition with China,” he said. “It certainly won’t be mine.” President Joe Biden applauded the bill’s passage in a statement Tuesday evening, saying, “As other countries continue to invest in their own research and development, we cannot risk falling behind. America must maintain its position as the most innovative and productive nation on Earth.”  Senators slogged through days of debates and amendments leading up to Tuesday’s final vote. Schumer’s office said 18 Republican amendments will have received votes as part of passage of the bill. It also said the Senate this year has already held as many roll-call votes on amendments than it did in the last Congress when the Senate was under Republican control. While the bill enjoys bipartisan support, a core group of Republican senators has reservations about its costs. One of the bill’s provisions would create a new directorate focused on artificial intelligence and quantum science with the National Science Foundation. The bill would authorize up to $29 billion over five years for the new branch within the foundation, with an additional $52 billion for its programs. Senator Rand Paul said Congress should be cutting the foundation’s budget, not increasing it. He called the agency “the king of wasteful spending.” The agency finances about a quarter of all federally supported research conducted by America’s colleges and universities. “The bill is nothing more than a big government response that will make our country weaker, not stronger,” Paul said. FILE – Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., speaks on Capitol Hill in Washington, Feb. 5, 2020.But Senator Maria Cantwell noted that a greater federal investment in the physical sciences had been called for during the administration of President George W. Bush to ensure U.S. economic competitiveness. “At the time, I’m pretty sure we thought we were in a track meet where our competitor was, oh, I don’t know, maybe half a lap behind us. I’m pretty sure now as the decade has moved on, we’re looking over our shoulder and realizing that the competition is gaining,” said Cantwell, chair of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee. The lead Republican on the committee also weighed in to support the bill. “This is an opportunity for the United States to strike a blow on behalf of answering the unfair competition that we are seeing from communist China,” Senator Roger Wicker said. Senators have tried to strike a balance when calling attention to China’s growing influence. They want to avoid fanning divisive anti-Asian rhetoric when hate crimes against Asian Americans have spiked during the coronavirus pandemic. Other measures spell out national security concerns and target money-laundering schemes or cyberattacks by entities on behalf of the Chinese government. There are also “Buy America” provisions for infrastructure projects in the U.S.  Senators added provisions that reflect shifting attitudes toward China’s handling of the COVID-19 outbreak. One would prevent federal money for the Wuhan Institute of Virology as fresh investigations proceed into the origins of the virus and possible connections to the lab’s research. The city registered some of the first coronavirus cases. It’s unclear whether the measure will find support in the Democratic-led House, where the Science Committee is expected to soon consider that chamber’s version. Congressman Ro Khanna, who has been working with Schumer for two years on legislation that’s included in the bill, called it the biggest investment in science and technology since the Apollo space flight program a half century ago. “I’m quite certain we will get a really good product on the president’s desk,” Schumer said. Biden said he looked forward to working with the House on the legislation, “and I look forward to signing it into law as soon as possible.” 
 
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The top executive for the biggest fuel pipeline operator in the United States told lawmakers he felt like he had no choice but to pay off hackers after a ransomware attack shut down operations along the East Coast. Testifying Tuesday before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Colonial Pipeline Chief Executive Joseph Blount took responsibility for agreeing to pay the Russian-based DarkSide Network approximately $5 million to minimize potentially disastrous delays to fuel delivery. “I know how critical our pipeline is to the country, and I put the interests of the country first,” Blount said. “It was the hardest decision I’ve made in my 39 years in the energy industry,” he added. “We wanted to stay focused on getting the pipeline back up and running. I believe with all my heart it was the right choice to make.” The May 7 DarkSide ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline spawned fuel shortages and panic-buying across parts of the U.S., pushing prices higher as drivers hunted for gas stations that had not run out of fuel. FILE – A man with a gas container greets a motorist waiting in a lengthy line to enter a gasoline station during a surge in the demand for fuel following the cyberattack that crippled the Colonial Pipeline, in Durham, North Carolina, May 12, 2021.U.S. law enforcement, including cyber experts at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), routinely warn companies against paying ransoms to hackers. But Blount said that even though the company was in contact with the FBI, he felt paying DarkSide was the most prudent option. “It was our understanding that the decision was solely ours as a private company,” he told lawmakers. “Considering the consequences of potentially not bringing the pipeline back on as quickly as I possibly could, I chose the ransom.” Blount said Colonial did not deal with DarkSide directly and instead hired legal experts and negotiators to act as intermediaries. The payment was delivered May 8 to the ransomware network in the form of the bitcoin cryptocurrency.  In return, DarkSide provided Colonial with a decryption key that helped the company regain access to its systems and eventually resume operations, Blount said, noting that some systems are just now coming back online. Blount’s testimony comes just a day after the U.S. Justice Department and the FBI announced that they managed to track the ransom and recover the majority of the bitcoin, which was valued at about $2.3 million.  FILE – A Colonial Pipeline station is seen in Smyrna, Ga., near Atlanta, May 11, 2021.Other experts worry that companies, organizations and governments, like Colonial Pipeline, are putting themselves at a disadvantage. “With ransomware, the misconception is that there’s two options: pay criminals or don’t pay criminals,” said Raj Samani, co-founder of No More Ransom, an organization that distributes decryption keys for free. “Many of the decryptors that are developed by the ransomware groups are actually rubbish,” said Samani, who is also the chief scientist at McAfee, a U.S.-based cybersecurity company. “So, even if you pay a fee, you may not get your data back.” In the case of the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack, the decryption key did allow the company to start getting some systems up and running.   “It’s not a perfect tool,” Blount told lawmakers Tuesday, adding that the company is working to further harden its cyber defenses. Blount said DarkSide was able to access Colonial’s systems by exploiting a virtual private network (VPN) that was no longer in use and which was protected only by a single password. CISA recommends using what is known as multifactor authentication, which requires users use a password and then complete a second step, such as replying to a text message, in order to access critical systems. 
