Corrupt world of Russian intelligence; Twitter bans Kaspersky Lab; Russia steps up U.S., U.K. hacking, and more

The Washington Post wins 2 Pulitzer Prizes for reporting on Russian interference and the Senate race in Alabama (Paul Farhi, Washington Post)
The Washington Post was awarded the Pulitzer Prize on April 16 for its investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. The Russia-related stories shared the Pulitzer for national reporting with the New York Times, which was recognized for its work on the same topic.

Document: DNC sues Russia, Trump campaign and WikiLeaks for election interference (Matthew Kah, Lawfare)
On Friday, the Democratic National Committee filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York against the Russian government, the Trump campaign and associated persons, and WikiLeaks, alleging an illegal conspiracy to influence the outcome of the election.

Bad news for President Trump (Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes, The Atlantic)
The Comey memos are more revealing than they seem.

Inside the competitive, corrupt world of Russian intelligence (Levy Maxey, Cipher Brief)
The Kremlin employs various often overlapping and competitive security and intelligence services to create multiple sources of intelligence, encourage risk-taking and keep a wary eye on each other. This has enabled Russian President Vladimir Putin to consolidate power by playing agencies off of each other to avoid uninvited power grabs. But these redundancies can also create inefficiencies that Russia can’t afford as its economy continues to falter.

Twitter bans ads from Russia-based cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab (CBS News)
After vowing to stop Russian disinformation on its social network, Twitter has banned Russia-based cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab, CNET’s Alfred Ng reports. In an open letter, Kaspersky Lab founder Eugene Kaspersky called out Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey over the social network’s advertising ban. Kaspersky said his company was banned in February because its business model “conflicts with acceptable Twitter ads.”

Putin’s cyber war against the West: Russian trolls rise 4000% since Salisbury attack (Andrew Gregory, Mirror)
Russian social media bots and automated accounts have fuelled a massive increase in the spread of lies and disinformation

Nobody is safe from Russia’s colossal hacking operation (Nicole Kobie, Wired)
Russia hackers have targetted “millions” of connected devices in the UK and US. It’s all part of Putin’s grand plan to disrupt the west

Senator Marco Rubio says Florida is vulnerable to Russian hacking in 2018 midterms (Dave Elias, NBC-2)
U.S. Senator Marco Rubio called Florida the most vulnerable state in the nation when it comes to getting its election system hacked. Rubio warned that Russian hackers might be planning a hack of the 2018 election.

US and UK warn of Russian hackers targeting network devices (Nathan Cranford, RCRWireless)
The U.S. and U.K. recently published an alert that Russian state-sponsored hackers are targeting network infrastructure devices, such routers, switches, firewalls and network-based intrusion detection systems, as part of a cyber espionage campaign.

Russia has taken a liking to one far-right American outlet in particular (Casey Michel, ThinkProgress)
The One America News Network (OANN), a vociferously far-right, pro-Trump media outlet, may not have anywhere near the same audience as outlets like Fox News or CNN. But it has at least one fan: Russia. After OANN ran a report earlier this week defending the Syrian government against claims that it had used chemical weapons on its citizens, the Twitter feed for the Russian embassy in South Africa, one of Moscow’s most prominent Twitter accounts, promoted OANN’s findings. The Russian Twitter feed also regularly sends alerts to its followers about postings by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Other far-right figures have been promoting the Russian broad campaign of lies and disinformation denying Assad’s continuing use of chemical agents against his people – among them Richard Spencer and David Duke.

Russia steps up hacking, purring U.S.-U.K. warning on risk (Robert Hutton and Nafeesa Syeed, Reuters)
Russia is using compromised computer-network equipment to attack U.S. and British companies and government agencies, the two countries warned in an unprecedented joint alert. The warning included advice to companies about how to protect themselves and warned specifically of attacks on routers, the devices that channel data around a network. “Once you own the router, you own the traffic,” Jeanette Manfra, assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, said. “Russia is our most capable hostile adversary in cyberspace,” Ciaran Martin, CEO of Britain’s NCSC, said.