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The SolarWinds Body Count Now Includes NASA and the FAA


Some blasts from the past surfaced this week, including revelations that a Russia-linked hacking group has repeatedly targeted the US electrical grid, along with oil and gas utilities and other industrial firms. Notably, the group has ties to the notorious industrial-control GRU hacking group Sandworm. Meanwhile, researchers revealed evidence this week that an elite NSA hacking tool for Microsoft Windows, known as EpMe, fell into the hands of Chinese hackers in 2014, years before that same tool then leaked in the notorious Shadow Brokers dump of NSA tools.

WIRED got an inside look at how the video game hacker Empress has become so powerful and skilled at cracking the digital rights management software that lets video game makers, ebook publishers, and others control the content you buy from them. And the increasingly popular, but still invite-only, audio-based social media platform Clubhouse continues to struggle with security and privacy missteps.

If you want something relaxing to take your mind off all of this complicated and concerning news, though, check out the new generation of Opte, an art piece that depicts the evolution and growth of the internet from 1997 to today.

And there’s more. Each week we round up all the news we didn’t cover in depth. Click on the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

In addition to infiltrating the unclassified networks of seven other US government agencies, the suspected Russian hackers who compromised the IT services firm SolarWinds as a jumping off point also penetrated NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration. Researchers and officials testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday about the scope and scale of the attack. The Washington Post reported ahead of the hearing that the Biden administration is preparing sanction against Russia related to the SolarWinds espionage operation and other recent incidents of aggression. The seven other breached agencies are the Departments of Commerce, Homeland Security, Energy, and State, the US Treasury, the National Institutes of Health, and the Justice Department. The White House said earlier this month that hackers also compromised 100 companies in the spree….

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SolarWinds Hackers Also Went After NASA and the FAA


Illustration for article titled SolarWinds Hackers Also Went After NASA and the FAA

Photo: Mark Wilson (Getty Images)

Apparently not content with having penetrated the networks of such piddling federal agencies as the U.S. State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, and that agency that maintains our nuclear stockpile, the hackers of the “SolarWinds” affair also went after NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration, according to a new report from the Washington Post.

The report comes shortly after a briefing last week when White House national security adviser Anne Neuberger explained that approximately 100 different companies and a total of nine federal agencies had been successfully “compromised” by foreign hackers. The foreign intrusion campaign (likely “Russian in origin,” as officials have put it) is thought to be the largest in U.S. history.

The Neuberger update was the first official tally provided by the Biden administration on the extent to which government networks had been breached. At the time of her comments, all but two of those nine agencies had already been outed as targets (they include: the State Department, DHS, and the Departments of Energy, Justice, Commerce, Treasury, and the National Institutes of Health). Now, the Washington Post seems to have identified the stragglers. Per the paper’s report:

Last week, Neuberger said the government found that computer systems at nine federal agencies were compromised. She did not name them, but The Post has confirmed the identities with U.S. officials. They include NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration, which have not previously been publicly identified.

It is unknown what kind of access the hackers may have had to either agency. However, officials have said that, in instances where the government was breached, all data that was stolen was unclassified and that operational systems were never accessed. NASA reportedly told the newspaper that they continue to work with the U.S. cyber agency CISA on “mitigation efforts to secure NASA’s data and network.” We have reached out to both NASA and the FAA for comment and will update if they respond.

The revelations add little to the overall “SolarWinds” narrative, but underline the scope of the intel-gathering operations…

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NASA Data Aid Food Security Assessments in Kenya


NASA Data Aid Food Security Assessments in Kenya

Nearly 75 percent of Kenya’s people rely on farming for their food and income, so environmental issues like drought, locusts, and climate change can put many lives and livelihoods at risk. Crop insurance programs can help mitigate those risks, but it is not always easy to know where resources are needed. Now NASA-funded scientists are working with colleagues in Kenya to make better assessments of agricultural needs through the use of satellite data.

In the first few years of the country’s crop insurance program, Kenyan agriculture agents collected much of their information through in-person visits, traveling to individual farms to determine how crops were performing and if financial assistance was necessary. It was labor-intensive and time-consuming. Officials urgently needed timely information spanning vast areas of the country—and that is where NASA Earth observations came in.

“We suggested that instead of looking for farmers, we look at fields by using products derived from NASA satellite data,” said Catherine Nakalembe, a geographical scientist at the University of Maryland and a leader of the Africa section of the NASA-funded Harvest program. By adding satellite observations into their models and calculations, managers of Kenya’s agricultural insurance program could more readily assess critical information necessary to help farmers.

Grants from the USAID-NASA SERVIR program allowed the Harvest team and the Regional Center for Mapping of Resources for Development (RCMRD) to incorporate satellite data on rainfall, soil moisture, and land use in ways that can inform Kenya’s agriculture monitoring programs. It also supported efforts to assess crop conditions from afar by using a technique called “cropland masks.” These mapping tools use computer analyses of satellite images and data to build highly localized views of where crops are growing and the health of those fields. The Kenyan ministry and researchers in the RCMRD can then confirm the satellite data by sampling crop…

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