 
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A number of major websites could not be reached early Tuesday because of an outage at the cloud services company Fastly.The affected sites included news agencies CNN, The Guardian and The New York Times, streaming platform Twitch, and the British government website.  All were back online within a period of hours.The outage also forced CNN’s website offline in the Asian cities of Hong Kong and Singapore. There was little mention of the outage on social media platforms in China, where most foreign media websites are permanently blocked.About an hour after acknowledging the problem, Fastly said, “The issue has been identified, and a fix has been applied.”The company said a service configuration issue caused the disruptions, suggesting it was an internal glitch.Based in San Francisco, California, Fastly is a content-delivery network that provides cloud computing servers to many popular internet sites.The servers store images, video and other content in various places around the world to be closer to users. Closer proximity to the servers enables users to access content more quickly.The outage occurred about a month after a cyberattack caused the largest fuel pipeline operator in the United States to stop operating for six days.
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Apple on Monday said a new “private relay” feature designed to obscure a user’s web browsing behavior from internet service providers and advertisers will not be available in China for regulatory reasons.The feature was one of a number of privacy protections Apple announced at its annual software developer conference Monday.It will also be unavailable in Belarus, Colombia, Egypt, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkmenistan, Uganda and the Philippines, Apple said.The “private relay” feature first sends web traffic to a server maintained by Apple, where it is stripped of its IP address. From there, Apple sends the traffic to a second server maintained by a third-party operator who assigns the user a temporary IP address and sends the traffic onward to its destination website.The use of an outside party in the second hop of the relay system is intentional, Apple said, to prevent even Apple from knowing both the user’s identity and what website the user is visiting.Apple has not yet disclosed which outside partners it will use in the system but said it plans to disclose them in the future. The feature will not likely become available to the public until later this year. 
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U.S. law enforcement officials say they have hit back at the Russian-based criminal network that caused gas pipelines to shut down across parts of the country last month, seizing much of the multimillion-dollar ransom payment before it could be used.The Justice Department announced Monday it recovered $2.3 million of the approximately $5 million Colonial Pipeline paid to the DarkSide Network following the ransomware attack, which resulted in fuel shortages along the U.S. East Coast.“We turned the tables on DarkSide,” said Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, describing the seizure as a “significant development.”“Ransomware attacks are always unacceptable, but when they target critical infrastructure, we will spare no effort in our response,” she added.Tanker trucks are parked near the entrance of Colonial Pipeline Company, May 12, 2021, in Charlotte, N.C.Colonial Pipeline, the target of DarkSide’s May 7 attack, is the top fuel pipeline operator in the U.S., responsible for about half of the fuel supply for the East Coast.Following the attack, the company made the decision to meet DarkSide’s demands, paying out about $5 million in Bitcoin cryptocurrency. But U.S. government officials said Colonial also worked closely with law enforcement agencies, who were able to track the payment to a virtual wallet.Specifically, officials said they were able to obtain a virtual key that unlocked the contents of the wallet.As a result, the Justice Department said it was able to recover about 80% of the cryptocurrency, which has dropped in value in recent weeks, before DarkSide could access it.“We deprived a cybercriminal enterprise of the object of their activity,” said FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate. “For financially motivated cybercriminals, especially those presumably located overseas, cutting off access to revenue is one of the most impactful consequences we can impose.”Officials said this is not the first time they have been able to recover ransom payment made to groups like DarkSide, and encouraged other companies to cooperate with the government if they are targeted.“The message we are sending today is that if you come forward and work with law enforcement, we may be able to take the type of action that we took today to deprive the criminal actors of what they’re going after,” Monaco said.But she added that this type of operation is a “significant undertaking” and “we cannot guarantee, and we may not be able to do this, in every instance.”The FBI has been investigating DarkSide since last October, blaming the network for attacks against 90 victims across critical sectors such as manufacturing, health care and energy.DarkSide and its affiliates have also been connected to ransomware attacks in at least 14 other countries. Last month, The Wall Street Journal reported the group made almost $60 million in seven months, including $46 million in the first three months of this year.In a statement late Monday, Colonial Pipeline President Joseph Blount said the company was grateful for the help from both the Justice Department and the FBI, calling them “instrumental in helping us to understand the threat actor and their tactics.”“Holding cyber criminals accountable and disrupting the ecosystem that allows them to operate is the best way to deter and defend against future attacks of this nature,” Blount added. “As our investigation into this event continues, Colonial will continue its transparency in sharing intelligence and learnings with the FBI and other federal agencies.”The Justice Department announcement also earned praise from some private cybersecurity firms, with one calling the seizure of the ransom payment a “welcome development.”“In addition to the immediate benefits of this approach, a stronger focus on disruption may disincentivize this behavior, which is growing in a vicious cycle,” John Hultquist, vice president of analysis at Mandiant, said in a statement. “Law enforcement agencies need to broaden their approach beyond building cases against criminals who may be beyond the grasp of the law.”U.S. President Joe Biden is expected to raise the issue of the DarkSide ransomware attack when he meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Geneva, Switzerland, next week.Biden has previously said Moscow bears “some responsibility” to deal with the attack.“The president’s message will be that responsible states do not harbor ransomware criminals, and responsible countries take decisive action against these ransomware networks,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters last week.National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said Monday that Biden will also use meetings next week with G-7 leaders to discuss “increasing the robustness and resilience of our defense against ransomware attacks.”Sullivan said the U.S. also hopes to discuss ways to better share information about ransomware attacks.Information from Reuters was used in this report.
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