Tag Archive for: east

Journalist warns Missouri about security breach. He’s threatened with criminal charges. – East Bay Times

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JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) — Gov. Mike Parson on Thursday condemned the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for exposing a flaw in a state database that allowed public access to thousands of teachers’ Social Security numbers, even though the paper held off from reporting about the flaw until after the state could fix it.

Parson told reporters outside his Capitol office that the Missouri State Highway Patrol’s digital forensic unit will be conducting an investigation “of all of those involved” and that his administration had spoken to the prosecutor in Cole County.

The governor suggested that the Post-Dispatch journalist who broke the story committed a crime and said the news outlet would be held accountable.

The state’s schools department had earlier referred to the reporter who broke the story as “a hacker.”

The Post-Dispatch broke the news about the security flaw on Wednesday. The newspaper said it discovered the vulnerability in a web application that allowed the public to search teacher certifications and credentials.

It notified the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education and gave it time to fix the problem before the story was published.

After removing the pages from its website Tuesday, the agency issued a news release that called the person who discovered the vulnerability a “hacker” — an apparent reference to the reporter — who “took the records of at least three educators.” The agency didn’t elaborate as to what it meant by “took the records” and it declined to discuss the issue further when reached by The Associated Press.

The Post-Dispatch journalist found that the school workers’ Social Security numbers were in the HTML source code of the pages. It estimated that more than 100,000 Social Security numbers were vulnerable.

Source codes are accessible by right-clicking on public webpages.

The newspaper’s president and publisher, Ian Caso, said in a statement that the Post-Dispatch stands by the story and  journalist Josh Renaud, who he said “did everything right.”

“It’s regrettable the governor has chosen to deflect blame onto the journalists who uncovered the website’s problem and brought it to the Department of Elementary…

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How reporting on the Middle East prepared one journalist to cover Facebook

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For Sheera Frenkel, a New York Times reporter and the co-author of An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination covering the social media giant was a result of “happenstance.” 

As a freelance foreign correspondent, Frenkel published her first big stories from Israel, although she actually got her start in South America. Frenkel, who speaks Hebrew and Arabic, moved to the Middle East in search of stories to report just before Israel’s disengagement from the Gaza Strip in 2005.

“I left stuff with a friend in Argentina because I was so sure that I was just going to be gone for six months,” she recalled. “I have not been back to Argentina since then, and who knows what happened to my suitcases.”

She joined The New York Times in 2017, assigned to the cybersecurity beat. “I was very, very pregnant, and pretty much immediately after joining, I went on maternity leave,” Frenkel told Jewish Insider in a recent phone interview. The end of her maternity leave coincided with the departure of the paper’s Facebook beat reporter, who left to write his own book on the company. 

“They needed somebody that could fill in for a couple months while he was off writing his book,” Frenkel recalled. 

Four years later, Frenkel has become a must-follow reporter on the Facebook beat — an auspicious place to be, as news about the company’s pursuit of profit at all costs continues to emerge. Last week, Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee-turned-whistleblower,  testified to Congress about how Facebook executives, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, suppressed internal research demonstrating the harms of the company’s products, especially Instagram. Frenkel felt vindicated.

“It was, I would say, incredibly satisfying to see the receipts, in a way, for everything we had been told for years,” she said.  

In conversation with JI, Frenkel talked about what covering authoritarian governments taught her about the social media giant, how to use Facebook responsibly and why she separates her Jewish identity from her reporting. 

This conversation has been edited and condensed for length and clarity. 

Jewish Insider: To start with recent…

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Here are ransomware groups that businesses need to watch our for – Middle East & Gulf News

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By Doel Santos and Ruchna Nigam

As part of Unit 42’s commitment to stop ransomware attacks, we conduct ransomware hunting operations to ensure our customers are protected against new and evolving ransomware variants.  During our operations, we have observed four emerging ransomware groups that are currently affecting organizations and show signs of having the potential to become more prevalent in the future:

  • AvosLocker is ransomware as a service (RaaS) that started operations in late June, using a blue beetle logo to identify itself in communications with victims and “press releases” aimed at recruiting new affiliates. AvosLocker was observed promoting its RaaS program and looking for affiliates on dark web discussion forums and other forums. Like many of its competitors, AvosLocker offers technical support to help victims recover after they’ve been attacked with encryption software that the group claims is “fail-proof,” has low detection rates, and is capable of handling large files. This ransomware also has an extortion site, which claims to have impacted six organizations in the following countries: the US, the UK, the UAE, Belgium, Spain, and Lebanon. Initial ransom demands ranged from $50,000 to $75,000.

  • Hive Ransomware is double-extortion ransomware that started operations in June. Since then, Hive has impacted 28 organizations that are now listed on the group’s extortion site, including a European airline company and three U.S.-based organizations. Hive uses all tools available in the extortion toolset to create pressure on the victim, including the date of initial compromise, countdown, the date the leak was actually disclosed on their site, and even the option to share the disclosed leak on social media.
  • HelloKitty is not a new ransomware group; it can be tracked as early as 2020, mainly targeting Windows systems. However, in July, a Linux variant of HelloKitty targeted VMware’s ESXi hypervisor, which is widely used in cloud and on-premises data centers. There were two clusters of activity. Across the observed samples, some threat actors preferred email communications, while others used TOR chats for communication with the victims. The observed…

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Does Turkey need the EU anyway? – Middle East Monitor

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Australia’s scrapping of the French submarines deal constitutes a turning point in the strength and solidarity of the Western alliance headed by the US, which dominated the world stage following the end of the Cold War period and the formation of the Western-oriented world order.

Over the past three decades, there was a state of harmony and consistency between the US and its global allies, including European countries, Canada, Australia and others. This was represented in backing the US-led wars in Afghanistan in 2001 and in Iraq in 2003, and other hot files worldwide.

Turkey, for its part, sided with the Western camp in the Cold War period and in the early post-Cold War period, by keeping close ties and alliances with the US and Europe. In the nineties of the last century, Turkey exerted great efforts to join the European Union (EU), but suffered a long procrastination process. However, within Turkey’s long waiting period, many changes and developments on the world stage took place.

In recent years, European countries, mainly France, began to realise how they were marginalised in the international arena when dealing with events such as the Ukrainian crisis with Russia and the differences between France and the US on dealing with the Syrian crisis. Similarly, the same can be said with the Iranian file, where the US position was the dominant actor in dealing with Iran. Last but not least, the US dominated the international community’s approach towards the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, even with the presence of the international quartet (the US, the EU, the United Nations (UN) and Russia).

New alliance

In a virtual joint press conference on 15 September for US President Joe Biden, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, the latter announced his country’s scrapping of a multi-billion deal with France and inking a new one with the US and the UK to purchase nuclear-powered submarines, instead of the French diesel-powered submarines.

The move was shocking to France, which described it as a “stab in the back”. Paris recalled its ambassadors to Canberra and Washington for consultations. Other European countries were also astounded, as they felt…

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