By Scott Shackelford, Megan Wade
May 27, 2021
It took little over two hours for hackers to gain control of more than 100 gigabytes of information from Colonial Pipeline on May 7, 2021 causing the firm to shut down its fuel distribution network and sparking widespread fears of a gasoline shortage. The decision to pay off the attackers was also made with apparent speed, but the ethical arguments involved are age old and the implications could reverberate well into the future.
Cyberattacks, including those on critical infrastructure in the U.S., are nothing new. Ransomware, a type of malicious software that locks access to a computer until a ransom is paid, has been a component of the cyberthreat landscape since the mid-2000s. But the Colonial Pipeline breach raised the stakes and highlighted the ability of ransomware to interrupt the vital services on which Americans rely.
To combat the rising number of cyberattacks, Utah’s Department of Technology Services is encrypting the data it shares internally and externally with other agencies and private entities.
By Ralph Pisani
May 27, 2021
Recently, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency information security specialist Jay Gazlay said the SolarWinds breach made it clear that “identity is everything now.” Tighter identity controls, including behavior analysis techniques, can flag impossible logins, Gazlay told the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Information Security and Privacy Advisory Board. “If we don’t get set up to do that, we’re not going to notice these user impersonation attacks that become
de rigueur for our adversaries.”
In 2004, the U.S. invested billions in the Einstein intrusion detection system to protect government resources on the internet. Over the years and despite enhancements, Einstein 3.0 failed to detect the SolarWinds cyberattack on the Departments of Treasury, State, Defense, Homeland Security and Commerce, the Postal Service and the National Institutes of Health.
By GCN Staff
May 25, 2021
Recent demonstrations have shown that commercial cloud computing can be used to process and securely deliver actionable information from low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites to military ground stations, command centers or direct to warfighters on the battlefield.
As part of the Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center s Commercially Augmented Space Inter Networked Operations program, Microsoft and Ball Aerospace demonstrated that data and images from distributed constellations of LEO satellites could be quickly processed, analyzed and distributed using Microsoft s Azure cloud and Ball Aerospace‘s imagery exploitation algorithms.
For the demonstrations, simulated infrared data was pushed from Telesat satellites to a Microsoft Azure cloud data center, where it was processed using Ball’s event-driven architecture and then distributed to multiple end points, officials said in a press statement. In the final demonstration showing that satellite data could
By Aly Fathy
May 25, 2021 Within seconds after reaching a city, earthquakes can cause immense destruction: Houses crumble, high-rises turn to rubble, people and animals are buried in the debris.
In the immediate aftermath of such carnage, emergency personnel desperately search for any sign of life in what used to be a home or office. Often, however, they find that they were digging in the wrong pile of rubble, and precious time has passed.
Imagine if rescuers could see through the debris to spot survivors under the rubble, measure their vital signs and even generate images of the victims. This is rapidly becoming possible using see-through-wall radar technology. Early versions of the technology that indicate whether a person is present in a room have been in use for several years, and some can measure vital signs albeit under better conditions than through rubble.