Tag Archive for: house

Is White House Crackdown on Ransomware Having Any Effect?

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The latest edition of the ISMG Security Report features an analysis of the state of the Biden administration’s efforts to disrupt ransomware attackers.

In this report, you’ll hear (click on player beneath image to listen):

  • ISMG’s Scott Ferguson detail White House efforts to combat ransomware via geopolitical and law enforcement means, as well as by boosting the cyber resiliency of the U.S. private sector and government agencies;


  • ISMG’s Jeremy Kirk cover/detail/analyze an emergency patch from Apple, which fixes a zero-click integer overflow vulnerability in iMessage that was being exploited by Pegasus spyware;


  • Detective Chief Superintendent Andy Gould, who heads Britain’s National Police Chiefs’ Council’s cybercrime program, detail essentials for planning and executing a cybersecurity incident response plan.


The ISMG Security Report appears on this and other ISMG websites on Fridays. Don’t miss the Sept. 3 and Sept. 10 editions, which respectively discuss the latest data breach trends and ransomware attackers’ ideal targets.

Theme music for the ISMG Security Report is by Ithaca Audio under a Creative Commons license.

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‘Our country is in a cyberwar’: Inside the White House summit with Hadi Partovi of Code.org

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Code.org CEO Hadi Partovi. (GeekWire File Photo)

President Joe Biden brought together top executives from the nation’s biggest technology, financial services and energy companies this week to address the growing challenge of cybersecurity, speaking to tech leaders including Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Apple CEO Tim Cook.

“The federal government can’t meet this challenge alone,” Biden said in his public remarks to open the meeting. “I’ve invited you all here today because you have the power and the capacity and the responsibility, I believe, to raise the bar on cybersecurity. And so, ultimately, we’ve got a lot of work to do.”

So what happened next? And did any real solutions emerge? Our guest on this episode of the GeekWire Podcast was in the closed-door meeting. Seattle-area investor and entrepreneur Hadi Partovi, CEO of computer science education nonprofit Code.org, shares details and key takeaways on this week’s show.

Embed from Getty Images

[Hadi Partovi, lower right in the photo above, with President Joe Biden and other tech and business leaders at the White House cybersecurity summit this week.]

In the third segment, Partovi reflects on his own childhood in Iran, as a 6-year-old during the 1979 revolution, later immigrating to the U.S. with his family, and finding success as a computer scientist and entrepreneur along with his twin brother, Ali, who joined him in founding Code.org. Hadi Partovi now finds himself asking if the children in Afghanistan today will find the same opportunities as they did.

Read his full thread on that topic and see our earlier coverage.

Listen to the full episode above, subscribe to GeekWire in any podcast app, and continue reading for edited highlights from Partovi’s comments.

What it was like inside the event: It was a very unique event. It’s not my first time being at the White House, but it was my first time with this administration. And it was, for sure, the first time with the collective set of people who were there.

President Biden hosted a summit for cybersecurity, inviting the CEOs of the largest technology companies, and CEOs across financial services, energy, insurance,…

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The White House Announces Additional Steps To Combat Ransomware : NPR

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The big meatpacker JBS faced a ransomware attack in early June. JBS paid a ransom of $11 million to cyberattackers.

Chet Strange/Getty Images


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Chet Strange/Getty Images

The big meatpacker JBS faced a ransomware attack in early June. JBS paid a ransom of $11 million to cyberattackers.

Chet Strange/Getty Images

The Biden administration on Thursday announced new initiatives meant to combat growing domestic and foreign cyber threats.

The White House has launched a ransomware task force to help coordinate its efforts, a senior administration official told reporters Wednesday evening.

The federal government will also launch stopransomware.gov, a website of preventative resources geared at assisting businesses and state and local governments with cybersecurity-related issues.

And the Biden administration will begin what it’s calling a Rewards for Justice program, a State Department effort offering up to $10 million for information that leads to the identification of state-sanctioned cyber activity against key infrastructure.

The additional steps come two months after President Biden signed an executive order focused on increasing federal cybersecurity protections.

And they come in the wake of multiple large-scale cyberattacks, including to SolarWinds, Colonial Pipeline and JBS, a meat processor.

The steps from the White House also follow a major Russian-linked ransomware group reportedly going offline this week. The cause of the entity’s going offline is unknown.

The departments of State and Treasury also plan to work on increased regulation of virtual currency and focus on its role in spreading ransomware attacks, the administration official said.

NPR’s Franco Ordoñez contributed to this report.

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White House working to respond to massive ransomware attack

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A massive ransomware attack that affected thousands of victims continued to cause chaos on Sunday as the White House pledged “full resources” to probe the breach.

Companies across the globe appear to have been affected through compromised software, asked to pay ransoms reported from $45,000 up to $5 million as the full breadth of Friday’s attack came into focus.

The ransomware hit Florida-based Kaseya and spread through a slew of companies, many which use its software to serve multiple customers.

“The level of sophistication here was extraordinary,” Fred Voccola, CEO of Kaseya, told The Associated Press.

About half the company’s 37,000 customers were victimized – but 70 percent of those were “managed service providers” who use Kaseya’s software to many others. In total, he estimated that thousands were affected, the AP said.

Although experts believe the attack originated from a group with ties to Russia, President Biden said Saturday it wasn’t yet clear if that was the case. He told reporters he’d ordered a “deep dive” by intelligence into the breach.

“And if it is, either with the knowledge of and/or a consequence of Russia, then I told Putin we will respond,” Biden said, according to a transcript of his comments.

Cyber crimes were a topic – and a major point of contention – between Biden and Russian leader Vladimir Putin when the two world leaders met in Europe during the G-7 summit.

The Russian-linked group REvil is suspected to be behind the attack, and may have struck during Independence Day weekend because it knew companies would have had limited staff due to the holiday, the AP said, citing experts.

Some companies may still not yet know they are victims until they return to work on Monday, the AP stated.

The White House said Sunday the FBI and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) were working with Kaseya to conduct outreach to victims.

Cybersecurity teams worked feverishly Sunday, July 4, 2021, to stem the impact of the single biggest global ransomware attack on record
Cybersecurity teams worked feverishly Sunday, July 4, 2021, to stem the impact of the single biggest global ransomware attack on record.
AP Photo/Jenny Kane, File

“Since Friday, the United States Government has been working across the…

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