China announces ban on journalists from WSJ, NYT and the Washington Post I Israel's Secret Service Receives Approval to Track Patients I German Military Laptop Sold on eBay I
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Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs just announced it is expelling all the American reporters at Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Washington Post. Axios
The head of Israel’s shadowy Shin Bet internal security service said Tuesday that his agency received Cabinet approval overnight to start deploying its counter-terrorism tech measures to help curb the spread of the new coronavirus in Israel. Time
German military laptop sold on eBay included classified missile information. The computer was probably decommissioned years ago, but its hard drive held information relating to a weapons system that’s still in use. The New York Times
ASPI ICPC
Submission to the Senate Select Committee on Foreign Interference through Social Media
Parliament of Australia
@JakeWallis_ASPI @tomatospy
Submission to the Senate Select Committee on Foreign Interference through Social Media - Access to accurate unbiased information is a pre-condition for effective decision-making, yet malign actors are engaged in organised and concerted efforts to manipulate the information environment to achieve their strategic goals. Authoritarian states have identified influence operations as a cheap yet effective mechanism for influencing and weakening liberal democratic societies. Russian meddling in the 2016 US election has become perhaps the most well-known and best documented case study of foreign interference through social media and it is a striking, but not representative, example. These influence operations are not limited to nation-states there are a range of actors, with diverse motivations, who are willing and able to manipulate social media audiences at scale. And these influence operations are not limited to elections they are persistent, ongoing, and are used to pursue a range of strategic goals. This submission outlines the threat from various forms of social media interference and makes concrete suggestions for policy responses. As this is a persistent ongoing and diverse threat, we recommend rapid implementation to prevent a significant disruptive event such as a manipulated election.
Your favorite Nikes might be made from forced labor. Here’s why
The Washington Post
@xu_xiuzhong @jleibold
For each Uighur citizen transferred, the government pays a sum of money to organizers of the transfers and the recipient factories. Advertisements have been popping up on the Chinese Internet in the last year. One ad offered batches of Uighur workers as young as 16, promising to deliver them in just 15 days while setting the minimum order at 100 workers.
Read the ASPI report here.
The World
Be Wary of Those Texts From a Friend of a Friend’s Aunt
The New York Times
@mihirzaveri
The text messages have largely followed a pattern: The author claims to have a connection to someone working at a clinic or government agency, an aunt, a neighbor, a friends cousin, who has revealed unannounced plans for an impending lockdown or quarantine. They’re passing along a warning, telling recipients of the urgent need to stockpile food, gas, medicine or other necessities. They often contain pleas that they be forwarded to others. And none of them are true.
Enterprise cyber security tips around COVID-19
LinkedIn
This post is a gathering of tips, tricks and traps from current and recent leaders of enterprise cyber security teams, and is posted here as a resource for organisations that may not have a Chief Information Security Officer (CISO).
Australia
Privacy concerns about encryption laws
The Saturday Paper
@KarenMMiddleton
Australia’s key independent national security legislation watchdog is concerned about a law that gives police and spy agencies access to encrypted communications because government ministers and the agencies have the power to authorise its use, without needing any approval from a judge.
China
China bans journalists from 3 major U.S. newspapers
Axios
@bethany@axios.com @zacharybasu
The Chinese government announced Tuesday that it will revoke press credentials for American journalists who work for the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal and whose credentials were set to expire in 2020, retaliating for state media restrictions by the Trump administration.
Huawei takes lion’s share of China 5G market, sparking trade tension
Politico Pro
@laurenscerulus
European vendors share of China’s telecom market drops to 5.3 percent for 2019.
China's information warfare is failing again
Japan Times
Once again, China is waging its infamous public opinion warfare against the rest of the world. Beijing’s foreign ministry spokesman tweeted in English last Thursday that “It might be the U.S. army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan. Be transparent! Make public your data! U.S. owe us an explanation!”
USA
Surveillance Company Says It's Deploying 'Coronavirus-Detecting' Cameras in US
Vice
@josephfcox
An Austin, Texas based technology company is launching "artificially intelligent thermal cameras" that it claims will be able to detect fevers in people, and in turn send an alert that they may be carrying the coronavirus.
Cyber operations already impacting coronavirus response
The Hill
News reports indicate that on Sunday computer systems within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) were affected by operations designed to slow their service (but not corrupt or exfiltrate sensitive data). No claim of responsibility has been issued, and so far the U.S. government has not identified a culprit.
Staff angered as Charter prohibits working from home despite spread of coronavirus
TechCrunch
@zackwhittaker
An engineer from Charter, one of the largest phone and internet providers in the U.S., sent an email blast to a senior vice president and hundreds of engineers on Friday. In the email, Nick Wheeler, a video operations engineer based in Denver, criticized his employer for not allowing its staff to work from home despite ongoing efforts to lock down vast swathes of the U.S. to combat the coronavirus pandemic.
Europe
German Military Laptop Sold on eBay Included Classified Missile Information
The New York Times
@CFSchuetze
Weighing in at a hefty 11 pounds, with a tiny 128 MB of working memory and a decades-old Pentium III processor, a used laptop recently bought by a German cybersecurity firm had its heyday long before the first iPhone was built. Its hard drive carried - without encryption or even password protection - a confidential user manual and schematics for a surface-to-air missile system that Germany’s air force still uses.
Why the Norsk Hydro attack is a 'blueprint' for disruptive hacking operations
Cyberscoop
@snlyngaas
It’s been a year since malicious code tore through the computer network of Norwegian aluminum giant Norsk Hydro, forcing the company to shift some of its operations to manual mode and inflicting tens of millions of dollars in damage.
Russia
Russian firm says it will sue U.S for $50 billion after meddling case dropped
Reuters
A Russian firm accused of meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election said on Tuesday it planned to file a $50 billion lawsuit against the United States after a U.S. federal judge dismissed the criminal case against it.
Flurry of coronavirus disinformation spread by Russian sources - EU Commission
Reuters
The European Union has seen a flurry of disinformation about the coronavirus outbreak spread by Russian sources over the last few weeks, a European Commission spokesman said on Tuesday.
Middle East
Spying on Coronavirus: Israel's Secret Service Receives Approval to Track Patients
Time
@aronhellerap
The head of Israel’s shadowy Shin Bet internal security service said Tuesday that his agency received Cabinet approval overnight to start deploying its counter-terrorism tech measures to help curb the spread of the new coronavirus in Israel.
Israel deploys cyber-monitoring against coronavirus, tells people not to leave home. Reuters
Gender and Women in Cyber
Technology and cybersecurity: a double-edged sword for women
The Strategist
@GaiMBrodtmann
Women have made real gains in cybersecurity in recent years. These wins are important, and they should be celebrated. But we need to keep the pedal firmly to the metal. We need to continue to address pay gap, systemic bias, recruitment pool, workplace culture, role definition and work-life balance issues. And we need to continue to invest our energies in attracting, retaining and progressing women in STEM and the technical and non-technical fields of cybersecurity.
Misc
TikTok 'tried to filter out videos from ugly, poor or disabled users'
The Guardian
@alexhern
TikTok moderators were told to suppress videos from users who appeared too ugly, poor or disabled, as part of the company’s efforts to curate an aspirational air in the videos it promotes, according to new documents published by the Intercept.
I Used to Hate FaceTime. Now It Is My Lifeline.
Slate
@mjs_DC
To ward off the COVID-19 ennui, I have turned to a technology that I previously scorned: video chat. And now I am a convert, exhorting anyone who will listen to whip out that videophone every night to build solidarity over our shared plight.
YouTube will rely more on AI moderation while human reviewers can’t come to the office
The Verge
@jake_k
YouTube will rely more on AI to moderate videos during the coronavirus pandemic, since many of its human reviewers are being sent home to limit the spread of the virus. This means videos may be taken down from the site purely because they’re flagged by AI as potentially violating a policy, whereas the videos might normally get routed to a human reviewer to confirm that they should be taken down.
Research
Brigadier General (ret.) Robert Spalding argues that 5G networks must be built with data security as the top priority to both protect individual privacy and uphold democratic freedoms.
The National Bureau of Asian Research (NBR)
@robert_spalding
Brigadier General (ret.) Robert Spalding argues that 5G networks must be built with data security as the top priority to both protect individual privacy and uphold democratic freedoms.